Episode 11 of WordPress weekly features a one hour interview with Small Potato, formerly of WPDesigner.com. We’ll be talking about his inspiration that lead him to creating themes in WordPress, why he chose to work with WordPress and not another publishing platform, the reasons for WPDesigner going up for sale, his outlook on themes in WordPress and perhaps where he sees themes heading in the near future. We will also open the phone lines and invite listeners to call in and ask their own questions.
Jeffro2pt0 – Ever wish WordPress out of the box would have a certain feature? Perhaps you believe that your idea should be in the core of WordPress? The good news is that, WordPress has a section of their website dedicated to users sharing their ideas with the team. Its located at wordpress.org/extend/ideas. Once you submit an idea, people can then rate your idea base on a 5 star rating system. The higher the stars, the higher the rating which means the higher the probability that the idea will see the light of day. For example, the most popular idea right now is Easy Updating of WordPress which honestly, is coming down the pike faster than we know it.
Ronald – Duplicate your website locally, and install WP 2.5 from there.
For developers, you can develop and sell mobile applications easily with the help of http://www.movaya.com/
Ptah Dunbar – When floating DIVs, use margins rather than padding and provide width and height parameters to the floating DIVs to contain IE bugs.
Jeremy Clarke – To make sure your plugins are working, try out 2.5 and if the plugin does not work, notify the plugin author and encourage them to look at making their plugin compatible with WordPress 2.5.
Jacob Santos – If you don’t want to start a flame war with the folks dealing with Ruby, don’t say it sucks and don’t say Ruby is Ruby on Rails as they are two separate things. Don’t say PHP does not scale to prevent flame wars with PHP people.
Join us for Episode 9 where we’ll discuss the Buddy Press acquisition, Gravatars with and without a plugin, Ebay decided to use WordPress?. We’ll mention the WordPress icon pack and the WordPress.com February wrap up.
AOD Design released a stylish WordPress icon pack that you can use to pimp your love for WordPress.
Turn WordPress into a Membership Directory – Chris Cagle wrote a guest blog post on WP Designer which explains how to build a membership directory within WordPress using the default WordPress 2.3 install with two plugins.
Jeffro2pt0 - Jeremy Clarke mentioned to me about a way to search the Codex, WordPress support area and the plugin repository all from within FireFox. Simply click on the links of the search engines you want to add into the search bar within FireFox and install. Searching these various resources from within FireFox has already saved me a ton of time. To find out how to do this, check out the article I wrote explaining how to install these search engines into FireFox.
Brad - Give your blog readers the option to easily print out your blog posts, pages, along with or without the comments attached to them with the WP Print plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-print/
Ronald – Separate Trackbacks from Comments by using this nifty article as a guide.
Patricia – http://authorityblackbook.com/ – free ebook with a blatant WordPress slant on how to develop an authority blogging presence.
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 this episode of WordPress Weekly, we cover the story of how Matt and Toni of Automattic secured a Series B round of funding for $29.5 million dollars thanks to the NY Times. WordCamp Dallas is right around the corner and we give you the 411 about the event as well as a primer as to what WordCamp is. We also talk about the success that Lisa Sabin Wilson has been having with WordPress For Dummies. WordPress is the top CMS of choice within the Technorati Top 100 linked to blogs according to CMSWiRE and last but not least, we discuss Prologue and what it really is. Saving the best for last is our WordPress Tips of the week.
Act Two – Matt Mullenweg lets us know about the successful round of funding they achieved through investors. Matt also goes on to tell us that he believes this to be Act2 of the Automattic story. The funding came out to be $29.5 million dollars and was ponied up by the NY Times. According to Matt, a buyout or acquisition seems highly unlikely as he wants to take Auttomatic into the future with more open source projects to come along the way.
WordPress Is The Most Popular CMS In Technorati 100 LINKED TO – John Conroy and folks from CMSWiRE put together a detailed list of content management systems that made up the Technorati top 100 Linked To. As it turns out, WordPress took the top spot with 34 percent of the sites being linked to are using WordPress. Some of those big websites include Techcrunch, Mashable, icanhascheezburger, and perez hilton.
WordPress For Dummies Still The #1 WordPress Book - WordPress For Dummies remains the #1 book on blogging at Amazon.com – - it’s been #1 almost since the week it was released in November, and has remained there ever since. Wiley Publishing has completely sold out its stock after only 3 months of it being on the market – - they are completely OUT and have to print more!
For those who purchased the book, Wiley Publishing has provided Lisa Sabin Wilson with the opportunity to provide updates in PDF format that will be available for FREE as a download from her website, and from the Dummies.com website.
What Is WordCamp? – After being contacted via email by a few people asking me what WordCamp was, I decided to do a small writeup that describes what the event is, how it started and what to expect.
WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events. These events are usually highlighted by speeches or keynotes by various people.
WordPress Video Tutorials – iThemes has a number of WordPress tutorials that are video based. The tutorials are easy to understand and cover everything from how WordPress works to installing Google Analytics. There are also a number of video tutorials to watch if you happen to use the Essence WordPress Theme.
Performance improvement to the outgoing trackback processing code. (#5699).
WordPress.com Introduces Prologue – For WordPress.com users, you now have a new theme to use called Prologue. Prologue is a theme that was released under GPL and essentially places the functionality of Twitter into a blogging format. This is great for those that want to do group blogs either public or private.
TalkPress – Can Matt Mullenweg do for forums what he has done for blogging? We dive into what little details there are in regards to Matt’s new project and discuss what could end up happening.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Jeffro2pt0 – For those looking to easily make their WordPress blog mobile friendly, Mark Ghosh has posted a neat tip that bypasses the need for a plugin and instead, opts to use Google’s mobile news reader.
Ronald – If your plugin has been waiting over a week or two, try submitting a bug report to WordPress. I took the advice of a forum moderator and submitted a bug, and my plugin was approved the next day.
This week there is a ton of stuff to talk about. We have the bombshell that was dropped the other day noting that Matt and Toni of Automattic secured a Series B round of funding for $29.5 million dollars. That last part will actually be discussed on Episode 4. Then we have the improvements that have gone into the code for WordPress 2.5. We also dive into the conundrum of what makes a WordPress theme Premium. WordCamp Dallas is right around the corner and we give you the 411 about the event. Saving the best for last is our WordPress Tips of the week.
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.
David Peralty: 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:
WP-Forum SQL Injection Vulnerability – Earlier this week, the websec security team has discovered a vulnerability within this plugin that can be exploited by malicious users to conduct SQL injection attacks
WordPress.com Winners Of The Crunchies - Techcrunch held their little get together called the Crunchies and WordPress.com ended up taking two of the nominated categories. WordPress for Most Likely to Succeed and Toni Schneider for a well-deserved Best Startup CEO.
WordPress.com Storage Goes From 50mb to 3,000mb – Matt Mullenweg announced that because of the optimizations that have taken place in the backend of WordPress.com, they are now able to offer all WordPress.com users 3 gigs of space. Matt also said that those who purchased a 1GB upgrade will automatically be bumped up to 5GB at no additional charge.
New functionality to allow for editing of post slugs within there permalink context (#5679).
Changes to the APP implementation to ensure that timestamps can be updated on already published posts (#5680).
Matt Cutts Offers Tips To Secure WordPress – Matt has published an article which highlights three different ways to secure your WordPress installation. The first tip involves locking down your Admin directory. Matt configures his .hatccess file so that only his IP address is allowed to access the WP-Admin directory. For the second tip, you should create a blank index.html file to place into your wp-content/plugins directory. Not doing so allows your plugin folder to be wide open, giving nosy people an idea as to what plugins you have installed.
Matt’s third and final tip involves subscribing to the official WordPress development blog – http://wordpress.org/development/feed/ As we should all know by now, this is the best way to stay up to date.
Matt also offers a bonus tip where he suggests removing the line of code within your header.php file that publishes your WordPress version. This is to prevent your WordPress version number from being publicly viewable.
WordPress.com Still Growing According To Compete.com – Compete.com released a list of the fastest growing and declining sites of 2007. These stats are made up of the top 1,000 domains in between December of 2006 and December of 2007. However, WordPress.com appears to have grown by 523% with 24,393,457 visits. Great news for WordPress.com despite Compete being the one to show case these statistics.
WordPress/Automattic Blog By Team Members – is (going to be) written by various team members at Automattic and their goal is to help all publishers get the most out of WordPress. They will cover features that are often overlooked, highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality and showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress. They are looking for publishers working on innovative projects using WordPress and would like to field questions from users. From the comment that Raanan left on PressedWords, it would appear that they want to focus on large WordPress installations that are doing lots of custom work and help publishers find the proper resources.
What Makes A WordPress Theme Premium? – Ronald Hureca asked this question back on January 12 and boy did he get a response. Answers ranged from premium meaning PAID FOR to better support with more features than your average theme.
Dean’s Migration Plugin Vulnerability – According to an advisory released by Packetstorm, a fellow by the name of g30rg3_x has discovered two bugs within Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin version 1.0. The first bug relates to XSRF and can allow an attacker to force a user to perform an unsolicited action that when combined with an XSS bug that has also been discovered, allows the attacker to gain valid credentials.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Jeffro2pt0 -Add Buttons To Text Editor – WP Candy published an awesome tutorial which highlights how to add custom buttons/functions to your visual text editor. For instance, I’ve managed to add a H1 and H2 button to my visual text editor so I no longer need to access the dropdown menu.
Ronald – His tip this week is for plugin and theme authors. An effective way of demonstrating your plugin and/or theme is through a screencast. For Mac users, there is a great program (for $30) that makes great screencasts called Screenflick
I added that I have sometimes used a program from TechSmith called Camtasia Studio It’s not cheap but it works, $299.00 If you know of a better solution for Windows user’s and screen capture software, let us know in the comments.
Andrew - Firstly I want to encourage WordPress users that are maybe comfortable with modifying their own theme to just get stuck in and produce their own plugin; just for their own personal use. Not every plugin needs to be a a fully featured, released, plugin with admin pages and customizable options. Learning how to put together something really quick and basic, perhaps with a single hook and a single function can let you do some really interesting things.
Secondly I really want to make a point of how useful a good knowledge of the wordpress.org codex can be. In particular it helps to understand how to find things; for example, I regularly just search for functions from the wordpress.org home page because I know that will generally give me the functions reference page. The more of the codex you read the more you start to understand the mindset behind some things such as templates.
I mentioned that, while it is possible to display category specific content using conditional tags, the template system will actually look for a category, and now a tag, specific template page as the first step in the template hierarchy. There is more information on that at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy
David - Dave lets us know of a blog metrics plugin that is especially useful for multi-author blogs. This plugin gives you at a glance information such as author contributions and conversation rates. A good plugin to have to monitor who is doing what.
I really apologize for this weeks show. I wasn’t as prepared as I should of been and overall, it’s just been one hell of a week. There will be no WordPress Weekly Episode Three for the week of January 13th. However, the next episode of WordPress Weekly will be on Friday, January 25th, 2008. If you end up taking a listen to the show, I thank you for putting up with it. Next time, I will be well prepared and take the proper precautions to ensure that the next episode will be a good one. Thanks to Ronald, Brad and Andrew Rickmann for appearing on the show, I really appreciate it.
Stories Discussed:
Matt Mullenweg Turns 24 Matt Mullenweg, one of the WordPress founders turns 24 years old. Happy birthday man.
WordPress Weekly Digest for Dec 31st 2007 – Jan 6th 2008. Peter Westwood lets us know what has been changed and or fixed within the WordPress core throughout this time period. There quite a few things that are worth sharing in this update such as, the integration of the functions that the Optimal Title plugin was known for, the introduction of auto-suggest for tags, a new sidebar interface to choose which widgets you want on which sidebar, and last but not least, changes to the dual/visual code editors to remember which one you used last.
Smashing Magazines 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes Smashing Magazine has done it again by publishing an article which highlights 100 different high quality WordPress Themes. Some of these I’ve seen before while there are also a few new ones in this pack.
Uninstall – Is There Such A Thing? Earlier this week, I posted an article that took a hard look as to what uninstall actually means when you look at WordPress plugins. This has been a hot topic of debate during the week and I feel it will probably take up most of the show.
General Motors Using WordPress – One of the new General Motors community websites has elected to use WordPress as their publishing platform of choice. Personally, I don’t like the design and they are already a version behind.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Jeffro2pt0 – How To: Blocking Your WordPress Categories and Archives From Google Kyle Eslick has posted a small guide which explains how to cut down on the internal duplicate content issue. As it turns out, the biggest culprit for duplicate content is the Archive pages.
Ronald – Separate trackbacks from comments. Click here for a tutorial from DBT. While you’re at it, allow users to comment without having to register.
Here’s a bonus tip: If you are releasing something that you expect to get a lot of trackbacks from (such as a plugin), turn trackbacks off. Trackbacks usually only benefit the blog author anyway.
Brad – Our To Do List Plugin A simple todo list plugin to share ideas/todos with blog members. All members work together to manage the todo list under “Manage” section in WordPress administration interface.
Andrew Rickmann - An Uninstall tool that adds an uninstallation option on the plugins page. The uninstall option will only show up if the plugin has been deactivated and if the plugin author has created an uninstall file. Check out the second iteration of his tool, here.
Episode 11 of WordPress weekly features a one hour interview with Small Potato, formerly of WPDesigner.com. We’ll be talking about his inspiration that lead him to creating themes in WordPress, why he chose to work with WordPress and not another publishing platform, the reasons for WPDesigner going up for sale, his outlook on themes in WordPress and perhaps where he sees themes heading in the near future. We will also open the phone lines and invite listeners to call in and ask their own questions.