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/

Popularity: 24% [?]

WordPress Report For The Week Of November 21st 2008

The Results Are In – Last week, I reported that there was a survey available to where users of WordPress could vote for which icon pack looked the best with the new User Interface. Well, the results are in and it looks like the icon set that was labeled BD in the survey has taken the crown. VS came in a close second while all of the other icon packs didn’t stand a chance. The winning icon sets by Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert will be incorporated into WordPress 2.7 RC1. However, the team has implied that it would be great if someone could come up with a plugin that would allow individuals to upload the icon pack of their choosing. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/the-results-of-project-icon/

WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 Released – WordPress 2.7 beta 3 was released back on November 15th. Since beta 2, there have been over 160 changes within the core code. Many of these changes are appearance and bug fixes. The changelist is too long to discuss here but be sure to check out the show notes which will contain a link to the official announcement with the list of changes. By the way, if you happen to be using WordPress beta 2, this would be a good opportunity for you to test out the core upgrade function in WordPress.- http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/wordpress-27-beta-3/

Two Big Newcomers – Since last week, WordPress has welcomed a few big names to the WordPress family. These are the Wall Street Journal Magazine, Portland.com and Instapundit. These sites are huge and generate an enormous amount of traffic. Many people think WordPress is a resource hog or runs terrible on sites that generate tons of traffic. When you see major sites like the ones I listed choosing to go with WordPress, I think that puts an end to that argument.- http://publisherblog.automattic.com

Plugin Of The Week – WPTuner – WP Tuner for WordPress is a powerful and easy way to answer hard questions about why your blog is slow or cranky. What’s causing the slowdown? Is it a plugin? Is it your host? This plugin will help you find out. Used with a bit of common sense, this powerful plugin helps blog administrators as well as software developers improve their WordPress blog performance -
One caveat with this particular plugin is that it’s not for the faint of heart. While I was able to understand what the plugin was showing me, it may not be that obvious to you. Be sure to read the plugins readme file and the associated help documents before using it.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptuner/

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. Here is the first question which was submitted by lledslinger and he wants to know if there is a plugin available for setting up a link page on Wordpress for link sharing.
Answer: Based on my research, no. However, there are a few things you can do to sort of perform a work around. The first is using a plugin called WordPress Link Directory (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-link-directory/). This plugin enables you to setup your own link directory where visitors can submit their links through a submission form and then you approve them. The downside to this method is that this is a full blown link directory and not something you can just add to a PAGE within your WordPress installation.
The other thing you can try doing is to use a plugin called TDO Mini Forms (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tdo-mini-forms/). TDO Mini Forms is a very powerful plugin that enables you to create a custom form where your visitors would then be able to submit there links to. You can even notify the submitter through this plugin if their submission was approved.

To sum things up, there is no solution available for your particular use case of WordPress. However, simply adding a submission form and adding the links manually to a page or to a specific blogroll shouldn’t be that difficult or time consuming if you have a low trafficked website.

Popularity: 47% [?]

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WordPress Report For The Week Of November 14th 2008

Project Icon – A few weeks ago, the WordPress dev team put out a call to those who are interested to develop a set of icons that can be used throughout the WordPress administration area. Over a dozen designers responded but after the team decided to turn the actual decision of which icons to use to the community, half of the designers took back their submissions. As it stands, there are now five icon packs to choose from. The icon survey will will remain open for a period of 48 hours starting Thursday so be sure to head on over the WordPress devlopment blog for a link to the survey. The icons that win the survey will be added into WordPress beta 3.- http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/wordpress-27-project-icon/

WordPress 2.7 Update – WordPress 2.7 will undergo another beta release which would make it the third in the testing cycle. Bugs continue to be added to the WordPress bug tracker but most of the problems stem from the WordPress UI redesign coupled with IE6 compatibility. Considering the icons from the survey will be part of beta 3 and the survey will last for 48 hours, I expect beta 3 to be released either on the 16th or 17th of November.

IntenseDebate Reopens – IntenseDebate, the third party commenting service has reopened its doors after closing them soon after they were acquired by Automattic. Along with the service now being available to the public, there is also a new WordPress plugin that has been released that taps into many of the features the service has to offer. Some of these features include two-way comment sync, admin panel integration, search engine optimization, trackbacks, profile sync, post settings and much more. If you have time, be sure to check out the video on the IntenseDebate blog post which does a great job explaining what the new plugin is all about.- http://blog.intensedebate.com/2008/11/12/intensedebate-is-back/

Plugin Of The Week – No Self Pings – I don’t know about you but I find it annoying that WordPress pings itself if you link to a previously published article within your blog. Thanks to the no self pings plugin, this is no longer an issue. All you you have to do is upload the plguin to your plugin directory, activate it and just like that, you won’t ping yourself when you link to an article within your archive.- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-self-ping/

Popularity: 42% [?]

WordPress Report For The Week Of November 7th 2008

WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 Released – WordPress Beta 2 has recently been released to the public. This new beta includes a slew of bug fixes from beta 1. Some of the fixes that have taken place so far include:

Easier post box dropping

Plugin update and install fixes

Fixed broken wp-mail

Fixed some PHP warnings and notices

And much much more. WordPress 2.7 will not be available to the public on Novemebr 10^th but instead, will probably not be available until the end of November or possibly December 1^st. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/wordpress-27-beta-2/

Fake WordPress – Reports came out this week via the Register and others about a version of WordPress which was being distributed to the public that contained a back door trojan. The hack relies on an old version of WordPress whereas the module tells you when an updrage is available with a link to download it, the link in this case pointed to a fake WordPress site claiming you could download version 2.6.4 of the software which doesn’t exist. The site has since been shut down.- http://westi.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/wordpresz/

Continue Voting WordPress Style – While the U.S. Presidential election has come and gone, there are still plenty of things to vote for such as WordPress Ideas. WordPress Ideas is used as a central location where users of WordPress from all across the world share their ideas on how to improve the software, plugins to integrate, etc. So while many within the WordPress community may think that they have no voice concerning the direction in which WordPress is heading, that thought couldn’t be farther from the truth. The fact of the matter is, you do have a voice. Ultimately, the decision is up to the team on whether or not to include an idea into the core of WordPress, but with a grassroots effort, you can easily make your idea known - http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/11/05/were-not-done-voting-yet/

Plugin Of The Week – Slayers Custom Widgets – This plugin adds an entirely new level of theme customization through the use of widgets. You can assign a widget to display on the home page only or maybe you only want it to appear on the single post template page. All of these options are available along with a ton of other configurations. Until now, end users had no way of configuring their sidebar outside of displaying a static set of widgets. Now, you can turn that sidebar into something useful by displaying only the things you want to display. For example, I can display all sorts of widgets on the homepage but when someone clicks on a post title, the sidebar can be filled with related posts, recent comments from the article or whatever else I want to have there. - http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/10/16/wordpress-plugin-slayers-custom-widgets-v-10/

Popularity: 51% [?]

WordPress Report For The Week Of October 31st 2008

WordPress 2.7 Delayed – Earlier this week, I sent an email to the WordPress hackers mailing list explaining how it was getting close to the beginning of November and we have yet to see a beta release of 2.7. Considering everything that has changed in the backend added with the features that have been implemented, I suggested that the new version will need at least a week in the publics hands in order to bake and have as many bugs discovered as possible. Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers of the WordPress project agrees which means WordPress 2.7 will be delayed from its scheduled November 10^th release date. As of right now, it looks like the release will be pushed back a week but no dates have been set in stone.

WordPess Meets LinkedIn –Those of you who have Linked In accounts will now have access to a WordPress application that is available from the LinkedIn Application directory. This app will allow your network of people to be notified of when you publish a new post. You can even opt to display your WordPress blog on your LinkedIn profile and your homepage where it will appear as a drag and drop module in the right-hand column. Like everything WordPress does, this application is open source. - http://publisherblog.automattic.com/2008/10/28/wordpress-for-linkedin/

Revolution 2 Launches – Brian Gardner who acclaimed success in the WordPress premium theme market has launched his new project called Revolution 2. These new themes are released under GPL and are open source meaning you can download and use them for free. So far, Brian has released 10 themes which range from a simple two column style design to a full blown magazine style. However, if you need theme support, you’ll have to purchase a support plan. If you’re in the market for a new theme, definitely give these ten a look through. - http://www.briangardner.com/blog/revolution-two-launches-early.htm

Plugin Of The Week – Moderator – Moderator is a combination of an Adobe Air application that can be run on your desktop and a WordPress plugin. Moderator enables users to moderate comments from their desktop instead of having to login to their WordPress administration area to handle that task. After installation, minimizing the desktop application will display a number in the Windows Taskbar which is the number of comments that are in the moderation queue. This is a very cool plugin and I think this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of doing administrative tasks to your WordPress blog from the desktop. - http://www.danieldura.com/code/moderator

Popularity: 93% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of October 24th 2008

WordPress 2.6.3 Released – WordPress 2.6.3 was released on October 23^rd to address a vulnerability that was discovered in the Snoopy library. Snoppy is used by WordPress to parse feeds show in the WordPress dashboard. The team considers this a low risk vulnerability but they decided to quickly release a patch to take care of it. Now, if you don’t want to perform a full upgrade, they did provide links to the two files which were patched. You can download those and overwrite the ones in your directory and you’ll be safe. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/10/wordpress-263/

WordPRess Ranked 33 – Comscore recently released their monthly analysis of the top web properties for September. WordPress came in at number 33 in the list of top 50 web properties for the month. The numbers were comprised of total U.S. (home, work, and university locations). According to Comscore, WordPress saw 23,125,000 visits during the month of September. Although Comscore says WordPress, I am inclined to think that they are discussing WordPress.com and not .org. - http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/10/22/wordpress-ranked-33/

Akismet Has Stats –A new version of Akismet was released back on October 20^th which provides some bug fixes as well as a cool new feature in the form of stats. Akismet stats track your comment metrics, including missed spam, false positives and Yummy Pie, which displays your ham vs. spam count in a nifty pie chart. What is ham you might ask? To put it simply, legitimate comments. Be sure to download the latest version to check out your spam stats. - http://blog.akismet.com/2008/10/20/akismet-221-now-with-stats/

Plugin Of The Week – Backlinks – Backlinks is a plugin which basically copies the google backlink functionality. Because a substantial amount of people still use Blospot which stubbornly refuses to implement trackbacks, you do not see the full number of pages linking to you. At the moment it is at a very basic version but the author plans to add more features in future versions. You use it by simply adding its tag to your templates - http://dbzer0.com/the-penguin-migration/backlinks

Popularity: 79% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of October 17th 2008

Gravatar Has A Birthday – On October 11^th 2007, Gravatar was acquired by Automattic. What was once a small idea has blossomed into a incredible resource. Gravatar enables users to upload an avatar that is then displayed on any blog or service that supports Gravatar. Think of it as Global Avatar. Here are some stats that will boggle your mind. There are 7,214 requests to the Gravatar service each second every day. That equals about 623 million requests daily. - http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/10/11/gravatar-one-year-later/

Polldaddy Now Part Of Automattic – Polldaddy which is a service that exclusively deals with surveys and polls has been acquired by Automattic. The service which is based out of Ireland and was made up of only two employees will now have the opportunity to be used by over 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com. Integration of the service has already begun taking place with a WordPress.org Polldaddy plugin already made available. - http://ma.tt/2008/10/polldaddy-goes-automattic/

WordPress 2.7 Feature Frozen – WordPress 2.7 is now officially feature frozen. What this means is that, additional functionality will not be introduced into the core and instead, the focus will be on hammering out bugs while cleaning up the code. There are still a number of design issues to work out but based on my testing of 2.7 thus far, I think it will blow the socks off of a lot of people- http://performancing.com/wordpress-2-7-now-frozen

Plugin Of The Week – Stumble For WordPress –This plugin extends WordPress to support a “random article” feature, similar to StumbleUpon’s StumbleThru and Wikipedia’s (Mediawiki’s) random article feature. The plugin supports basic “go to any random page” functionality, but can also integrate with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin to stumble similar articles. Stumble! for WordPress will automatically give priority to articles with more comments, so users will be brought to your most popular posts.- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stumble-for-wordpress/

Popularity: 69% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of October 10th 2008

13 WordPress Plugins You Should Use - Smashing Apps.com recently published a list of 13 plugins that they believe most people don’t use but probably should. Some of the plugins on this list include: Manageable, Tweet this, AddFree Stats and WP Super Cache. A great list of plugin some of which I use. - http://www.smashingapps.com/2008/09/23/13-wordpress-plugins-you-probably-dont-use-but-should.html

Six Tips On Creating A Magazine Theme – For the ambitious ones out their, Catswhocode.com published an article describing six tips and tricks on creating a Magazine styled theme. The article describes how to use conditional comments, static page as the homepage, multiple queries in the homepage, using custom fields and more. The site even gives you code examples that you can copy and paste for learning purposes. - http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/blogging/wordpress/6-tricks-and-tip-to-create-a-magazine-wordpress-theme-838

The Perfect WordPress Themes – Joost de Valk wrote an excellent post diving into the aspects of what makes the perfect WordPress theme. The post covers topics such as hooks, template files, widget support, browser compatibility, looking for outgoing links and more. This is a great article to read as you can develop your own check list to use when browsing for a new WordPress theme. - http://yoast.com/perfect-wordpress-theme/

Plugin Of The Week – Exclude Pages – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus). Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.) - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/

Popularity: 61% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of October 3rd 2008

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Brian Gardner Goes Open Source – Brian Gardner who is known for producing the most successful premium WordPress theme series Revolution has announced on his blog that he will be going all open source. Here is what his announcement entails in a nutshell. The revolution themes site will be shut down on October 31^st to respect those who purchased a premium theme. November 1^st, a brand new revolution site will launch along with new packages that people can purchase which will contain support, tutorials, customizations for particular themes etc. Brian also announced that he will be working with Jason Schuller of WP Elements on this new project. - http://www.briangardner.com/blog/revolution-going-open-source.htm

WordPress 2.7 UI Survey #2 – Jane Wells of Automattic published a second survey, this time asking users to decide on where to put the search box, where to put the add new post button/favorites menu and how to label the future publish/edit timestamp function. The survey was open to the first 5,000 respondents. The results of the survey will not dictate the final product but will be weighed heavily on the outcome. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/09/wordpress-2-7-survey-no2/

More WordPress.com VIP Members – If you don’t think WordPress is a serious platform, think again. The UK Royal Navy has chosen to be part of the WordPress.com VIP program along with the NFL. Thats right, the National Football League is now using WordPress.com. Other big names that have recently joined the VIP network include Martha Stewart, Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, and Hackaday.

Plugin Of The Week - Insights – Insights was written by Vladimir Prelovac and is one awesome plugin. Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time the appeal of your posts.

With Insights you can very quickly (in couple of seconds) do the following:

* Search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post

* Insert Flickr Images

* Insert Youtube videos

* Search and link to Wikipedia

* Search Google

* Insert a Google Map

Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant information to your post in just a few seconds..- http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/insights

Popularity: 100% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of September 26th 2008

IntenseDebate Acquired By Automattic – The third party commenting service IntenseDebate has been acquired by Automattic, the company who brings you WordPress.com for an undisclosed amount. IntenseDebate allows users to have threaded comments, OpenID support, comment rating, reply by email and much more. Self hosted WordPress users will most likely see a full featured plugin which taps into IntenseDebate so that you can use their services on your blog. Keep in mind that no one will be FORCED to use IntenseDebate. - http://ma.tt/2008/09/intense-debate-goes-automattic/

WordPress.com Does A Woopsy – Those of you who use WordPress.com know that you can not upload any custom themes to use for your blog. On September 23^rd, WordPress.com announced that they had made changes to a popular theme called The Journalist. Just one problem, the theme over rode the original journalist theme forcing users to use the new one. Thankfully, Noel Jackson notified everyone that the new version is now a new selectable theme allowing for end users to switch back to the original journalist theme. I think WordPress.com may have learned that updating a theme that so many people are using without the users consent can lead to quite a backlash let alone an inconvenience. - http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/the-journalist-revised/

Top Entrepreneurs – Inc.com which is a magazine squarely focused on business individuals announced their list of the top 30 entrepreneurs who are under 30 years of age. Matt Mullenweg made the list at number 18. While WordPress began in 2003, Matt founded Automattic in 2005. Matt is 24 years old, just like me.

Plugin Of The Week - MTR Podcast Recorder - MTR Podcast Recorder offers real-time recording that is saved on the same server where WordPress is installed. All recordings will be saved into the MP3 format using the LAME encoder. In addition to all this, you can manage your playlists and recordings from the WordPress administration panel. You can easily add a Podcast Player widget to any of your sidebars, posts, or pages if you want to promote a specific recording to your readers.- http://mtr-design.com/en/projects/mtr-podcast-recorder/

If you would like to know more about what is going on within the world of WordPress, visit www.weblogtoolscollection.com

Popularity: 79% [?]

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