In episode 8, I interview Brandon Rosage. Brandon is the webmaster of MVN.com, a WordPress powered site that covers sporting events from A-Z. We cover the news of the week such as Matt’s speech at the Future Of Webapps Conference, Should You follow or NoFollow, Sniplets plugin security woes, an article highlighting how WordPress has reached it’s current point of success, the revolving topic of WordPress themes and more. This week, we’ll close out the show with our WordPress tips of the week.
Lack of creativity or lack of inspiration? I share my thoughts on this question and provide my overview as to the state of WordPress themes as I challenge theme authors to keep it simple yet raise the bar at the same time.
The negatives of DoFollow For a period of time, bloggers were used to using NoFollow. But because of how great Akismet and other anti spam measures work, people have resorted to disabling the NoFollow attribute. We discuss the various issues surrounding Do-NoFollow.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Brad – Brad discussed using the OpenID plugin for WordPress. OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your blog URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. This plugin allows verified OpenIDs to be linked to existing user accounts for use as an alternative means of authentication. Additionally, commenters may use their OpenID to assure their identity as the author of the comment and provide a framework for future OpenID-based services (reputation and trust, for example).
Ronald - Ronald discussed his comment sorter plugin. His comment sorter plugin allows you to
Prevent Trackbacks/Pingbacks from showing.
Sort comments by Date Ascending.
Sort comments by Date Descending.
Sort comments by Name Ascending.
Sort comments by Name Descending.
The ability to remember options.
Check it out if you have a chance.
Andrew Rickmann – My tip of the week was for plugin authors who have a plugin that adds a DBX box to the advanced section of the post page.
There is a new function to create these boxes – add_meta_box
This is a function, not a hook, so you need to call the function from within the admin_head hook.
Also note that as of the current SVN version the old hook is still there, so you not only need to add the new method, but make sure the old version will not run if the add_meta_box function exists.
I’d also like to throw in an article about no-follow that I mentioned in the show and a poll on my site for people to comment on what I have done with comment links.
Jacob Santos – In the dashboard, click on the Edit link in the “WordPress Development” Feed. The link is to a RSS feed, and therefore supports any site which has an RSS feed. It could even be Jeffro2pt0 site or another planet.
For myself, since I’m using SVN, it is more useful for me to get SVN commits than plain releases I’m not doing to download anyway.
You can also change the title, which is below the link text box to change the feed title. The Primary and Secondary feed widgets are the only ones you can change the title for.
In episode 7, I interview Tommy from Buzzdroid as I try to figure out the inspiration behind the Shifter WordPress theme. We then dive into the news of the week which stems from WordPress.com experiencing a DoS attack to a topic of WordPress upgrading being more of a fuss, than a must. Near the end of the show, we begin our WordPress theme round table and then conclude with our tips of the week.
Ian Kallen of Tecchnorati lets us know that they have seen a number of blogs “exploited by a recently announced WordPress vulnerability”. You folks might want to upgrade your WordPress installations if you haven’t yet done so already.
Roundtable discussion revolving around the state of WordPress themes. We will discuss trends, our favorite/worst themes, and any other topic dealing with themes we can think of
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Didn’t have time to go over our tips of the week. Instead, we each gave our likes, dislikes, and our thoughts as to where we would like to see themes head into the future.
This week on Episode 6, we finally see WordPress 2.5 feature froze which is a standard practice for all versions of WordPress. A live WP 2.5 demo site has been made available to the public in case you want to see what you have to look forward to, WP.com intros summarized stats for the stat junkies, Yahoo interviews Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com and discusses a variety of topics. Movable Type does WordPress in a weird sort of way. Your WordPress Weekly Digest update and some tips on making sure that your WordPress plugin using Jquery does not conflict with other plugins using Jquery. Last but not least, some WordPress beginners lingo.
Panel Members:
Andrew Rickmann: Long time user of WordPress who has molded themes, plugins and hacks within the WordPress code. Fun with WordPress is Andrew’s solution to putting all those thoughts in one place, and giving something back to the community.
Kaspars Dambis - Author of the WordPress themes Morning Racer, Agneka Simple, Sans-serif Racer and Times Racer. Kaspars is also a WordPress plugin developer.
David Peralty – A man who seemingly needs no introduction, but I’m going to give him one anyways. David is a very busy man who has love/hate relationships with WordPress. He currently is the marketing guy for SplashPressMedia and has coded over 100 themes for WordPress.
You can catch all of David’s blogging related material here BloggingPro
Stories Discussed:
WordPress.com Introduces Summarized Stats – WordPress.com users can rejoice as they now have a summarized version of their stats available for consumption. The summarized results includes detailed information such as referrers, search terms, and clicks. Andy also let’s us know that there is a refresh time limit of 180 seconds or 3 minutes before the data within your stats is updated. Definitely an awesome update for all of us stat junkies.
WordPress 2.5 Now Under Feature Freeze – No more new features will be added. Concentration will be on fixing bugs, polishing up the new admin design, and finishing off the new features that are already in. We still have some styling work to do on the new design, but the big changes are already in.
Yahoo Speaks With Matt Mullenweg – Yahoo had a chance to interview Matt Mullwenweg which allowed us to get some good information related to WordPress 2.5, PHP4 versus PHP 5 and some other nifty tidbits.
MovableType Plugin Mimics WordPress Dashboard – What started off as a joke, has now turned into an excellent proof of concept that the MT backend could have an alternative interface with little effort involved. This thing looks like an almost exact replica of the WordPress administration area. If I didn’t know any better, I would of thought WordPress invaded Movable Type.
WordPress 2.5 Demo Site Launched – Chris Johnston has announced the availability of a public WordPress 2.5 demo site.The other way of seeing WordPress 2.5 is by manually installing an SVN or Subversion installation of WordPress which requires time, and effort. This makes it painless for end users. Be sure to check in from time to time each week to see the progress.
Building A Web App In 45 Minutes – Matt Mullenweg will be participating in a panel featuring Kevin Rose from Digg.com and other web app superstars at the Future Of Web Apps conference being held Feb 28 – March 1st. However, Erick Schonfeld has yet to decide what he wants these panel members to build and is conducting a poll which you can vote on to help decide which app should be built.
Kaspars Of Konstruktors.com Shares Some Jquery Tips – Kaspars lets us know of a few tips that would help out plugin authors planning on using Jquery within their plugin. There is a certain Jquery line of code that you need to know about to prevent conflicts with other plugins also using Jquery.
Weekly Digest For Feb 4th – Feb 10th 2008 – As 2.5 is now under feature freeze, it’s time for the WP Dev team to really crank out the bug fixes. Here are some things worth noting in this weeks diget
Renaming of is_front() to is_front_page() to avoid conflict with bbPress (#3682)
Introduction of the ability to have random post ordering (#4617).
Reversion to full content, including content after the more tag, for feeds (#2582).
A more informative error message when theme files are not writeable (#5783).
Removal of gzip_compression(). Leave it to the server to handle (#4342).
www versus non-www: On the WordPress Support Forums, clarification on the issue of www to non-www has been given. WordPress 2.3 offers “canonical URLs” which redirect www to non-www or vice-versa. Go to Options > General and set the URL to whatever you want it to be, with or without the www and WordPress will automatically redirect visitors and search engines to the correct URL and permalink.
WordPress Beginners Lingo – Earlier this week I wrote up a post the described various WordPress terms that people who are just starting out in the world of WordPress may hear about, but may not know the definitions to. The lingo post contains 8 words and I believe I will be writing a part 2 of this post containing even more.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Andrew Rickmann - If you are running more than one local version of WordPress and want to standardise your local theme and plugin folders so you can test them all without copying them to different folders you can make some minor changes and use a quick plugin to do that.
I have written more about it on my blog at the link below:
Kaspars Dambis - Kaspars tip of the week dealt with semantic blog posts. Users should use the heading tags as well as using a proper title tag when inserting a link to your article.
Jeremy Clarke - About my tip of the week, people can find the codex Firefox search bar plugin at this page, which has the search results for searchbars related to wordpress. The one I recommended is called “WordPress Codex”, though “Wordpress Support” might also be useful. On that page you can just click on the name of the searchbar thing and it will install like a FireFox plugin. While people are there they should see if there are other sites they want in the search bar. I love it for everything. (the php.net manual one is very useful for coders and who doesn’t need the youtube one?)
Jeremy also posted a video link which highlights some of the work that the folks from Happy Cog have done. How Not To Get Noticed
David Peralty - David recently helped a friend migrate from Typepad to WordPress while keeping their permalink slugs in tact. David explains the tactics he used and why the technique was successful. A good read if I must say so myself. View the article here Migrating Post Slugs From Typepad To WordPress
Jeffro2pt0 – If you notice that many of your posts that are older than one month are attracting spam bots, login to your admin panel and browse to the plugins tab, then click on Akismet configuration. Check mark the box that describes the option to automatically discard spam comments on entries more than a month old and click the save button. This has really cleaned up my Akismet spam filter.
I haven’t been inside the feed reader too much this week because of the redesign of this blog. But this week, we have a wide variety of news topics to cover, including the release of WordPress 2.3.3. Sony gives back to the community with two custom coded WordPress plugins, one for image rotation and the other for replying to comments. WP Candy explains how to separate trackbacks and comments to make the commenting section of your blog cleaner and easier to navigate. Ronald ignites a fire by asking if Trackback messages are still useful. Although we always seem to get into an argument over the subject of WordPress being a CMS, I figured I would cover a piece of news which highlights plugins that would give your WordPress installation some CMS oomph. All this and more on WordPress Weekly Episode 5. Hope to see you there!
Panel Members:
Ronald Huereca: Contributing editor for WeblogToolsCollection.com and raproject.com. Author of the WordPress Ajax Edit Comments plugin.
Andrew Rickmann: Long time user of WordPress who has molded themes, plugins and hacks within the WordPress code. Fun with WordPress is Andrew’s solution to putting all those thoughts in one place, and giving something back to the community.
Kaspars Dambis - Author of the WordPress themes Morning Racer, Agneka Simple, Sans-serif Racer and Times Racer. Kaspars is also a WordPress plugin developer.
Rob White - Host of the weekly Talkcast on talkshoe called Podcast Training And Chat via Twobeams. Also a big fan of WordPress.
Check out all of the valuable podcasting information at Twobeams.com
Stories Discussed:
Turning WordPress Into A CMS Via Plugins – Josh Byers posted an article that highlighted various plugins that would give your WordPress installation the oomph that is provided by CMS solutions out of the box. Plugins such as Search Everything, One Click Installer, Clutter Free and Custom Admin Menu.
Content Theft And How Report It- Lorelle Van Fossen has written a detailed article that explains how you can report content theft on your WordPress.com or WordPress.org blog. This article contains a slew of great information and I’ll be looking forward to seeing what Jonathan Bailey has to add in his speech about this subject at WordCamp Dallas.
Rocky Mountain Voices Conducts Video Interview Of Matt Mullenweg – The folks of Rocky Mountain voices had a chance to interview Matt when he was in Utah. He covers the various revenue streams that WordPress has, the recent funding and what it means for Automattic, community involvement, and much more.
Trackbacks: Still Useful? – Ronald Huereca of WeblogToolsCollectionl.com asked a perplexing question to the community. Are trackbacks still useful? There has been quite a response from the community ranging from trackbacks are another form of spam to, trackbacks help keep track of a conversation as it spreads across the web. Don’t worry, this is one I think all of us can chip in on.
TrialSoftWarez Releases Post Randomizer – For those of you looking for a plugin that displays a random set of posts each time a page is loaded, you’re in luck. Post Randomizer displays a random set of posts per page visit. The plugin author recommends placing the plugin in the footer so the content is unobtrusive but that doesn’t mean you have to abide by that suggestion.
WordPress.org now in Kazakhstan – The free blog publishing software WordPress, which can be translated into any language in order to increase its accessibility, has been translated into Kazakh by Kazakh bloggers. The number of people blogging in Kazakh has grown significantly because there is a group on Google that explains how it works
WordPress 2.3.3 Released – Earlier this week, WordPress 2.3.3 was released as a security upgrade. This new releases fixes an XML-RPC implementation flaw that would enable a specially crafted request to enable a user to edit posts of other users on a blog. If you haven’t upgraded yet, don’t complain about your site if it ends up being attacked.
Separate Comments And Trackbacks - More and more blog readers/commenters are becoming annoyed with wading through the trackback/pingbacks that seem to clog up the commenting section of so many blogs, this one included. Chris Thomson has written a good article which describes what you need to do in order to separate the two without the need of a plugin. Thanks Chris!
WordPress 2.5 Progress – Westi provides us his weekly update as to what is going on with WordPress 2.5. Things that caught my eye:
Removal of any old compatibility functions for PHP 4.2 and 4.3 (#5415).
I18N updates for the new widgets interface (#5583).
Changes to increase the memory limit for PHP (#3141).
Comment feed fixes to ensure that we have got a post before we querying for the comments (#5185).
Addition of the TinyMCE Fullscreen plugin (#5735).
Fixes to future post publishing over xmlrpc (#5721).
Changes to allow for multiple database connections (#2722).
Introduction of a new template tag is_front() which is only true on the front page of a WordPress install (#3682).
Sony Releases Two WordPress Plugins – Sony published an article that not only showed their love for WordPress, but also highlighted two plugins that they have developed on their own to fill a need that a previous plugin couldn’t fill. The two plugins are as follows:
Comment Replies
Think of it as a threaded response-lite. We wanted our authors to be able to respond directly to comments, but not create a completely threaded conversation. That’s the purpose of Comment Replies. You also have the option to style the responses in a number of different ways. Full details/download.
Image Rotator
On the front page of this blog we have a graphic banner that rotates (at the top) to feature different items with a corresponding link. Initially, we created a simple manager on the backend, but we quickly ported it over to a WordPress plugin. Just like the Comment Replies plugin, you can customize how the plugins works. Full details/download.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Jeffro2pt0 – My tip this week featured the WordPress Codex. The Codex is a repository of information for WordPress.org. Inside the codex, you’ll find documentation for functions that are built into WordPress, instructions for how to perform certain tasks, and overall general tips on how to make your WordPress installation secure. An awesome source of info that should be looked into at the first sign of trouble.
Ronald Huereca - Ronald’s tip deals with theme authors. Include a template file for separating comments from trackbacks and allow an option in the admin panel to switch between the regular comments view or to have a separated view.
I for one support this tip and would greatly encourage theme authors to adopt this functionality into new themes.
Kaspars Dambis – A newcomer to WordPress Weekly, Kaspars gives us the lowdown on a new plugin he has been working on.
I wanted to let you know that I have created a new plugin which allows user to use other plugins which don’t provide widgets but only function hooks.
So with CFW it is possible to use, for example, the ‘Popularity Contest’ plugin without ever touching the theme files. Just drag a new ‘custom function’ widget into the sidebar, enter the name of the function as well as any arguments it may require and there’s the widget.
It is important that this plugin doesn’t use php eval function and users don’t have to write php code. They supply only the name of the function and the arguments.
There are a few other options worth mentioning and I have detailed them in this blog post:
Rob White - Rob, also a new comer to the show suggested that everyone read Jeffro2pt0.com and to listen to the podcast. Hey, I think this may be the best WordPress Tip Of The Week that has ever been suggested. Rob, you’re ok in my book!
Andrew Rickmann – Andrew suggested that WordPress developers look into something called Aptana which is an open source code editor. As was discussed on a post made by Matt Mullenweg recently, Dreamweaver CS3 is not all it’s cracked up to be. Yes, that rhymes!
In episode 8, I interview Brandon Rosage. Brandon is the webmaster of MVN.com, a WordPress powered site that covers sporting events from A-Z. We cover the news of the week such as Matt’s speech at the Future Of Webapps Conference, Should You follow or NoFollow, Sniplets plugin security woes, an article highlighting how WordPress has reached it’s current point of success, the revolving topic of WordPress themes and more. This week, we’ll close out the show with our WordPress tips of the week.