The theme on that site wasn’t tweaked at all to make the Ajax functionality work (except some irrelevant CSS changes). It works out of the box on most WordPress themes that follow the theme coding recommendations, see the plugin’s readme.txt for details.

Downloads are available at WordPress.org.

The second plugin the magazine features is my Theme Switch plugin: Modifying a current theme to suit can be a stressful and painful experience. However, this plug-in allows users to preview a theme without the hassle of having to activate a theme and then preview in a different tab or window. They focus on the plugin’s usage for theme development, although it can do much more than that, like displaying this switch cloud:

Thanks to Kerry Webster for bringing this article to my attention. You can download a PDF version at his site.

About Imagine publishing:

Imagine publishing is one of the UK’s fastest-growing consumer specialist magazine publishers, with over 20 print magazines and 20 websites published worldwide within the entertainment, computing, digital photography and videogames market sectors.

If you write WordPress plugins and want them to be published on the WordPress plugins page you have to use svn which can be painful once you’re used to git.

Fortunately, git can interact with svn via git-svn. Here’s a list of the commands you will need to use.

git svn init -s http://svn.wp-plugins.org/your_plugin

Update:
The git svn init + git svn fetch takes forever on the WordPress repository. Instead, use svn log http://svn.wp-plugins.org/your_plugin to get the correct revision number and git svn clone http://svn.wp-plugins.org/your_plugin -rYOURREVISION.

This will initialize a local git repository. Inside the repository, use

git svn fetch
git gc
git branch -a

The first command will take a few minutes and fetch all tags, branches etc. from the svn repository. The second command cleans up your git repository. This will significantly reduce it’s size. The last command will list all branches, local and remote. To track the remote trunk in a local branch use

git checkout -b svn-trunk trunk

svn-trunk is just the name the local branch gets in this example, you can use anything you like.

A normal workflow usually looks like this:

git checkout -b newbranch # create a local branch that you edit
... edit ...
git commit -m "Added awesome new feature" -a
git checkout svn-trunk
git merge newbranch
git svn dcommit

These commands create a local branch where you can try new things. Commit the changes to your local branch. Then check out the local svn-trunk branch that tracks the remote WordPress repository, merge the changes from newbranch. Then rebase the svn branch to the subversion trunk. The last command will update the remote svn trunk, assuming you really named your local trunk branch svn-trunk. As we’re talking about WordPress plugins you’ll want to tag your commit so that older versions of your plugin can still be downloaded.

git svn tag version

This will create the tag in the remote svn repository. It looks like this is only possible since git 1.6.1. For Debian Lenny systems you’ll need git from backports.org for this to work.

This should get you started with git and WordPress plugin development. Please do read the git documentation for more details, as git-svn has some limitations: Only use the described workflow if you’re the only commiter and work with one git repository.

That’s not good. Yes, jquery is lightweigt, CSS files aren’t big, but that’s not a good reason for making every visitor download them. I did some research and it doesn’t look like anybody wrote about a solution yet, so here’s one way. Usually, you would add an action to wp_print_styles or wp_print_scripts that does something like this:

add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'yourplugin_include_css' );
 
function yourplugin_include_css() {
    echo $csslink;
}

Instead, try this:

add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'yourplugin_include_css' );
 
function yourplugin_include_css() {
    // Check if shortcode exists in page or post content
    global $post;
    if ( strstr( $post->post_content, '[yourshortcode]' ) ) {
        echo $csslink;
    }
}

That’s it. Please don’t add custom javascript or CSS on each and every page of my blog.

Update: See this excellent post for an improved solution.

Update 2: The best solution for loading JavaScript so far