WordPress Report For The Week Of November 28th 2008

WordPress 2.6.5 Released – On Tuesday, WordPress 2.6.5 was released to the public. End users are highly encouraged to upgrade because of a Cross Site Scripting vulnerability that was discovered and subsequently fixed. Besides the security fix, the release contains three other bug fixes. For those wondering why version 2.6.4 was skipped in favor of 2.6.5, a week or two ago, a malicious version of WordPress which contained a backdoor was being distributed across the web and this version was labeled as 2.6.4 thus why the WordPress development team is avoiding confusion by not having an official version labeled with that number. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/wordpress-265/

Obama Turns On IntenseDebate – President elect Obama has recently chosen the third party commenting service IntenseDebate to be the ones to host the discussions section on the Change.gov website. One of the first questions that was asked after launching the platform on the site dealt with the issue of health care. So far, the question has over 2,800 comments and IntenseDebate seems to be working fairly well despite the comment volume. Considering Automattic recently acquired the company, having the next U.S. President using the service sure is a nice way to convince others to use it. - http://change.gov/page/content/discusshealthcare

WordPress Rockstars – The folks behind the site WPZoom.com have created a list of 20 WordPress rockstars to read and follow. Not to gloat but yours truly was included on the list along with some notable others such as Justin Tadlock, Brian Gardner, Alex King and many more. Take this opportunity to visit the post and add those blogs to your feedreader. Although I’ve been labeled a rockstar, I have yet to sign any autographs. - http://www.wpzoom.com/design/20-wordpress-rockstars-to-read-and-follow/

Plugin Of The Week – Screen Grab To WordPress – To change things up a bit, this week I’ll be featuring a FireFox extension rather than a plugin so without further adieu, Screen Grab To WordPress. After installing the extension, you’ll have to configure the URL, username, and password to all your Wordpress blogs an you’re ready to go (just make sure you have XML-RPC remote publishing enabled After installation, click the icon in your Firefox status bar to display SGW’s menu and choose what to capture and where to send it. You can save locally, copy to the clipboard, or post directly to Wordpress. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8204

Ask Jeff – A few weeks ago, I put out the call for anyone who has a question regarding WordPress whether it be wanting to know if a plugin existed for a particular purpose, a theme, or a technical question, and you delivered. Josh Budde wants to know - What’s the best plugin for podcasting?
Answer: Well, it used to be that Podpress was the absolute best plugin for podcasting with WordPress however, since the release of WordPress 2.6, the plugin has been broken and development on the plugin has apparently ceased to exist. I’ve tried to get in contact with the developer of Podpress but have been unsuccessful. Therefor, based on what I can tell the blubrry WordPress plugin called Powerpress is now what I consider to be the best plugin for podcasting with WordPress.
The plugin contains a ton of features such as the ability to add/modify/remove pocast episodes from blog posts, integrated media player, itunes RSS tags, and most importantly, easy migration from podpress to powerpress. Blubrry was smart in that they saw what happened in the WordPress community and developed the plugin to be a podpress replacement. Outside of powerpress, there is not a lot in terms of plugins that enable podcasting with WordPress as easily as PodPress. So powerpress is your best shot - http://www.blubrry.com/powerpress/

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