Congrats to Donncha O Caoimh for releasing version 1.0 of his popular caching plugin, WP Super Cache. The release is an incremental improvement over previous versions but contains a number of bugfixes and new features such as a “Delete Cache” link within the admin bar. Back in 2009 when the plugin was first released, it was THE plugin that everyone suggested using if you wanted to increase performance on your site due to caching. Now a days, it seems as though W3 Total Cache has taken over that position. However, it’s nice to see Donncha still improving the plugin to provide users an alternate choice in caching solutions. ∞
Case Study On How WordPress Won The Crown
Interesting case study using a number of cool data points that shows how WordPress has won the crown amongst Joomla and Drupal for being the most widely used CMS in the world. One things for sure, it certainly paid off for WordPress to be focused on making the democratization of content publishing as easy as possible first, then making WordPress incredibly extensible later. There is an entire laundry list of reasons of why WordPress is at the top of the mountain right now, the success of the platform can not be traced back to one thing. The comments in the article contain a couple of those reasons while the others are spread amongst the various comment and forum threads on the web.
The past 7-8 years is very interesting to look back upon to figure out how WordPress ended up in it’s current spot of being the best in breed within the content management space. But, what I find even more interesting is if whether or not the things that made WordPress successful in the past will continue to stick around so that the platform is equally or more successful in the future. Focus, ease of use, extensibility, etc. Be right back, I’m going to go ask my magic 8 ball. ∞
Dre Armeda On WordPress End-User Security
From WordCamp Chicago 2011, Dre Armeda who is one of the guys behind the awesome security service/site Securi. His presentation contains a ton of information that all end users should take note of.
How Ryan Imel Created The WP Quarterly Page
One comment I have that applies to all of the e-commerce plugins I tried out is this: the initial setup process is quite overwhelming. During my toying process I set up the basic Quarterly sales items and process for each plugin on a testing location. Without exception, each plugin presented me with options I never ended up needing, or didn’t even care about. I realize that WPCandy’s shopping cart needs aren’t as complicated as some, but that made me wish for a simplified setup process even more.
It would be great to see these plugins take more of a “decisions over options” approach. When that isn’t possible, stashing less vital options in an advanced section would lessen the initial impact of a screen full of checkboxes and dropdowns.
Ryan Imel explained in-depth how he created the sales page for the WordPress Quarterly magazine. Within the post you’ll find his thoughts on the various e-commerce systems he tried, code snippets to produce the page, and much more. Definitely worth a read.
3.3 Is Getting Closer
Looks quite possible that we’ll be using WordPress 3.3 before Christmas. 3.3 Beta 1 was released on October 11th so plugin and theme authors have had more than enough time to test their code against the latest version of WordPress. However, when a Release Candidate is offered, it’s generally the best time for testing as there is a very small chance that any major code changes will occur to the core. ∞
Interesting Logo Copycats
Shared by Ozh on Twitter, image consisting of the ingredients necessary to turn an original logo into something that’s different but still retains some of the original characteristics. Can anyone figure out what’s wrong with the WordPress image?
Revenue Sharing Advertising Arrives On WordPress.Com
Some users of WordPress.com will now be able to partake in revenue sharing display advertising thanks to the launch of WordAds. I say some users because it’s available only if your application is accepted. This quote by Jon Burke sums up the story of how bad advertising had been for WordPress.com users over the past few years.
Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.
It’s indeed sad that Adsense can be considered the best that WordPress.com can do however, it’s about time they broadened their horizons and provided an alternate means of display advertising. Just a few weeks ago, I linked to a story that described just how bad the display advertising was on WP.com and the news of WordAds couldn’t come at a better time, despite being late.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this all comes together. The type of advertising, the sites content, and the actual products being advertised. If everything can mesh together well, this should be a success.
Cleaning Up The “Cannot Redeclare Mess”
Looks like there’s an exploit going around that appears to be similar in nature to the TimThumb vulnerability. If you noticed a bunch of “Cannot Redeclare” errors when browsing your website recently with eval code, chances are you’ve become a victim of this attack. Jeff Starr of DigWp.com and co-author of the book, Digging Into WordPress has laid out a series of steps on how you or consultants can clean up the mess that’s left behind. It’s also worth noting the following forum thread on the WordPress.org support forums where a number of people have been trying to investigate how this attack works.
Tips On Creating A Good Plugin Readme.txt File
SmashingMagazine has a great article that covers some tips on how WordPress plugin authors can create better readme.txt files. While the code within the plugin is important, the readme.txt file is what users are going to encounter first. It’s the means by which we discover plugins within the repository so it’s important that relevant information be written within the file or else you’ll end up with no one using the plugin. I’m happy to see that amongst their tutorial, they included how to add a changelog which is still something many plugin authors are failing to do. Speaking of changelogs, plugin authors should write them in such a way that the latest version appears at the top of the file and not at the bottom. Too much scrolling is a bad thing! ∞
Feature Filled Comment Administration
By Jeffro on December 2, 2011
Comment administration within WordPress has come a long way. As illustrated by Lorelle VanFossen, the comment administration panel these days has 18 different features for comment management. While the current iteration of comment management features are great, there is one particular quick link that I hope gets added in a future version of WordPress. It’s called ‘De-Link‘ and it’s one of my favorite features of the WP Ajax Edit comments plugin.
Delinking Feature Within WP Ajax Edit Comments
I’ve noticed that a large amount of comments that I have deleted or trashed in the past can now be approved after I de-link them as the content is usually related to the post. It’s their way of trying to get a link on the site. I have my own rules for which sites are allowed to be linked to and which are not but if the comment is relevant to the post at hand but contains a bad link, I’ll simply de-link, then approve it. Sure, I could go into the Quick Edit mode within the comment management area and manually remove the links but the method of clicking once sure seems a lot easier to me then clicking the mouse button a few times.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged comments, features, Plugins | 4 Responses