Theme authors take note, Andrew Nacin is currently leading the charge on rewriting large swathes of get_themes(). Andrew has spent the better part of the last week working on the WP_Theme Class which will make theme authors lives a lot easier. If you’re a theme developer, I encourage you to thoroughly review ticket #20103 to provide feedback on these changes. ∞
Joost de Valk Conducting WordPress Host Survey
Related to a new project Joost de Valk is working on, he needs WordPress users to fill out a short survey that tells him which WordPress hosting company you use, which package you’re on, and what you think about them. Joost will compile this information to determine which webhostng companies support WordPress properly and will reach out to them to perform a couple of tests. Joost is specifically looking for those hosting in Europe as it appears that finding a good host in Europe is more difficult than here in the U.S. ∞
2012 Theme Customiser In WP 3.4
As tweeted by MarkMcWilliams, some of the theme customization options for the TwentyTwelve theme have landed into WordPress 3.4.
All In One SEO Plugin Reaches 10 Million Downloads
Congratulations to Michael Torbert as the All In One SEO Plugin recently reached the 10 million downloads milestone. That’s a heck of a lot of downloads with Akismet being about 1.24 million away from reaching the same milestone. By the way, All In One SEO reached one million downloads around January 27th, 2009.
While this is a cool achievement, I must admit that I think the AIO SEO plugin has somewhat lost the battle of being the best SEO plugin for WordPress, at least that’s my perception. Based on the people I follow on Twitter who I consider to be influential within the WordPress community and the various articles I’ve read, it seems as though the WordPress SEO By Yoast plugin is currently the one to use. Recently, the only mentions of AIO that I’ve seen are from people looking for comparisons between the two. That doesn’t detract from AIO being a useful plugin, but those are the observations I’ve made over the past few months.
Are you using either of these plugins? I don’t use them and I don’t know much about the innards of SEO so I’ll have to take your word for which is better.
Absolute Privacy Plugin Back In The Repository
A few days ago, Sucuri mentioned that the Absolute Privacy plugin for WordPress contained a security vulnerability that would allow the ability to bypass the authentication mechanism and gain admin access to the application, that being WordPress. The plugin was subsequently pulled from the repository as there had not been any updates to fix the security issue for well over a year. Today however, the plugin can be found within the repository again as the security issue has now been fixed.
500 Plugins To Possibly Be Purged From The Repository
It’s been awhile since we’ve had a discussion revolving around those three magic letters GPL. It looks like we’ll be talking about it again considering that somewhere around 500 plugins run the risk of being purged due to their incompatibility with GPLv2. There has been an ongoing discussion within the past 11 months regarding various licenses and what is and is not compatible with what WordPress uses. It looks like the core team has been monitoring the discussion considering Andrew Nacins comment:
The core team plans to discuss plugin directory licensing once none of us are sick or traveling. So, expect an update here in the next week or so.
The arguments have been laid out, so no need to continue to do so. Not trying to stifle discussion, but, you have all made your points.
Jane Wells also participated in the tract ticket discussion:
I would think we would want everything on wordpress.org to have consistent and compatible licensing. If we’ve moved away from that, is Matt aware of it? (I wasn’t.) He’s always said in the past that anything promoted (including being hosted) on wordpress.org needs to be 100% GPL, and said that no one should ever have to wonder what they can/can’t do with something we host, because the license would be the same/compatible.
I also think the end goal for WordPress.org would be for consistency across the site with regards to licensing. No one should have to guess or worry about which license a particular piece of code is using if it’s being hosted by WordPress.org. At the end of the day though, it looks like license consistency is easier said than done.
*Update*
Until the guidelines have been thoroughly reviewed and discussed amongst the core team, Plugins that violate the current guideline but are compatible with GPLv3 will not be de-listed.
Refreshingly Communicative
It’s been awhile since I’ve visited WPDevel.WordPress.com which is the home of WordPress development updates and I’m happily surprised to see so much content from the folks who make things happen. The different teams that are working on various aspects of WordPress 3.4 are doing a good job of keeping not only the other team members up to date, but they are being transparent so that the public can view the progress and figure out what is going on. I hope the amount of communication on the site continues, the more transparent the merrier.
Creating A Simpler Login URL
While most users of WordPress will know that to login to the back-end, you’ll need to visit /WP-Admin/ or wp-login.php, but what if you could change that to make it simpler to remember? WPBeginner has a small tutorial complete with a code snippet that you place within your .htaccess file that enables you to rewrite the WordPress Login URL into a custom URL. Telling clients to visit yoursite.com/login is a lot easier than that gobbily gook everyone has to deal with by default. Personally, I’ve just bookmarked the WP-Admin URL for my site and use that instead of remembering anything.
IntenseDebate Phasing Out Blogger Widget Installation
By Jeffro on February 27, 2012
Blogger will soon contain redirects to country-code URLs or ccTLD’s for all Blogger sites except for custom domains. For example, if you’re in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected to [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location. This causes an issue with IntenseDebate through the Blogger widget installation as different sets of comments will display depending on which ccTLD readers visit. They are strongly recommending that you move from the Blogger Widget installation to their Template installation which already addresses the necessary changes. Pay special attention to their instructions when making the move so you don’t lose any of your existing comments.
Posted in News | Tagged blogger, comments, intensedebate | Leave a response