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: 24% [?]

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: 38% [?]

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: 84% [?]

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: 74% [?]

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: 64% [?]

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: 57% [?]

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% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of September 19th 2008

WordPress 2.7 Development Progress – A Ton of inline documentation has been added thanks to the work of Jacob Santos. - http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/heaps-more-inline-documentation-from-jac/

Comments look like they will have paging support in 2.7. Work has begun on adding this support to the wp_list_comments function in WordPress. - http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/hailin-got-a-start-on-adding-paging-to-t/

Volunteers are needed to help implement the theme installation and updates features into the backend of WordPress. The hookups to the API are already there, someone just needs to plug it all together. According to Ryan, much of the job can be done with a cut-and-paste of the plugin update and install code. - http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/we-need-to-find-someone-to-pick-up-the-t/

Drafts now have a real timestamp while also being ordered properly in the All Posts timeline. - http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/drafts-now-have-a-real-timestamp-and-are/

WordPress 2.7 Usability Survey – The WordPress team earlier this week released a public survey for anyone to participate in giving feedback on how the new administration panels should look and function. The survey also provided different areas for folks to give their feedback. As of now, the survey is closed but I did manage to give them my input. I’m personally glad to see the team give end users even more of a bigger role in terms of how things work, look and function. I hope they do more of these types of surveys in the future.

Plugin Competition Winners Announced – Weblogtoolscollection.com published the results of their awesome WordPress plugin competition and how ironic is it that a commenting plugin won first place. Here are the results.

First place belongs to WP Comment Remix by Pressography - WP Comment Remix adds a plethora of new options and features to Wordpress. From Reply and Quote links for commenters, to a full upgrade to the edit comments pages in the admin panel. -http://pressography.com/plugins/wp-comment-remix/

Second place goes to Manageable WordPress plugin - A WordPress plugin that allows for inline editing of the date, title, author, categories, tags, status and more on both posts and pages without leaving the “Manage” admin sections. No need to load each post or page individually. Simply double-click anywhere in the post or page row and when you’re done, press enter. By the way, this plugin has been integrated into the core and will be part of the feature set of WordPress 2.7 - http://www.aaronharp.com/dev/wp-manageable/

Third place goes to WP Easy Uploader -WP Easy Uploader was created to make the life of WordPress bloggers easier by allowing an Administrator to add plugins, themes, and any type of file to WordPress directly from inside WordPress. You no longer have to load up an FTP client just to try out that latest plugin or to upload a text document for people to download. - http://gaarai.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-easy-uploader/

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

Popularity: 82% [?]

WordPress News For The Week Of September 12th 2008

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*WordPress 2.6.2 Released* – WordPress 2.6.2 was released earlier this week to fix a security problem dealing with the mt_rand php function. You really need to upgrade your blog if you allow open registration. The problem is not tied strictly to WordPress rather, this issue affects many other PHP apps as well such as Vbulletin. - http://wordpress.org/development/2008/09/wordpress-262/

*Development Progress * – Noel Is Redesigning the Press This bookmarklet to make live blogging easier as well as going for a more streamlined approach

Take one of wp_list_comments() with threaded comments support is in. To get threaded comments, themes will have to change to make use of wp_list_comments(). You can still use the plugins already available if preferred.

Columns can be hidden on the various management pages. Posts and Pages are done with the others on the way. If you use Categories and not Tags, for example, you can hide the Tags column.

The first cut of Inline Editing is in thanks to Aaron Harp. Posts and pages can be edited inline. Click the “Quick Edit” link to try it out.

*WordPress.com Video Tutorials* – WordPress.com now hosts a series of screencast tutorials which explain everything from creating a gallery to embedding a YouTube video. You’ll find these new videos within the WordPress.com FAQ.- http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/wordpresscom-faq-screencasts/

*Plugin Of The Week* – Progressive License – Progressive license is a plugin that gives authors an opportunity to put Creative Commons or Custom Licenses on their content. It also gives authors the ability to put time frames on the licenses. This give the authors the chance to use a different license depending on how old their post is.- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/progressive-license/

If you would like to know more about what is going on within the world of WordPress, visit www.weblogtoolscollection.com <http://www.jeffro2pt0.com/>

Popularity: 87% [?]

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