The verdict has come and the winner of WordPress Plug-in Competition 2009 at WeblogToolsCollection has been decided. Congratulation Godfrey Chan for making your way to the top of the list!

Before I talk in detail about the Section Widget plug-in which Godfrey Chang designed to win this competition, let us first introduce you to the two runner ups: Ron Rennick the designer of Advanced Export for WP and WPMU plug-in, and Chris Northwood, one who designed Live Blogging plug-in for WordPress. Congratulations!

Each runners have been given prize money each of $500, whereas, the winner Godfrey Chang took home prize money of $2,000.

It is time now to see what made these three guys stand out from the crowd and win the competition. I will start the discussion with describing Live Blogging plug-in created by Chris Northwood followed by a brief discussion on Advanced Export for WP and WPMU plug-in that Ron Rennick designed. Then we will discuss Section Widget plug-in at the end of the post. You guessed it right, I have saved best for the end.

Live Blogging by Chris Northwood

Live blogging plug-in will add live micro blogging functionality to WordPress blogs. The plug-in is simple to install and integrate in your WordPress blog seamlessly. The plug-in updates all the connected users’ page in real time. The users do not need to reload the page to see what has been posted.

This plug-in has a simple backend interface and support multiple hooks that could be triggered when a new post is made, but at the moment only hooks for twitter and Meteor are operational.

Advanced Export for WP and WPMU by Ron Rennick

Ron’s Advanced Export for WP and WPMU plug-in helps the WordPress users and users of WordPress Multi-user (WPMU) manage their exports. Instead of exporting a big, fatty file, which often becomes unmanageable, this plug-in helps users by breaking the exports into smaller and manageable chunks.

Each chunk contains one section of the blog. The plug-in has been tested on WP & WPMU versions 2.7 – 2.8.2, and found to be working properly. This plug-in will make it easy to manage large blogs.

Section Widget by Godfrey Chan

This 2009 WordPress Plug-in Competition winning plug-in helps a WordPress blog show section specific widgets on the pages. You can now fulfill your desire to display certain things just on the front page sidebar, while keeping them away from category or archive pages. In just a few clicks you can create a tabbed section widget for your blog using this plug-in, and to do this you do not require any knowledge of PHP.

Section Widget plug-in makes life easier for all of us. Now, we can do a lot many things in our sidebar. The first thing I am going to do is to add Author Bio to my page that should not appear on any other page. What would you do with it?

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