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P2 Now In The Repository – Back in March, I let you know that P2 was on the horizon for self installed WordPress users and that it was already available for WordPress.com users. Fast forward to today and Prologue 2 is now on the WordPress.org theme repository. The theme features perks such as threaded comment display on the front page, in-line editing for posts and comments, real-time notifications and much more. http://www.wptavern.com/p2-officially-on-the-theme-repository

WordPress help Center – Alex King, who is most well known for his popular WordPress plugins and more recently, his Carrington theme framework, made a big announcement the other day regarding a project that his company Crowd Favorite has partnered with called the WordPress HelpCenter. he HelpCenter is not aimed at replacing forums, email, comment forms, or other means of support. Instead, you’ll be able to pick up the phone Mon-Fri between the hours of 9am-7pm Pacific time and give them a call to answer any WordPress questions you might have instead of waiting around on a forum for someone to reply. In fact, any phone call under 3 minutes is free. Check out my review of the helpcenter on WPCandy.com – http://wpcandy.com/articles/one-more-way-to-get-wordpress-help.html

Matt On TechCrunch –Matt Mullenweg was recently interviewed on TechCrunch.com in a video from the Amsterdam Next Web conference. In this interview, Matt explains why Twitter is not sucking the life out of blogging. He also chats about the acquisitions Automattic made in 2008 with a hint that more could be on the horizon. Lat but not least, Matt shares some details regarding the success of both WordPress.org and WordPress.com. – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/16/interview-with-automattics-matt-mullenweg-blogging-is-not-slowing-down/

Plugin Pick Of The Week – DiggBar Killer – DiggBar Killer adds a little snippet of Javascript to your WordPress website to remove any frames or iframes, such as the Digg Bar, which are surrounding it. DiggBar Killer also has a (100% optional) annoy feature. You can choose to annoy users coming from digg.com by showing an obnoxious message. The default “annoy” folder comes with some ugly animated GIFs and a MIDI file, but can be easily customized using plain-ole HTML & CSS (no PHP knowledge required). http://ibot.tv/2009/04/13/digg-bar-killer-wordpress-plugin/

If you’re looking for more information regarding WordPress or just want to be part of a community centered around WordPress, please head on over to WPTavern.com. The forum has received a new paint job, advertising options are now open on the site and much more. Remember, the drinks are always on the house.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Twitter Comes To WordPress.com –If you’re a user of WordPress.com as well as Twitter, you’ll be delighted to know that the folks at Automattic have added a Twitter widget that you can place on your sidebar. All the links that you post to Twitter remain clickable in the widget, and your @ replies link to user profiles. The widget went live on March 26th and is currently available to use.- http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/twitter-widget/

Vote For WordPress – At about this time every year, the folks over at Webware present their Webware 100 finalists on which to vote on to see who will take the crown in their respective category. In 2008, WordPress was the winner of the publishing category. This year, the category is called Social Networking and Publishing in which WordPress.com along with the WordPress Platform are among one of the choices to vote for. The poll is being conducted via PollDaddy and the results will be announced on April 19th.

3 Plugins To Speed Up WordPress – If you’re finding your WordPress powered site to be running a bit sluggishly, then consider the information presented within a blog post on ConnectedInternet.co.uk. The site features three different WordPress plugins which will help optimize your site. On top of that, the site also features a few tips to put into practice to ensure that your site is not bogged down over time.

Plugin Pick Of The Week – Twitter User – Twitter User is a simple plugin which adds an additional field to the authors profile in which they can add their twitter username. Single author blogs will find this plugin useful however Multi Author blogs should really love this plugin as it allows all authors of a blog to quickly and easily share their Twitter username with readers.

If you’re looking for more information regarding WordPress or just want to be part of a community centered around WordPress, please head on over to WPTavern.com where the drinks, are always on the house.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Prologue 2 Released – During WordCamp Germany, Matt Mullenweg mentioned something called Prologue 2. This new version of the Prologue theme introduces Ajax like real-time commenting meaning, if I place a comment on the blog and someone else is staring at the site, they will see that comment appear before them as it happens. Heather over at the WordPress.com blog sheds some light on the project, including a video showcasing the new theme. Heather mentions that P2 is already available for WordPress.com users but to look for it on the WordPress.org theme repository in the coming days. – http://www.wptavern.com/prologue-2-sees-the-light-of-day

WordPress 2.8 Delayed Until April – WordPress 2.8 which was originally scheduled to be released in March has now been delayed until sometime in April. The roadmap currently has 2.8 scheduled to be released on April first but just think that it will probably be released at some point during the month, not really the first.

Multi Use Widgets In WordPress 2.8 – Earlier this week, it was announced by the developers that a new Multi Widget class has been added to WordPress 2.8? What does this mean? It simply means that in WordPress 2.8, all of the default widgets as well as widgets that are recoded with the new class will be able to be used multiple times instead of only once. We had a similar feature back in WordPress 2.3 so it’s great to see this one making a return.

If you’re looking for more information regarding WordPress or just want to be part of a community centered around WordPress, please head on over to WPTavern.com. The site contains news, reviews, editorials and much more on not only WordPress, but all projects under the Automattic umbrella. We also have a forum which has been rocking as of late so stop on by and join the party. The drinks at the tavern are always on the house.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

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Plugin Development Book – Vladimir Prelovac who I consider to be a WordPress Rockstar in his own right has is very own book called WordPress Plug-In Development. Beginner’s guide. Vladimir is not only a plugin developer but also a good theme developer as well. The book goes into detail regarding the underpinnings of the software, plugin security, development, hooks, and much more. It’s currently available in either Paperback form or online via PDF for $39.99 http://www.wptavern.com/new-wordpress-book-for-plugin-development

IntenseDebate Gets Plugged In – IntenseDebate, the third party commenting service which Automattic acquired back on September 23rd, 2008 has announced that they will have their own plugin repository. So far, IntenseDebate has four plugins to choose from. PollDaddy for creating polls, Seesmic for creating video based comments, YouTube integration and Smileys. It will be interesting to see how far this plugin repository gets off the ground but I think its a great step in the right direction. – http://www.wptavern.com/intensedebate-is-getting-plugged-in

WordPress Store To Get Revamped – Remember the WordPress Shop? If you forgot about it, don’t worry as I did too considering I haven’t seen much news come out of the store for quite awhile. The site is undergoing a facelift to match the current WP site designs and also a new batch of new product is being produced. USB drives have been added this week with more items to follow. (By the way, the USB drives cost $15.00 and contain 4 GB worth of space. – http://www.wptavern.com/wordpress-store-to-get-a-revamp

Plugin Of The Week – WordPress Mobile Editions – With mobile device usage skyrocketing, it only makes sense to ensure that your blog can be read in a mobile format. WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Mobile browsers are automatically detected, there is no configuration needed. – http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project=wordpress-mobile-edition

If you’re looking for more information regarding WordPress or just want to be part of a community centered around WordPress, please head on over to WPTavern.com. The site contains news, reviews, editorials and much more on not only WordPress, but all projects under the Automattic umbrella. We also have a forum which has been rocking as of late so stop on by and join the party. The drinks at the tavern are always on the house.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

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WordPress MU 2.7 Released – Donncha states that this release is mostly a code sync release but it also contains quite a few bug fixes. The most notable change in WordPress MU is the addition of Viper007bond’s admin bar. Upgrading to the latest release should be as simple as overwriting the old files with the new ones. However, always make a backup copy first before doing anything! – http://ocaoimh.ie/2009/01/28/wordpress-mu-27/

BuddyPress 1.0 Beta 2 Released – Hot on the heels of the recently released WordPress MU 2.7, BuddyPress 1.0 Beta 2 has been released to the public. Andy states that the release fixes hundreds of bugs since Beta 1 with most of those being fixed by the community. Andy states that the project is three days later than expected with this beta. WordPress MU 2.7 was just released and it made much more sense to sync up the release schedules to ensure there were no compatibility problems. The 1.0 release will now be February 12th, exactly two weeks from today. – http://buddypress.org/blog/2009/01/1-0-beta-2/

Thank A Plugin Developer Day – It’s only fitting that WordPress has it’s own series of holidays. After all, just about everyone and (everything) else has holidays. January 28th has officially been declared by Matt Mullenweg “Thank A Plugin Developer Day”. Asides from paying homeage to plugin authors, Matt also lets us know that the plugin repository is called home by over 4,000 different plugins. Another little tidbit is that the average number of plugins installed per self hosted blog is five! – http://wordpress.org/development/2009/01/thank-a-plugin-developer-day/

Plugin Of The Week – Revision Control – Revision Control is a plugin for WordPress which gives the user more control over the Post/Page Revisions.
The plugin allows the user to set a blog-global setting for pages/posts to enable/disable/limit the number of revisions which are saved for the page/post. The user may change this setting on a per-page/post basis from the Revisions Meta box which is displayed within the Post Editor
The plugin also allows the deletion of specific revisions via the Revisions post metabox. – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/revision-control/

If you’re looking for more information regarding WordPress or just want to be part of a community centered around WordPress, please head on over to WPTavern.com. The site contains news, reviews, editorials and much more on not only WordPress, but all projects under the Automattic umbrella. We also have a forum which has been rocking as of late so stop on by and join the party. The drinks at the tavern are always on the house.

Popularity: 15% [?]

WordPress MU 2.7 Beta Released – Donncha the lead developer of WordPress MU announced today the release of WordPress MU 2.7 beta. The announcement states that this version is pretty stable but it’s not the final version which will be released to the public as it still needs some testing. – http://ocaoimh.ie/2009/01/22/wordpress-mu-27-beta/

Visual Coverage Of WordPress – On January 16th a new community oriented blog headed up by Automattic employee Michael Pick opened to the public. The site is called WordPress.tv with the goal of providing up-to-date WordPress themed content. This could be WordCamp videos, plugin reviews, tutorials. Right now, the site boasts quite a bit of visual content from recent wordcamp events as well as WordPress.com material. However, the site plans on featuring user created videos within the near future. – http://blog.wordpress.tv/2009/01/16/welcome-to-wordpresstv/

The WordPress Handbook – During the recent WordCamp Las Vegas event, Matt Mullenweg announced something he calls the WordPress Handbook documentation project. This project will be a free online manual for WordPress users that will contain updated information. Right now, the details of the project state that the online manual will be versioned, edited, and compiled much like the way development for the WordPress project takes place. – http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/wordpress-handbook-project/

Plugin Of The Week – WP Greet Box – This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer URL.
For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/

If you’re looking for more information regarding WordPress or just want to be part of a community centered around WordPress, please head on over to WPTavern.com which will soon be opening to the public. Until that happens, you can register an account and participate in the forum which is already buzzing with new forum posts being created every day.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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WordPress 2.7 Hits 1 Million Downloads – For the past two weeks, people have been keeping tabs on the WordPress download counter to see when it would hit 1 million downloads. Well, the wait is over and WordPress 2.7 hit 1 million downloads on January 9th. I imagine that once the majority of users end up with WordPress 2.7 or higher which contains the automattic core upgrade function, 1 million downloads will be reached at a record pace.- http://www.miroslavglavic.ca/blog/wordpress/1000000-wp

A Smaller Number – Matt Mullenweg has announced a small but noticeable change on WordPress.com. The stats counter used to show the total number of blogs on WordPress.com as well as how many new posts and words for the day. With the recent change, the total number of blogs hosted on WordPress.com has been changed to show the total number of active bloggers. This number is an average over the last few days and provides a more accurate statistic with regards to the activity taking place on the domain. – http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/a-smaller-number/

Subscribe To Comments – Subscribe to comments which is a popular plugin used on the self hosted version of WordPress has found it’s way onto WordPress.com. Subscribe to comments provides a checkbox in the comments form that when checked, will notify the end user when a new comment has been published keeping everyone in the loop. The feature is enabled by default meaning there is nothing to configure.- http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/subscribe-to-comments/

Plugin Of The Week – Maintenance Mode – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. When the maintenance mode is activated, a custom defined message is show to site visitors – http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/maintenance-mode/

I invite you to head on over to WPTavern.com and bookmark the site. WPTavern will be a WordPress centric site containing news, reviews, videos, and my WordPress Weekly podcast as well as a forum. Hope to see you there when the site launches in public beta next month.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

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WordPress 2.8 Survey – The development team has released a new survey for the next version of WordPress dubbed 2.8. The survey contains a list of features that not only didn’t make it into version 2.7, but also ideas which were originally slated for 2.8. The problem however is that the team doesn’t know what should be worked on and what should be pushed off. Thats where the survey comes in. The survey will close on December 31, 2008 so be sure to cast your vote and take part in the development process! – http://wordpress.org/development/

WordCamp Columbus – Over the weekend, I discovered that their will be a WordCamp event held in my own backyard down in Columbus Ohio on the weekend of May 16th, 2009. WordCamps are conference like events centered all around WordPress. The event will be taking place at the Columbus State community College with admission currently being free but as the event draws near, their may be an admission fee of $20.00 applied. So far, Noel Jackson along with Nick Momrik two employees of Automattic are tentatively scheduled to appear. Oh, and yours truly will be their as well. – http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/12/25/wordcamp-columbus-is-on/

WordPress Forum User Guide- A few days ago, I published a WordPress.org forum user guide on WeblogToolsCollection.com. The purpose of the guide is to help steer end users in the right direction as it pertains to using the forums. While the forum is heavily used by the community, there are a few tricks you can do to speed up your support process. Check out the guide for more information. -http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/12/24/wordpress-forum-user-guide/

Plugin Of The Week – Widget Context – Widget Context is a plugin that allows you to assign widgets to appear on certain parts of your blog. For example, you can configure the plugin to only display the recent comments widget to show up on your homepage and nowhere else. Or, you can assign a widget to display in multiple places but keep it from displaying in others. In short, this plugin provides an entirely new level of customization options for your blog. Look for functionality similar to what this plugin provides to be coming down the pike in a future version of WordPress. – http://konstruktors.com/blog/wordpress/842-wordpress-gpl-widget-context-plugin/#more-842

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Popularity: 11% [?]

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5 Years Of WordPress – Ozh who is a very active contributor in the WordPress community has published an awesome post which highlights the past five years of WordPress development. The article includes photos as well as short stories regarding each version from 0.7.1 to 2.7. A great way to look at how far WordPress has come.- http://planetozh.com/blog/2008/12/a-journey-through-five-years-of-wordpress-interface/

Updated Plugins – Lester Chan’s who is the developer behind some of the most popular plugins for WordPress recently announced that he has updated all 15 of his plugins to be compatible with WordPress 2.7. Lester was going to retire his stick post plugin thanks to stickies now being a default feature but because the demand was so high, Lester decided to keep the plugin around and update it. On top of all this, Lester also introduced a new plugin called WP-CommentNavi which basically adds pages to your comments similar to how his PageNavi plugin paginates posts.- http://lesterchan.net/wordpress/2008/12/11/lester-chan-wordpress-plugins-december-2008-update/

BuddyPress Hits Beta -BuddyPress which is a project headed up by Andy Peatling and provides a social aspect to WordPressMU was released as a beta on December 15th. This release consisted of the BuddyPress components as well as both default themes. Keep in mind that in order to use BuddyPress, you’ll need to first install WordPress MU. -http://buddypress.org/blog/2008/12/buddypress-10b1-components/

Plugin Of The Week – Filosofo Comments Preview – Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them. After the plugin is installed and activated, end users will see a new button labeled PREVIEW next to the submit button. This allows visitors to preview their comments before publishing them. It’s also very quick to load. – http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/comments-preview/

Popularity: 15% [?]