About a week ago I came across two great articles on the Themeshaper website, The Ultimate WordPress Theme Test and Hide all your links.  If you develop WordPress themes or do any web design I suggest you read them. I just loved the idea of getting rid of everything from your theme so you can concentrate on what is important; the content. And as the the content of most blogs is primarily delivered in text, good typography is at the heart of every good blog and every great theme. You can simply add a bit of css to your style sheet when developing your theme as suggested in the articles or you can use this plugin to add and remove the css dynamically.

The wpdc Typography Tester plugin simply add 2 buttons to the bottom of your page (when an administrator is logged in). Simply click the first button to hide everything in your theme except the main content. Click the next button to put all the other stuff back.

Download: wpdc Typography Tester

Installation instructions:

1. Download and extract the plugin
2. Upload the wpdc_typog_tester folder to your plugins directory eg. /wp-content/plugins
3. Activate the plugin in the plugins section of you admin page
4. When you visit your blog as and admin you’ll have two buttons at the bottom of your browser window which will turn the typography tester on and off.

So here it is! My first WordPress plugin. It’s a really simply plugin that adds an extended version of the recent posts widget. The extended version adds the ability to specify either categories to include or exclude from a list of recent posts. I developed this plugin for ambercouch.co.uk so I could display only recent post from the news category in the news section of the site.

Download: wordpress recent posts extended widget

Installation instructions:

1. Download and extract the plugin
2. Upload wpdc_recentposts_extended.php to your plugins directory eg. /wp-content/plugins
3. Activate the plugin in the plugins section of you admin page
4. In your widget section you will now have a widget called Recent Posts Extended which you can add to any of your sidebars
5. Add the widget to a sidebar and click edit
6. There are 3 options which you can change Title, Number of post and Category number
7. In the ‘Category number..’ field enter a comma delimited list of the categories you want to include eg. 1,5,6,23 or if you want to exclude categories use negative numbers eg. -1,-5,-6,-23