Supercharged WordPress 1.7.0 is out, with Widgets support and new plugins

published Apr 03, 2006, last modified Jun 26, 2013

This weekend was WordPress weeekend. In fact, I could barely keep up with the tons of juicy announcements - plugins, themes and more developments - around WordPress. But I finally managed to keep up with the pressure. After hours and hours of hard, tiresome work, I can finally feel satisfied and proud to present to you: Supercharged WordPress 1.7.0.

And what's so new about it? Let's make a quick list:

  • The first and most important change was the addition of the Widgets plugin. The Widgets plugin is all the rage, and in all fairness, its fame is well-earned, because bloggers can reorganize their theme sidebars through the Widgets plugin effortessly, with a couple of drags and drops. Of course, merely including Widgets was the easy part: the themes distributed with Supercharged WordPress also had to be updated. So four new versions of themes now have Widgets compatibility: the default, classic, RevvedUp and the gorgeous Burnin' R all have full Widgets support.
  • Multimedia capabilities in Supercharged WordPress have been enhanced considerably. If you're looking to podcast audio, or serve remixes to your visitors, that's much easier now that every hyperlink to an MP3 is automatically turned into a nifty, lightweight audio player which lets readers listen to your songs immediately, thanks to the Taragana's del.icio.us audio player. Of course, the Audio player plugin from 1pixelout, which is much nicer (although heavier) is also included.
  • The gorgeous Lightbox 2 effect is now included in Supercharged WordPress. Whereas gorgeous galleries were previously limited to people with deep HTML skills and Flickr account owners, you can boast the same range of beautiful effects in your WordPress-powered image galleries and posts.
  • The Sociable plugin was updated to its latest version, and now includes a much wider selection of social bookmarking sites for you to choose from and offer to your readers.
  • A Contact form plugin made the quality cut as well. Now you can have posts with contact forms so people can contact you directly, without the need of posting your precious (and spam-vulnerable) e-mail address in your blog.
  • Finally, on the technical side: SEO improvements come in the form of the Permalink redirect plugin, which lets you tell your blog to automatically redirect visitors that don't come through the officially sanctioned permalinks. This lets search engines make more sense out of your blog, and avoid duplicate listings.

So, if this has you interested, I've got news for you. You probably know that all of this can be yours mostly for free. But the question remains: are you willing to sacrifice an entire weekend, like I did, or are you willing to shell out only fifty bucks to get all this (and much, much more) in a single, convenient package along with free hands-on support? If I were you, I would honestly shell out fifty dollars and spend my weekend with a girl. So, take the plunge and get Supercharged WordPress today.