WordPress Planet

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/21

Perurry — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:12:09 +0000

THF204

Three column, simple clean theme with two widgetised sidebars.

BlackLens

BlackLens is a black, white and pink theme with a floral decoration in the top right of the page. Its a two column theme with a left sidebar and support for widgets.

Filmix

It supports gravatars, is widget-ready, Adsense-ready, dark, modern and clean.

Tiki Time

3-columns, widget-ready, Adsense-ready, and supports gravatars

The Hives

Three column, widget ready theme with a rotating carousel, lifestream and related posts.

Mark Jaquith: Block-level comments trick

Mark Jaquith — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:49:41 +0000

Block-level comments are useful for commenting out an entire block of code in PHP, CSS, and other code contexts.

/*
$this = 'code is deactivated';
$and = 'so is this';
*/

The only problem with this is that when you go to re-activate this code, you have to change both the opening and closing comment markers. That’s a pain.

While I was at WordCamp NYC last week, I saw Daisy Olsen using a very clever trick in her lightning round talk.

/*
$this = 'code is deactivated';
$and = 'so is this';
/**/

See what she did there? The closing comment marker is preceded by another opening marker. Because comment blocks can’t be nested, this second opening comment marker is ignored. This enabled her to re-enable this code by removing the opening marker.

$this = 'code is reactivated';
$and = 'so is this';
/**/

Brilliant! I can’t believe I haven’t seen this before. The one downside to this is that you are deleting two characters and destroying the opening marker. Here’s an even better method.

//*
$this = 'code is reactivated';
$and = 'so is this';
/**/

By adding a slash in front of the opening comment marker, I comment out the comment marker. It only takes one key press, and the corpse of the original opening marker is retained, allowing you to reinstate it with the deletion of a single character.

Props to Aleem Bawany for the second trick (he uses //*/ as the closing comment, which works pretty much the same way).

What other commenting tricks do you know?

Weblog Tools Collection: How to Create Micro Blogs Within WordPress

Keith Dsouza — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:01:56 +0000

I recently started out with a microblog on my site, where I wanted to quickly share content I find on the Internet. Before I started out I had an option of using the P2 theme to post quick content on it. However, I shelved the idea since I did and do not have much time to customize the P2 theme to match the look and feel of my current site.

This led to a big dilemma since I wanted 3 things:

Start a Micro Blog and post quick content on it.
Make sure that Google Indexes the micro blog content as it does with the other content.
Create separate feeds for the Micro Blog and the rest of the content.

Well, i was able to do all of these things without having to add new plugins or create a new blog. Here are the steps I followed to do it. Hopefully many of you will find this useful, and in turn also understand how powerful WordPress is when you want to customize it the way you want it to be.

Create Categories & Modify Loops to Segregate Content

The first few steps include creating a separate category for the Microblog and segregating content accordingly.

Create Category for your Microblog

The first thing I wanted to do was to segregate the main content from the micro blog content on the home page, so I went ahead and created a new category called “Microblog”, where I post all the Microblog content.

Exclude Microblog Content from Main Loop

After creating a separate category, I needed the content from this category to be displayed separately on the site and not with the regular loop. To do that, you will have to edit your template file for the home page, usually index.php in your WordPress theme directory.

To do that you will need to add the code given below before checking if posts exist.

   1: query_posts($query_string . '&cat=-123'); //excludes micro blog category

   2: //continue regular WP loop

   3: if (have_posts()) :

   4:   while (have_posts()) : the_post();

   5:       //display posts

   6:   endwhile:

   7: else :

   8:     //show errors

   9: endif;

The code query_posts… instructs WordPress to ignore categories which have an id 123. Please not that you need to provide the minus(-) symbol before the category id. You will need to specify comma separated values to skip multiple categories.

Only Display Microblog Content in The Loop

Since I wanted Google to index the content from the Microblog, I wanted to display in on the home page, for this I needed to run another loop, which only displays content from the Microblog.

For that you need to add the following code:

   1: query_posts('category_name=microblog&posts_per_page=5'); //only display microblog posts

   2: if(have_posts()) :

   3:     while(haveposts()) : the_post();

   4:         //show posts

   5:     endwhile;

   6: else:

   7:     //show errors

   8: endif;

In this case, the query_posts only fetched posts from a particular category we specified as the category_name and skipped the rest of it.

Using the above tricks you now have different sections on your blog home page which segregates content based on categories. You can find more information about skipping and querying certain categories by visiting the WordPress Codex entries for The Loop.

Creating Different Feeds for Main and Microblog

Now that you have been able to separate content from your main blog and the microblog, it is now time to create separate feeds for them. This is much more simpler than segregating content above and only requires few changes in your feed URL.

For example if your main feed URL is http://example.com/feed you will have to change it to http://example.com/feed?cat=-123. Similar to the skip rule in the query above, -123 will ignore posts from the category you specify.

Creating a separate feed for your Microblog is much more simpler, all you need to do is use the current URL for the Microblog category and add /feed to it. Your Microblog feed will be http://example.com/microblog/feed.

Since you are offering multiple feeds, you might also want to add them to your header.php, so browsers with automatic feed discovery can discover all your feeds. To that, remove the regular feed/RSS link tags from your header and add this. Replace the feed URLs with your own.

   1: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Techie Buzz RSS Feed" href="http://feeds.techie-buzz.com/techiebuzz" />

   2: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Techie Buzz Microblog" href="http://feeds.techie-buzz.com/tbmicroblog" />

Doing this will ensure that whenever a user tries to subscribe to you feeds, they will see multiple options as shown above.

Posting Quickly to Your Microblog

Now that you have your Microblog setup and ready to go, it would be more appropriate that you can quickly post content to it.

To do that change your default category for posting to “Microblog” and then drag the Quick Press bookmarklet from your Tools menu to your browser bookmarks bar and start posting. Watch the video below to see how you can use Quick Press to quickly post content to your site.

The above tricks will not create a real Microblog, but it will eventually help you to segregate content and run multiple smaller blogs within your major blog and offer them to subscribers. I would still prefer to use the P2 theme for the above task, however customizing it to match the look and feel is a lengthy process and hopefully it should be quicker in the future.

The above tricks might be good or they might not be that good. Do give me your feedback on what you think about it and whether or not your found it helpful.

Weblog Tools Collection: The New P2 Is Awesome

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:56:10 +0000

During WordCamp New York, I and many others had the chance to view a demo of the new P2 theme that will be released to WordPress.org users in due time. It’s already live for WordPress.com users in case you use that system. The New P2 improves on the first version by adding support for custom post types. For example, the theme has built in content types for a blog post, status updates, quotes, or links. These specific content types can be designed to give each an individual style. The first thing that comes to my mind when I saw this in action was Tumblr which does a great job styling the various types of content you have to choose from. Custom post types will be available in WordPress 2.9.

The new P2 has also been reworked from the ground up so that it can be used as a parent theme and then extended with child themes. Andy Peatling says:

This will allow theme designers to create awesome new theme designs without having to duplicate all of the existing P2 features. We’ve streamlined the HTML of the theme so that it is much more flexible for creating new designs using CSS.

Although it’s not shown in the screenshots, I was told that the new P2 will contain media uploading so that images can be added to posts. This is something that was heavily requested after the first version of P2 was released. For more screenshots and to read Andy’s write up, check out this post on the WordPress.com blog and keep an eye out for the release of the new P2 on the theme repository.

WordPress.tv: Daryl Koopersmith: Elastic—Your Theme’s Future WYSIWYG Editor

Ryan Markel — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:45:12 +0000

Matt: This Week in Startups

Matt — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:45:35 +0000

Last week I was on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis and Joel Spolsky. Here’s the show:

Publisher Blog: WordPress and Windows Azure

Matt — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:26:07 +0000

This week I had a unique opportunity to appear at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, to demo four open source technologies — WordPress, Apache, MySQL, PHP — running on Microsoft’s new EC2 competitor called Azure.

WordPress and Windows Azure probably aren’t the first two things you’d think of together. WordPress has been free and open source software from the very beginning, Windows not so much, but we’ve always supported as many platforms as possible and for at least 4 years now you could run WP on Windows and IIS (Internet Information Services).

Choice and competition are great for spurring innovation and better for users and I believe open source software is a good thing even if it’s on a proprietary platform. (Just like we have an open source iPhone application, or encourage people to use Firefox on Windows.)

If you’re interested, check out the full transcript of the keynote from PDC or watch the video of the keynote.

We also created this FAQ in case you had more questions about what was announced.

What did you announce about WordPress at Microsoft PDC 09?
As part of the introduction of the Windows Azure platform, we announced that self-hosted WordPress can be run in an Azure environment on an open source stack of Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Showing MySQL in particular at a Microsoft conference was unusual.

Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.

Do you use Azure at all?
Yes, we’ve been testing out their blob storage as an alternative to Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles. We don’t currently use it in production.

Doesn’t this conflict with your open source orientation?
No. We actually think it’s going to help the spread of open source to have the Free and open Web stack get more support and deployment through Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, which they’re investing quite a bit in. Besides, as I like to say, once you get a taste of Freedom it’s hard to go back.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/19

Perurry — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:56:00 +0000

Aureola

A free magazine style WordPress theme to show your content on a smooth layout.

BrandNew Folio

Two column, fixed width theme with support for gravatars, widgets and a customizable homepage.

wpClassifieds

wpClassifieds is a free Wordpress theme that transform your wordpress blog into a classified ads site similar to Craigslist or OLX.

5 Travel-Inspired WordPress Themes

Five single column and multiple column themes inspired with some things travel.

Bold Life

Bold Life is 2 columns light, widget ready WordPress theme.

MiniCard

MiniCard is a social network/business card Wordpress theme inspired by Tim Van Damme’s website. The theme lets you add links to all the social networking sites you may be a member of, and post useful information such as bio’s and contact details. It also has built in hCard support and (optionally) lets you offer a vCard for visitors to download your contact information.

Donncha: WP Super Cache 0.9.8

Donncha — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:20:27 +0000

WP Super Cache version 0.9.8 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

New in this release are 2 translations. The Spanish translation is by Omi and the Italian by Gianni Diurno. Please, if you use their translations, drop by their sites and leave a thank you comment! They’ve been very patient with me as I fixed gettext bugs and added new text. Both have blogged about the translations if you need to know more: Gianni, Omi.

The second major feature to go in is an “advanced” section to the debugger. This allows the plugin to check the front page every 5 minutes to make sure everything is ok. It monitors for 2 very rare problems:

Very very occasionally, the front page becomes a gzip file that downloads. It happened here once and I examined the cache file. There was nothing wrong with it. It was perfect. I suspect Apache and mod_rewrite got confused somehow but clearing the cache fixed it. The file generated after was exactly the same size as the old one, so no chance it got “double gzipped”.
In certain rare cases, where a blog has a static front page, and uses a permalink structure of /%category%/%postname%/, the wrong page may be cached as the front page. Even if your blog satisfies the two conditions above it may not suffer from this problem. I tried it on this blog for a few days and couldn’t reproduce it at all!

Nevertheless, if you’re concerned edit your wp-cache-config.php and add this line:

$wp_super_cache_advanced_debug = 1;

Reload the admin page and you’ll see this added to the debug section:

If activated, it will check your front page every 5 minutes. It’s not activated by default because these errors only happen to a small number of blogs. I’ve also noticed that WordPress seems to randomly forget to run the page checker from time to time. I debugged it and the job simply disappears from the wp-cron system! I’ve no idea why, but reloading the admin page schedules it again.
If you’re still paranoid, set your cache expiry low so at least the cache files will be recycled quickly.

Caching, Minification and CDNs

Oh, there’s a new caching plugin on the scene. W3 Total Cache works like Supercache’s half-on mode but can store to memory as well as disk (like Batcache) but also does minification and supports CDNs. I’ve been asked a few times if I’ll support those features too but I don’t see why as other plugins already have that covered (and frankly, I don’t have time to maintain such complex features):

WP Minify “integrates the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.” Thaya is very responsive and fixed a bug I reported quickly.
There are any number of CDN plugins for WordPress. I don’t use a CDN so I can’t recommend one but OSSDL CDN Off Linker might be worth a shot. This post on it mentions Supercache plus, a fork of this plugin.

Traffic Spikes and Benchmarks

I really should collect more of these. A few weeks ago Mark Pilgrim blogged about how his book had been republished by a 3rd party and put up for sale on Amazon. His book was published under the GNU Free Documentation License so that’s perfectly legal to do, even if a little unusual as it can be downloaded from Mark’s website and is for sale by his publisher. The blog post generated a lot of interest and a few days later I received a donation from Mark, followed by a thank you email. I’m a big fan of what Mark does, so if it had been a physical cheque or a letter I’d have framed it!
A few days after that he tweeted the following graph. Nice spike of traffic eh? His server held up fine with help from WP Super Cache.

And finally, some benchmarks, in Russian unfortunately but the pages translates well.

WP Super Cache vs HyperCache vs W3 Total Cache vs MaxSite Cache (translation) shows Supercache doing 106154.90 requests a second, but that’s thanks to using Nginx too.
WP Super Cache vs MaxSite Cache: Part 1 (translation) shows a tight race between Supercache and a plugin called Max Cache Lite, probably because he used Apache this time.

Summary of changes in 0.9.8:

Added Spanish translation by Omi.
Added Italian translation by Gianni Diurno.
Addded advanced debug code to check front page for category problem. Enable by setting $wp_super_cache_advanced_debug to 1 in the config file.
Fixed wordpress vs wordpress_logged_in cookie mismatch in cookie checking function.
Correctly check if WP_CACHE is set or not. PHP is weird.
Added wp_cache_clear_cache() to clear out cache directory.
Only show logged in message when debugging enabled.
Added troubleshooting point 20. PHP vs Apache user.
Fixed problem deleting cache file.
Don’t delete cache files when moderated comments are deleted.

PS. WordCamp Ireland is on in early March next year in picturesque Kilkenny. Here’s Sabrina’s launch post. Sign up! I’ll be going!

Related Posts

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Wins Best Open Source CMS Award for 2009

Keith Dsouza — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:50:37 +0000

WordPress has always been one of the best open source software available for blogging and managing websites, corporate or otherwise. To better that, WordPress has been awarded the Best Open Source CMS Award for 2009.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

Three cheers to the most wonderful platform I have ever used, and will continue to use, thanks to the innovations and continued development of WordPress by the Automattic team.

What do you think about this award? Feel free to let your congratulations and thoughts flow through the comments form.

Update: WordPress was also named the first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS Software. Read Matt Mullenweg’s Official announcement here.

Weblog Tools Collection: Is Automattic Evil?

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:03:51 +0000

Stick around the WordPress community for a period of time and you’re bound to come across a few folks who say Automattic is an evil company or Matt Mullenweg is evil in the way in which he runs WordPress.org. The more time I spend talking to Matt and with other employees of Automattic, the more I don’t understand where these thoughts and feelings of evilness come from. Sure, there is a decision made from time to time that a vocal group of people disagree with but you can’t make the right decision 100% of the time. Let’s take a closer look at Automattic as it relates to WordPress.

When I interviewed Matt at WordCamp New York, one of the things I asked him to address is the notion that Automattic commercially benefits from those who work for free. This indeed happens but on the flip side, Automattic gives a ton back to the project and to the community. For example, I think there is a lot that can be said for the progression of WordPress thanks to the resources that Automattic has been able to provide due to their funding. It’s also worth mentioning that Automattic pays a couple of folks to work on WordPress the majority of their time such as Ryan Boren who is always slaving away committing code and Jane Wells who works on the usability front.

It’s not like Automattic hoards the contributions to the project and gives nothing back. Matt said something during the interview that really stuck a chord with me and that is “Automattic is just one member of the WordPress community. We are a huge contributor. Myself, Jane everyone involved tries to give as much back to the WordPress community as possible.” So far, I can’t see anything that portrays the individuals or the company as evil.

Throughout the history of Automattic, they have developed and released a number of WordPress plugins to the community. They have also taken some of their paid offerings such as VideoPress and released those to the public as well. The entire VideoPress framework to be exact. They don’t have to do this but they do so because Matt wants Automattic to be an excellent example of an Open Source based company. Not everything is open because hosted services do not have to abide by the GPL since there is no distribution taking place. It’s also worth noting that Automattic has a system in place now so that when they build in a cool new feature for WordPress.com such as Geotagging they also build a plugin to release for the WordPress.org side of things granted, the release isn’t always immediate.

Verdict:

It’s my opinion that neither Matt Mullenweg or Automattic is evil. They don’t have evil tendencies and they are not out to screw people. If that were the case, I can’t see how WordPress could become the piece of software it is today. So my question to you is, do you think either is evil and if so, why?

Alex King: WPWeekly Episode 79 – Alex King And WPHelpCenter

Alex — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:16:52 +0000

I enjoyed my podcast with Jeff last night on WordPress Weekly.

We discussed the WordPress HelpCenter, the Carrington CMS theme framework and a little about Open Source business models.

You can download the MP3 file here.

# | Visit Site »

Donncha: WordPress MU 2.8.6

Donncha — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:20:32 +0000

WordPress MU 2.8.6 has just been released and may be downloaded immediately.

This is a security release with the same fixes as WordPress 2.8.6 plus quite a few MU specific bug fixes too.

Please upgrade as soon as you can.

Related Posts

Weblog Tools Collection: How Do You Do That?

James Dimick — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:55:08 +0000

Ever wanted to do something in WordPress but just wasn’t sure how? In my experience this happens quite often, mostly with people new to WordPress. But, even the experts run into trouble sometimes. Today I thought I’d start a series of posts which will aim to explain how to do certain things in WordPress. Hopefully this will cover anything from quick tips and simple little functions, all the way up to more complex custom code and the like. So, stick around and you just might learn something.

I think I’ll kick off the series with a couple simple ones…

Why isn’t this plugin working with my theme?

This is probably one of the most common issues I read about regarding WordPress. Sometimes even more experienced WPers can get this one wrong. Now, I’m not saying this is the solution to all problems between plugins and themes. Its just that this little bugger is often the culprit.

Try ensuring that your theme has <?php wp_head() ?> somewhere inside the <head> section of the document. Also, for that matter, make sure it has <?php wp_footer() ?> somewhere in the foot of the document; Before the </body> tag.

If your theme lacks these function calls many plugins that manipulate your theme will not be able to hook into the required areas. This can cause many headaches.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you may be better off having a coder buddy take a look at the theme for you. Or you can also contact the theme author, if the theme you use was created by someone else.
How come my URLs are yucky?

Or, “How come my URLs look like www.mysite.com?p=123 instead of www.mysite.com/my-sample-post/?”

This one is right up there with the previous question. I see it all the time. However, more and more web hosts these days support the “nice” URLs by default without requiring any extra effort. So, its just a matter of going into the WordPress control panel, changing your Permalink Settings and then saving. Unfortunately, we’re not all this lucky…

The first thing to try would be to contact your web host support and make sure they have whats known as mod_rewrite (or similar functionality) enabled on your account. If such functionality is not available on your web host, and you really need this feature, you may need to upgrade to a new host that does support it.

If your host does support it and has it enabled on your account, but it still doesn’t work, you can check that WordPress is able to write to the .htaccess file (which is where all the “nice” URL magic happens).

For WordPress, on Unix-based systems, the htaccess file should be “CHMODed” to at least 666. On Windows-based systems the procedure is a bit different. It can be different depending on your particular setup so I won’t go into that.

Basically, as was the case with the previous question, you may need to seek help to figure this out. If you don’t have a code buddy, get one! They are really great to have around. Just make sure you buy them a nice gift for their trouble.
Can I have a link to login to WordPress somewhere in my theme?

Sure! It’s actually easier than you might think…

Some themes have a link for that already. But, there are also some that seem to lack this obvious and simple feature. You can easily add this to any theme yourself. No need for any programming knowledge. Simply add <?php wp_loginout() ?> somewhere in your theme and you’re done. Easy right?

Another nice function along the same lines is <?php wp_register() ?>, which will show a link to your registration page (if your settings allow users to register), or a link to the WordPress control panel if you are already logged in.

Do note though that by default the link will be output wrapped inside <li> tags. This is so you can include the link in a list of other links, like a “meta” section. If, however, that is not how you want it to be output you can use the function like <?php wp_register('', '') ?>. That will simply output the link and nothing else.

An example of how to customize that is something like <?php wp_register('<p>', '</p>') ?>, which will output the link wrapped in its own paragraph. Just change the opening and closing tags in the function to make it output how you want. Dead simple!

That’s all for now… I hope it helps!

Do you have a question about WordPress? Want to see it answered here on Weblog Tools Collection? If so, please send us an E-Mail or drop a comment here. Your question just might be featured in the series!

Dev Blog: WordPress Wins CMS Award

Matt — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:48:04 +0000

I was very excited last week to learn that WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.

As Hiro Nakamura said when he first bent time and space to land in Times Square: “Yatta!”

In addition to winning in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This is significant because we weren’t even in the top 5 last year, and now we’re #2, ahead of Joomla! As is stated on the Award site, “WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”

Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/17

Perurry — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:41:09 +0000

New Plugins

URL Redirector

URL Redirector allows you to create shorter URL’s and keeps track of how many times a link has been clicked. It’s useful for managing downloads, keeping track of outbound links and for masking URL’s.

Query Multiple Taxonomies

A WordPress plugin that allows you to filter posts through multiple custom taxonomies

Checkfront Online Booking Plugin

Checkfront is an online availability, reservation and booking engine. This plugin connects your Wordpress site to your Checkfront, and provides a powerful embedded booking interface within your site.

This plugin requires a Checkfront account (available for free).

Updated Plugins

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator plugin generates simple Archives/Sitemap based on your sites/blogs posts and pages. This is not another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a nice sitemap generator.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter Goodies plugin will show your tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages. REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY and you have 5 different Color Option.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator automatically generates a complete table of contents for your site, including pages, posts and forum comments. The table of contents is generated each time the page is displayed therefore ensuring it is always up to date.

Merge Tags

A simple WordPress plugin that allows you to combine tags easily.

Delicatessen

A plug-in for finding out who has bookmarked your posts and pages in delicious.com, as well as the tags they used and the notes they wrote about your pages (if there are notes!).

Weblog Tools Collection: Download WordPress 2.9 Beta 1

Keith Dsouza — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:00:18 +0000

WordPress 2.9 Beta 1 is now available for downloads. If you are looking forward to test out the new features in WordPress 2.9, head to the development update blog to find links to download and try out WordPress 2.9 beta 1.

WordPress 2.9 is still in beta, you can use it to test it and report bugs back to WordPress development team. However, do not use it on a production blog yet.

Weblog Tools Collection: How to Create an Author Info Section in WordPress

Mark Ghosh — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:43:27 +0000

Author Info Section

How to Create an Author Info Section in WordPress: Chris has put together a nice tutorial on how to create an author info section on your WordPress blog. I am sure you have seen these in the past on multi-author blogs. They normally tend to be displayed at thebottom of single posts and Chris provides details, code and styling for various features that can be added to this section. I also think this would make for a very nice and simple plugin. So if you would like to set one of these up for your own blog and increase visitor stickiness, head over to the tutorial.

Dev Blog: Core Contributors at WordCamp NYC

Jane Wells — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:14:57 +0000

WordCamp NYC was last weekend, and it was crazy awesome to have so many WordPress users and developers together in one place (final numbers to come, but looks like over 700). One of my favorite moments was right at the end, when someone suggested getting a picture of the core contributors (I’d asked them all to stand so people could applaud them when we were doing the closing remarks). Some of them were camera shy and kept out of the happysnap, but here’s a handful of the people who make WordPress what it is.

From left: Matt Martz (sivel), Jeremy Clarke, Shane Froebel (^BuGs^), Jane Wells, Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith, Beau Lebens, Andy Peatling, John James Jacoby (jjj).
Photo by Chris Cochran.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 2.9’s post image feature

Mark Ghosh — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:29:05 +0000

Everything you need to know about WordPress 2.9’s post image feature: Justin gives everyone an in depth look into the post thumbnail or image thumbnail features built into WordPress 2.9 Jeff already makes liberal use of post images in all his posts. Also included, for the benefit of theme authors, are detailed instructions on how to add post image features to your WordPress theme and create various feature sets around this core concept.

WordPress.tv: This (Past) Week on WordPress.tv: Nov 8—Nov 14

Ryan Markel — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:15:19 +0000

I’m a little late to the party this weekend with last week’s recap, but we have a special request for all you viewers, so let’s get down to it.

This week we published one WordCamp video and one tutorial—a little light considering recent weeks, but this week also saw a great livestream from WordCamp Phoenix. I hope you were able to watch it—there were some great sessions included and we’re hoping to have them available on WordPress.tv soon.

The WordCamp video from was WordCamp Netherlands: Liz Strauss’s presentation entitled “Meeting Your Audience Where They Are.” If you’re interested in community-building or in building a personal brand, it’s definitely worth a look.

On the tutorial side, we published a run-through by Tom Johnson on running a local copy of WordPress using WampServer. Local copies can have tremendous development potential; if you regularly develop themes or plugins, or just like to tinker with WordPress, local installation can be a great help.

So here’s the special request: I’d like you to take a moment and think up one thing—just one thing—you’d like to see covered in a video tutorial here at WordPress.tv. It can be anything WordPress-related, but here’s an exercise to focus your thinking.

Think of questions like: What do I wish someone had told me when I started using WordPress? What kinds of things seem hard at first but really aren’t once you get down to it? What feature of WordPress do I wish more people knew about and used? What’s the feature, plugin, or whatever that gives me an awesome productivity boost or makes me a better WordPress user?

Come up with one thing you’d like to see covered in a future video tutorial, and then send us an email using our handy contact form. We’ll take a look at those suggestions and report on them in a future week’s recap so you know what your fellow community members are asking for.

Until then, stay tuned for more WordPress.tv!

Dougal Campbell: Server Reconfig

Dougal — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:48:13 +0000

This blog will be moving to a new server very soon. If all goes well, you shouldn’t notice a thing. But just in case, I figured I’d give a warning, so that if you try to visit and you get an error, or the site won’t come up, you’ll know to just come back again later instead of thinking that my site was an early victim of the 2012 apocalypse or something.

I’m doing more than just moving onto a new server though. I’m moving to a new hosting provider, and I’m reconfiguring many aspects of how my services are set up. If you’re interested in the technical nitty-gritty, read on.

Some of you might recall that a little over a year ago, I moved from my original hosting onto Slicehost. I am now moving again, to a service called prgmr.com. I’ve had no problems with Slicehost, but the pricing for prgmr.com is lower, which made it possible for me to expand from 2 servers to 4 servers for less money.

Slicehost VPS hosting is pretty no-frills. You get a server with an initial OS installed on it, and a web-based management tool with some DNS tools and a Java applet console. With prgmr.com, it’s even more no-frills, because the console isn’t web-based. It’s SSH all the way, baby. It’s not for everybody, but it suits me fine. And even though I have more servers, it reduces my monthly hosting costs by about 40%. That said, I’m also reducing my virtual CPU power and disk space a little bit, and Slicehost has multiple facility locations, which might be factors for someone else shopping for hosting. For me, the ability to afford more servers was pretty high up.

So, that said, let’s look at what I’m changing in my setup, and why I felt it was important to move up to 4 servers.

All along, even before Slicehost, I have had trouble dealing with traffic spikes on my web server. I’ve used WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. I’ve used XCache for PHP code caching, and for my WordPress object cache. I’ve configured Apache to set caching headers for static files using mod_expires to reduce requests. But I still get load and memory spikes that grind my server into dust. That shouldn’t happen with only 200 visitors per hour (granted, a page view can generate about 50 HTTP requests). Obviously, I’ve configured my server poorly.

Like many large PHP applications, WordPress can be a bit hungry for memory. So when it fights against MySQL and an in-memory object cache for resources, things can start to get dicey. And of course, I’ve got a few other things on the server. When I get hit by a traffic spike (popular article, spammer runs, errant search spiders, etc), memory goes away fast. The machine starts to swap, things get slow, load average spikes as processes begin to wait for resources, and it all snowballs. I’ve got some homemade scripts that keep an eye on things and attempt to restart various services in order to force things back into line, but it’s a pretty heavy-handed way to deal with the problem.

In my new setup, here’s what I’m doing to fix it:

I’ll be running Apache, MySQL, and Memcached all on separate servers, instead of together on one host.
I’m switching from the Apache pre-forking model to the threaded worker model.
I’m switching from mod_php to FastCGI (mod_fcgid) and php-cgi.

There will probably be other tweaks, as well, but those are the biggies. I’m expecting this new setup to handle waaaay more requests than the old one. Oh, and I’m definitely open to any pointers from performance tuning gurus. Please share links and tips!

When the switch-over happens, there might be a period of transition while the DNS changes propagate. I don’t plan to post again until I’ve moved this blog fully to the new host. So you’ll know it’s happened when a new article appears here.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/14

Perurry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:44:40 +0000

Base

Simple two column theme with shades of blue that you can use to customize your site

Martial Arts Lover

A nice, clean, dark and simple wordpress theme with one right sidebar.

5 Girl-Inspired Free WordPress Themes

Set of five two column, widget ready themes

WP Commerce Flex

It features a variety of options, solid SEO-friendly CSS layout that is easily customizable, and built for seamless integration with PHPbay and PHPZon.

Polka Dots

It’s widget-ready, adsense-ready, and 3-columns. Colors: brown, white, aqua, green, chartreuse, yellow, orange, red.

Peter Westwood: Beta Testing in your language

Peter Westwood — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:13:59 +0000

Thanks to Naoko McCracken the WordPress Beta Tester plugin is now fully translatable and also has a Japanese translation out of the box.

WordPress Beta Tester with Japanese translation enabled

Hopefully this will make it easy for Japanese WordPress users to get involved in the Beta Testing of WordPress 2.9 in the coming weeks. If you would like to submit a translation for your language then you can download the pot file from the WordPress plugins Subversion repository here: wp-beta-tester.pot. If you send me the po and mo files I will add them to the repository and release an updated version of the plugin.

Alex King: Appearing on WordPress Weekly (next week)

Alex — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:22:48 +0000

I’m going to be on the WordPress Weekly podcast next Tuesday (dialing in from the Bay Area, hopefully will find a spot for the interview that will work OK). There is a thread at WP Tavern for people to post questions they’d like to hear me discuss.

I think there are a lot of very interesting things to cover about the new affiliate program from the WordPress HelpCenter, monetization and supporting the WordPress development community. So far it looks like some folks would like to hear about Carrington as well – I’ll be happy to try cover that as well.

Feel free to post questions in the comments here if you like and I’ll pass them along.

Weblog Tools Collection: I Wish I Was At WordCamp

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:58:05 +0000

If you’re looking for a cool way to keep tabs on what’s shaking at WordCamp New York this weekend, check out this site created by DimensionMedia called IWishIWasAtWordCamp.com. The site contains feeds from a few notable Twitter accounts that will be tweeting during the event as well as the important hashtag Twitter widget which goes above and beyond single accounts. Near the center of the site is a collection of photos published to Flickr but some of the photos are from the wrong WordCamp. This should be fixed by only aggregating photos that are using a unique tag such as the event Twitter hashtag. Near the bottom are even more Twitter accounts. The only bad thing about this page is that asides from the hashtag widget at the top, the rest of the page requires refreshing in order to see new information. Hopefully, Dimension has a decent server to put up with the load but I would have used the cool new Twitter widgets to see updates as they happen.

If you have any feedback, let him know in the comments!

Dev Blog: WordPress 2.8.6 Security Release

Ryan Boren — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:20 +0000

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.

Get WordPress 2.8.6.

WordPress.tv: Installing WordPress Locally Using WampServer

Ryan Markel — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:40:00 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: WordCamp Phoenix Live Video Stream

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:07:34 +0000

This weekend will be packed with WordCamp goodness starting with WordCamp Phoenix on Friday the 13th and WordCamp New York on Saturday the 14th as well as Sunday the 15th, both of which still have tickets available. However, if you can not make it to WordCamp Phoenix, the great news is that it will be live video streamed in its entirety thanks to their sponsorship with GoDaddy. Simply point your browsers to their Live Video page and the event will be streamed starting at 9AM Mountain time. Also check out the schedule of events in case you only want to tune in during a certain session.

Because of a lack of WiFi and bandwidth at WordCamp New York, there will be no live audio or video streams.

*UPDATE* Just found out that WordCamp Victoria in Canada is also this weekend.

WP Blackberry: Speed Improvement, UI Enhancements, and Video Library Support

Raanan Bar-Cohen — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:58:40 +0000

We are inching ever so close to the 1.0 release, with today’s beta version 0.9.0.169 update available at http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

Here is what’s new:

Based on all the great feedback, we reworked much of the UI layout for the main view, blog view, and media view
Ability to upload videos from your media library
New option to set media file properties (filename, caption, title, and position)
Created a new file browser that resembles the native BlackBerry file browser
Big improvements in the speed at which you can view and manage comments
Lots of optimizations for uploading photos and videos using base64 encoding
Indonesian language support updated thanks to Kate of Pixel Insert
Improved French language support thanks to Yann Nave of blog.onbebop.net

Here are a few screenshots of the new beta:

If you are running one of the latest versions of the app, it should prompt you to upgrade. If not, you can always download the latest version by pointing your mobile browser to: http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

And always, if you have any issues, please post to the forums so we can effectively track and respond to the issue: http://blackberry.forums.wordpress.org/

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/11

Perurry — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:00:33 +0000

New Plugins

Custom Coming Soon Pages

Custom Coming Soon Pages WordPress Plugin allows you to display a Customized Coming Soon Page or Under Construction page to normal visitors or regular members of your WordPress based website or Blog – while the Site Administrators see the fully functional website with the applied theme and active plugins as well as a fully functional Dashboard.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without loosing it’s formatting or making any manual changes.

WP Answers

Using a comments vote system you can order the comments by votes getting the focus to the most voted comment by the users. Page in Spanish

ImageMation

ImageMation lets you put a set of sliding images with captions on any of your webpage. Moving images interact with the direction of mouse movement.

Updated Plugins

Ajax Edit Comments

The most powerful comment editing solution for WordPress. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments. Check out the video demonstrating the new admin features.

Comment Autogrow

A WordPress plugin that makes the comment textarea expand in height automatically

Subscription Options

It adds 4 subscription options for readers with related feed icons for an RSS feed URL; a FeedBurner Email Service URL, a Twitter Stream URL and now, by popular demand, a Facebook Page URL. It’s totally user-defined, looks cool and it’s very simple.

Wp-Thumbie

Wp-thumbie is wordpress plugin to display thumbnail related posts. You can select the number of posts to be display in your content / feed.

Smart Archives Reloaded

Gives you an elegant and easy way to present your posts. See a demo on the author’s site.

BuddyPress-Kaltura

This BuddyPress-Kaltura media component adds features like photos, videos and audio upload to BuddyPress. These features are essential for building a social network around BuddyPress.

Matt: Published on CNN

Matt — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:45:31 +0000

Today a short piece “10 blogs to make you think” I wrote for CNN.com was published. I’m pretty excited about this and I also hope it drives a new audience to the blogs I mentioned, though to be fair if you’re not fascinated by how technology is changing society my picks might not be interesting. It’s a short piece in a “top ten” format, but I put a lot of thought into curating the picks.

I started blogging because I love writing. While the nature of Automattic is such that I’m writing all day long to communicate with my colleagues but writing for communication is different from the state of mind you’re in when you sit down to tell a story or change someone’s perspective. (Though perhaps it shouldn’t be.)

I started blogging for writing, I kept blogging for comments. It turns out what I love isn’t the act of writing itself, which has never come easy to me, but the conversation that happens afterward. Collectively in tech we become infatuated with each new medium be it blogs, widgets, social networks, micro-blogs, but in the end it always comes back to people talking to each other and eventually the novelty of the format fades.

As a final note when I write now I go into the WordPress editor because I know the auto-save will make sure my text is always safe, it produces clean and simple HTML, and I lean on After the Deadline. (Which now helps you rock the diaeresis New Yorker-style.)

Matt: First Impressions of Sony X

Matt — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:16:55 +0000

I’m a little addicted to gadgets, especially Sony laptops which have served as my primary on-the-go machines for the past few years because of their power and portability. When I first saw the Vaio X, Sony’s new ultra-thin and ultra-light laptop, I was taken aback. It looked beautiful, but so was the Envy 133 and the Envy was a complete waste of time and money due to a really bad trackpad and performance. Anyway, I’ve been playing with the X1 for 5-6 hours now, and here are some unordered thoughts:

It is the sexiest and most elegant laptop I’ve held or seen. Feels like it’s from the future.
It feels almost too light, I actually threw it up and caught it, particularly with the normal-sized battery.
I got the champagne color, which was a good choice.
The ethernet port works in a really interesting way.
Speed of browsing, installing, everything feels pretty good with Windows 7, but it’s obvious the graphics card is pretty underpowered. The moment you turn transparency on or get a flash video on Blip going it starts to stutter a bit.
That said, I could imagine using this as my primary machine for short and medium trips.
The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to in a way I haven’t run into before: the space bar is hard to hit. The keyboard is very compressed in vertical space so your thumb falls below where the space bar is, and you have to retrain your hand to be in a different position which isn’t as comfortable. The shift button can be hard to hit but that’s much easier to get used to, I’ve done it on other small keyboards. I’m not sure why they made it so small, it feels like it could stretch out a bit more.
Other big annoyance is the trackpad — it’s really narrow. Windows machines do the trackpad scroll on the right and bottom edges of the pad and I find myself triggering that accidentally because the tracking area is so tiny. Again, lots of apparent space toward the bottom of the laptop just a really narrow tracking area. This is easier to get used to than the keyboard, though, and the trackpad feels nice like most Vaios and unlike the Voodoo Envy.
I love that it has two USB ports, and a regular VGA connector instead of some weird micro-display-port you need a dongle for. (An Apple decision that bugs me almost as much as the recessed headphone connector on the original iPhone.)
Screen is gorgeous, like all recent Vaios.
Did I mention it’s drop-dead gorgeous? It’s the first laptop I’ve had in 5 years that I don’t want to put stickers on.
Hardware-wise, way better than the Air.

So while it won’t be replacing my Z890 as primary workhorse for now, the X is so light I might take it on my next few trips and use it as a day-top. I’m especially excited by the prospect of the 14 hour battery life (probably 10 in real life use) giving me freedom from power cords through even a whole day at a WordCamp. We’ll see in a week or two if I’m able to comfortably adjust to the too-small keyboard and trackpad.

WordPress.tv: Liz Strauss: Meeting Your Audience Where They Are

Ryan Markel — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:15:12 +0000

Publisher Blog: WordCamp NYC 2009

Raanan Bar-Cohen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:04:06 +0000

WordCamp NYC will be held this weekend, November 14th and 15th. It’s a great get together for the New York, and the extended, community of WordPress-loving bloggers and developers:

With an amazing lineup of speakers, over 525 people already registered, and 8 session tracks – there is something for everyone.

Myself and several colleagues from Automattic are flying in for this event, and I’m personally excited to see the track devoted to CMS use featuring case studies of current publishers.

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s $45 for both days, or just $25 for Sunday. More details available on 2009.newyork.wordcamp.org.

[ Visit WordCamp NYC 2009 and WordCamp.org for other WordCamps happening all over the world ]

Weblog Tools Collection: For Our Canadian Friends

Jeff Chandler — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:07:43 +0000

Just wanted to pass along another WordPress resource site to put in your bookmarks or RSS feed, especially if you’re Canadian called WordPress Canada. The site is managed by Len Kutchma, the same person who has been doing a great job providing feedback and even testing some of the themes being submitted to the New Theme release section of the WeblogToolsCollection forums. The site aims to bring you all the goodness happening throughout the world of WordPress albeit with a Canadian twist. If you feel like traveling a bit of Canada through WordPress news, be sure to check out Planet WordPress Canada which Len is a member of.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/09

Perurry — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:45:17 +0000

Glassical

Two column, fixed width theme with support for the WP Pagenavi plugin. This theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, clean look and simplicity.

Coffee Lite

Coffee Lite Theme is a minimalist blogging theme modded from the popular premium theme Coffee Break from WooThemes.

New York

Two column, fixed width, widget ready theme with inbuilt support for Twitter and 125×125 ads with a theme options page

Greenxi

Two columns, flexible width, base colors green and white, custom gravatar, widget ready (sidebar and footer)

Weblog Tools Collection: Darn You WordPress!!

James Dimick — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:20:18 +0000

WordPress rocks! (Most of the time…) Sometimes though it can make you want to pull your hair out. Today I want to talk about that. Those times when you wish you could take a machete to it. I’ve had my share of such situations several times in the past.

Now, I don’t mean plugins, or themes, or anything external like that. I mean the core of WordPress itself. Sometimes it seems WordPress just comes up short. It can be anything from a simple little inconvenience to a total show-stopper.

I think hearing peoples gripes about WordPress would be a nice contrast to the almost constant good things you hear about it. It might also help to get more attention on the issues. Don’t forget that someone may come across this post, read a gripe, and possibly provide a solution. We can all help each other!

So, lets get it started…

One of the issues I always seem to run into has to do with the way some core functions output their code. A lot of the functions in WordPress provide a method for either outputting the code (echo) or returning it for you to handle and probably eventually echo yourself.

Unfortunately not all functions currently in WordPress are like this. Some only allow for echoing the code. This can be quite the inconvenience for some of us. The only way to usually get around this is to capture the output with a buffering function (ick!) or to copy what the function does into a function of our own to do what we need. However, this is less than ideal. What if the core version of that function changes some time in the future? That leaves us in a situation where we have to also update our version of the function. That’s not very nice…

An easy fix? Probably… Will it be addressed in future versions of WordPress? I hope so! Is it a critical issue? No. But, not all WordPress gripes are. This is just one of those things that has bugged me for some time.

So, how about you? What bugs you about WordPress?

WordPress.tv: This Week on WordPress.tv: Nov 1—Nov 7

Ryan Markel — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:45:38 +0000

This week was a light one compared to the last four, with a break in the stream of WordCamp videos. We’re eagerly awaiting the arrival of a fresh batch of WordCamp video, with more sessions from the great speakers lined up for WordCamps both from the last few weeks and also from the next couple of weeks in November.

There were a handful of videos published this week:

We announced the arrival of the new WordPress for iPhone 2.0 with a brief overview of its features and quick introduction, and published a great plugin tutorial from Adam W. Warner on the AStickyPostOrderER plugin.

We also received and published yet another fantastic French-language tutorial from WordPress Channel: Effectuer une mise à jour de WordPress.

Next week will see the first videos from WordCamp Netherlands, and we hope to get you back up to a daily dose of WordPress video starting on Monday.

Off-weeks don’t have to be light like this! We’re always looking for new videos from the community—this is your resource. A great example is Adam’s plugin tutorial from this week. Is there a plugin that you absolutely can’t live without? One that you think more people should be using? Check out this list of screencasting resources and put together a quick tutorial. It’s really quite easy to get the hang of it.

Then drop us a line here at WordPress.tv and let us know about your great tutorial!

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/07

Perurry — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:30:48 +0000

New Plugins

Ecwid Shopping Cart

Ecwid is free full-fledged shopping cart that can be easily add to any blog. It offers the performance and flexibility you need, with none of the hassles you don’t.

Let it Snow

Display falling snow on your blog

Checkfront Booking

A plugin that connects your Wordpress blog to the Checkfront™ Booking platform.

Twitter Goodies Widgets

Uses the twitter goodies widgets API to create offical twitter widgets (profiles, lists, faves and search) straight from your control panel.

WP-TTFGen

TTFGen allows you to embed fonts on your website by generating static images from your own CSS parameters. TTFGen is 100% cross browser compatible.

Google-News-Sitemap

Automatically generate sitemap for inclusion in Google News. Page not in English

Post Ordering

With this plugin you can sort and order posts under a category manually.

Updated Plugins

WP-Orphanage

Users who have not been assigned any Roles or Capabilities are called “orphans”. When using the shared users table trick to link up multiple WordPress installations, users who register on one of your blogs, are not given any privileges on the other blogs in the network. WP-Orphanage is a plugin that automatically adopts your orphan users by promoting them to the Role of your choosing.

K2 Style Switcher

This plugin includes a style picker widget that allows site visitors to choose the K2 style that is applied during their visit. The list of available styles, type of widget and default style and footer can all be customised. The plugin also allows for certain base styles to be applied in all cases, these save the administrator copying the same CSS snippets into each selectable K2 style.

Custom Admin Branding

The Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to brand and customize the WordPress administration area for clients or for personal use. You can display custom images and styles for the login screen, admin header and footer.

Comment Autogrow

A small plugin that makes the comment textarea expand in height automatically. Version 1.1 fixes problems with IE.

Front-end Editor

Enables “edit in place” functionality on your site. Edit posts, text widgets etc. without going to the admin area.

Google Transliteration

A plug-in that implements Google Transliteration API for wordpress.

WordPress.tv: WordPress for iPhone 2.0

Ryan Markel — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:03:36 +0000

Dev Blog: Bug Hunt in Progress!

Jane Wells — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:50:39 +0000

Just in case anyone forgot, the first of the November bug hunts for version 2.9 is now in progress, and will last another day. If you’ve got a dev environment set up, please consider pitching in to run some tests and help get us closer to the 2.9 milestone release.

Weblog Tools Collection: Watch Out For The Gumblar Botnet

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:18:01 +0000

According to the blog Unmask Parasites, there is a new version of the Gumblar botnet making the rounds on PHP based websites. Back in May of this year, this malicious botnet was responsible for infecting a large number of websites in a short period of time. This time around however, the Gumblar botnet has buggy code which is leading to a number of infected WordPress sites breaking.

WordPress is a complex web application that comprises more than 200 .php files. When you open any page, WordPress loads index.php which, in turn, loads many other .php files using the require() function. WordPress admin interface also relies on multiple .php files. In all cases, WordPress loads wp-config.php file which contains database credentials and other important information required for normal operation.

So what happens if both index.php and wp-config.php are infected with the gumblar backdoor scripts? Since Gumblar injects identical backdoor scripts into files on the same site, they’ll have declarations of identically named functions, which PHP doesn’t allow. Hence the “cannot redeclare zsmh() …” error.

One thing not mentioned in the Unmasked Parasites post is information regarding which specific versions of WordPress are at risk or are safe to use. I’ve left a comment on the blog post to try and get an answer but until then, Denis Sinegubko provides detection and removal instructions while also suggesting the use of the WordPress Exploit Scanner which scans for WordPress files for signs of suspicious activity.

Based on the reports of infection, this does not appear to be a WordPress centric issue pointing to a problem with the software.

WP iPhone: 20,000 downloads of WordPress for iPhone 2

MT — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:00:13 +0000

It’s been just over a week since WordPress for iPhone 2 was released on the App Store. In that time, you’ve downloaded the app onto over 20,000 iPhones and iPods. We’re really pleased to see how many people are interested in the app, especially those who are able to use it for the first time with version 2.0. To mark the occasion, we wanted to show you our new video introduction for the app, take the time to share some data with you, and answer a few questions we’ve been seeing.

We’re also keeping track of downloads by country and by iPhone OS version. This helps us identify the languages to focus on once we begin translating the app, and helps us plan for which new OS features we can count on our users having available.

As happy as we are with the reception for 2.0, we continue working hard to make it even better. We’ve identified a few recurring questions that we’d like to answer for everyone.

Q. Why is this a new app? I don’t want to re-enter my blog settings.
A. Previous versions of WordPress for iPhone were uploaded to the App Store by a contracted developer. To make it easier for us to test new features, fix bugs, and update the app more often, that task will now be handled by those of us developing the app at Automattic. Apple’s only method for changing the “ownership” of an app in the store is to release a completely new version, as we’ve done here. It’s a bit painful, we know, but we should be set now for all future releases.

Q. Why did you remove landscape mode?
A. It’s still there. Bring up the on-screen keyboard to start editing a post, then rotate the device. Apple doesn’t support landscape mode in some areas, particularly the photo picker and the date selection wheel. Having landscape mode turned on for every section was causing bugs that were impossible to fix (while still using Apple’s standard user interface elements). So we’ve removed it from the areas of the app where it didn’t work well, and kept it in the writing interface, where it’s really useful.

Q. I can’t log in!
A. Ok, not quite a question, but we’ve seen this one a few times on iTunes. However, we haven’t yet had a report of this in the forums, the only place we’re able to provide hands-on assistance with the app. If you’re sure that you’re entering your URL, username, and password correctly and are still unable to connect, please let us know in the forums. (A quick hint for connection issues: Make sure you’re using the latest version of WordPress, 2.8.5, and try temporarily disabling any plugins you have installed). We’ve done lots of work in version 2.0 to eliminate connection problems for the vast majority of blog setups. We’d like to make it work for everyone, but can only help when you work with us to troubleshoot the problem you’re having.

We’ve already begun working on issues identified since the release of 2.0, and are looking forward to being able to provide more timely updates for you going forward. You can track the progress of the project’s development in Trac.

Once again, if you need help using the app or would just like to offer a suggestion, please visit the WordPress for iPhone forums. You can stay up to date with our progress by visiting our development blog, Making WordPress for iPhone. And of course, if you’re thrilled with the app, we’d love for you to review it on the App Store.

Weblog Tools Collection: The Best-Of Series: Download Managers

James Dimick — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:38:58 +0000

We continue our Best-Of Series today with download managers. Or, plugins for WordPress that will allow you to provide various files to your website visitors for download. Over the years I’ve gone through many. Everyone will have a different preference but, here is a list of my top plugins for managing downloads with WordPress…

Drain Hole
I’ve been using Drain Hole on my personal site to serve up my files for a couple years now. So far it is the best download manager plugin I’ve been able to find. It does everything it advertises and does it well. I’ve not yet had any issues with this plugin. I highly recommend it!
WP-DownloadManager
Before I found Drain Hole I used WP-DownloadManager exclusively. It did what I wanted and didn’t seem to have many problems. It has the features most would expect in such a plugin. It also has some you might not. Such things as custom templates, categories, RSS feeds, and more.
WP-Filebase
I actually just recently learned of WP-Filebase. I can’t speak from personal experience but from the research I’ve done on it I think it would be one of the best options. It has the obvious features you expect from a download manager. Some of the highlights are quick tags, top downloads widget, extensive file details, and even download pausing.
Wordpress Download Monitor
I really like the interface of Wordpress Download Monitor. It’s simple yet complete. It does its job as a download manager and keeps it simple at the same time. Some of the attraction points of this plugin are: simple custom download URLs, custom error pages, download mirrors, and even custom fields for all files.
Simple Download Monitor
What’s great about Simple Download Monitor is right in its name. It’s simple! To quote the author of the plugin “…I wanted to monitor the number of downloads of my files without having to maintain any kind of database or making any special download links. I just wanted to upload a file to a designated directory using FTP, provide a direct link to it and once in a while check the number of downloads“. This plugin also allows advanced logging.

What I think is especially nice is that all these plugins seem to be compatible with the upcoming WordPress 2.9. That means that they are future-proof for at least the foreseeable future. I took time to test each one of these plugins during the writing of this post. But, feel free to let me know if you have experienced anything to the contrary with any of them.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed the post and I hope you might be able to get something useful out of this list.

Do you have a good idea for the next article in the Best-Of series? Drop a comment here or contact us and your idea just might be next in the series!

Dev Blog: Upcoming WordCamps

Jane Wells — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:42:53 +0000

There are six WordCamps coming up before the end of the year, and since I like to make sure people know about it when there’s a WordCamp near them, here’s the list, with some personal commentary thrown in. If you just want the list without my asides, check out the full schedule at WordCamp.org.

WordCamp Phoenix is first up, on November 13. I’d planned on attending this one myself before they changed the date (it was originally scheduled for the 7th), but will sadly have to miss it as it conflicts with WordCamp NYC. If you, like me, can’t make it to Phoenix, be sure to check their web site for information on the live stream they’re planning to provide. If it’s anywhere near the quality of the stream from Portland or Seattle earlier this fall, it’ll be just like being there, but without a t-shirt to show for it (and theirs has stripes, so if you’re local, you should go!). My only consolation in missing this WordCamp is that I’ve seen about half of the speakers before. If you’re going, don’t miss the session by John Hawkins on Building a WordPress Plugin; it got me to write my first plugin in Portland! Matt‘ll be there, will you?

WordCamp Victoria is next, on November 14. This is another one I’d love to go to, but can’t because it’s at the same time as New York’s. I would especially have liked to go because it looks like the speakers are all local, and I haven’t seen any of them speak before. Occasionally WordCamps lose a little of the local feeling by focusing on visiting speakers, so it’s nice to see so many Vancouverites on the list. They’ll have a Blogger track and a Technical track running concurrently, so there should a little something for everyone. No word on a live stream, but hopefully they’ll be able to catch some of the presentations on video and post them to WordPress.tv after the event.

WordCamp Bangkok is scheduled for November 15. I have to admit that the first thing that catches my eye on their agenda is “WordPress Band.” I’ve known WordCamps to have people performing songs before, but a whole band? Might be a first. I hope they’ll post the video to WordPress.tv, too.

WordCamp New York City is the same weekend as the previous three, on November 14-15. In the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you that I’m one of the organizers of WordCamp NYC, so my informative comment about it here may be a little biased. That said, we have over 50 confirmed speakers (both local and visiting), and 2 full days of content in 8 — count ‘em, 8 — tracks. Newbies get a free year of hosting and walked through setting up a WordPress blog in workshop format, while the other tracks have specialized content for Bloggers, CMS Users, Beginning Developers, Advanced Developers, Academic Users, people interested in MU/BuddyPress, and the Open Source Community. Did I mention the theme and plugin contest? Or the awesome shirts? How about the Genius Bar, or the Hacker Room? The additional Unconference sessions? If you’re anywhere near NYC that weekend (and with the Acela, that’s anywhere from Boston to D.C.), you should definitely come. I’ll be there, Matt’ll be there, lead developer Mark Jaquith will be there, lead developer of BuddyPress Andy Peatling will be there, and too many other WordPress luminaries and locals to mention. If we hit 800 registrations by November 12, I’m baking cookies for everyone.

WordCamp Peru will be on November 28 in Lima. I was checking out their topics list, and it looks like they’re planning to cover all the usual topics around blog administration, security, increasing traffic, and integration with social media sites. No speaker list yet, but if you’re in Peru, it looks like this will be a nice gathering of WordPress users, and they’re hoping to have around 100 people attend.

WordCamp Orlando is the last of the year, on December 5. They haven’t published a speaker list or schedule yet, but I know Matt will be there, Mark Jaquith will be there, and I will be there. I know some other awesome core contributors are planning to come, but I don’t want to jinx anything, so if you’re curious, come see for yourself. Plus, Florida in December!

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 2.9 Revamps Hello World

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:47:02 +0000

During the WordPress development chat today, one of the topics of discussion centered around the suggestion of changing the Hello World post that is seen with every new install of WordPress to something that contained useful WordPress specific information such as links to the release mailing list, the codex and other helpful material. I’d like to break down how this change came about to show how easy it is to contribute to the WordPress project without writing a line of code.

It first started out as a discussion on the WordPress Hackers mailing list concerning the addition of email notifications to the core of WordPress to keep administrators abreast of new versions of WordPress as they were released. The discussion became long winded but a response by Lynne Pope provided one of those why didn’t I think of that moments.

Change the sample data – instead of, “this is a post”, provide some meaningful information. With a link to subscribe to WP-Announce. Make an entry announcing that WP-Announce is being used, so this will show in the dashboard feeds. Bloggers will quickly pick up on this and news of it will spread.

Needless to say, her idea sparked a series of kudos with other suggestions for what to include in the sample data. Then, in a WordPress development chat regarding the topic that was discussed on the hackers mailing list, it was agreed that the best course of action would be to not only revive the WP-Announcements mailing list, but to also change the Hello World! post in WordPress to something more useful. A fellow by the name of Demetris took it upon himself to create a draft of what the sample data should be. The discussion surrounding the change including links to see drafts and revisions were included in ticket number 11008. The ticket has been open for two weeks and in today’s developer chat, Demetris published a link to his draft which you can view here. There was a unanimous decision to include the sample post data into the core of WordPress starting with version 2.9. If the sample data needs editing, it will be done throughout the beta process before the stable release.

There you have it. A time line of events that happened in quick succession which provided a small change with huge benefits without having one line of code written. Let me know your thoughts in the comments with regards to the new sample data that will be provided in any new installation of WordPress starting with 2.9.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/05

Perurry — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:54:00 +0000

New Plugins

Local Time

Using JavaScript, Local Time automatically transforms all dates and times on your blog into the visitor’s timezone.

Fytch Comments

Fytch is a fully featured plugin that provides comment publishing to http://fytch.com It allows to assign a Fytch topic to each post so that wordpress comments are co-published under the appropriate topic on http://fytch.com. It not only allows to publish comments to http://fytch.com but to Twitter and FriendFeed as well.

vlam-a-post

vlam-a-post automatically creates a vl.am URL for every post you publish and keeps track of the number of clicks the vl.am URL received. After publishing your post you can easily post your vl.am URL to twitter.

Amazon Affiliate Linker

The Amazon Affiliate Linker Plugin allows easy linking to Amazon.com products by only using the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). It also allows you to embed your Amazon Associate link so that you can pick up affiliate commissions on your links.

Facebook Share New

The Facebook Share (new) button easily allows your blog to be shared. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been shared throughout Facebook.

Thumblated Related Post

This plugin shows thumblated related posts. It allows you to design your own layout using simple and easy interface.

Random Post Link

Generates a link to random post, but never the same as before.

Gweather

With the gweather plugin you can display and embed Google Weather Feeds in your WordPress posts and pages.

Simple Facebook Connect

Makes it easy to add Facebook Connect functionality to any WordPress site. Modular: activate only the pieces you need.

URL Shortener

Allows you to create your own short url using the WordPress Post ID and also integrates multiple URL Shortening service with your WordPress.org installation bringing a similar functionality to that of WordPress.com’s WP.me shortlinks feature but using 3rd party URL Shorteners.

Page.ly Reseller Management

This plugin is a Reseller dashboard to manage client accounts on the page.ly WordPress hosting system.

Updated Plugins

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support. Plugin can be integrated with comments for making a review website.

Visitor Blogroll

The visitor blogroll is a Wordpress Plugin/Widget which allows visitors to your blog to leave an RSS feed of their blog which is then displayed on your visitor blogroll.

WordBB

WordBB is an integration between the blogging platform WordPress and the bulletin board system MyBB.

Digg This Button

Adds the smarter digg button. Extended options like topics, prefilled descriptions, shortcodes etc. allow full control of your digg icons.

hRecipe

This is a plugin to allow the easy entry of microformat content for recipes (i.e. the hRecipe microformat) in WordPress pages and posts.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 2.8 Visual Cheat Sheet

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:26:47 +0000

Antonio Lupetti of Woorkup.com has created and released an awesome visual cheat sheet for WordPress 2.8. The cheat sheet contains a practical reference guide to 2.8 with references to WP Template Tags as well as sample code. Definitely worthy of being added to your resources bin.

Check out the live demo before you download the guide.

Matt: CoPress

Matt — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:35:23 +0000

CoPress Pushes Innovation, Shows Value of Open-Source Platforms.

WordPress Planet

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/21

Mark Jaquith: Block-level comments trick

Weblog Tools Collection: How to Create Micro Blogs Within WordPress

Create Categories & Modify Loops to Segregate Content

Create Category for your Microblog

Exclude Microblog Content from Main Loop

Only Display Microblog Content in The Loop

Creating Different Feeds for Main and Microblog

Posting Quickly to Your Microblog

Weblog Tools Collection: The New P2 Is Awesome

WordPress.tv: Daryl Koopersmith: Elastic—Your Theme’s Future WYSIWYG Editor

Matt: This Week in Startups

Publisher Blog: WordPress and Windows Azure

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/19

Donncha: WP Super Cache 0.9.8

Caching, Minification and CDNs

Traffic Spikes and Benchmarks

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Wins Best Open Source CMS Award for 2009

Weblog Tools Collection: Is Automattic Evil?

Verdict:

Alex King: WPWeekly Episode 79 – Alex King And WPHelpCenter

Donncha: WordPress MU 2.8.6

Weblog Tools Collection: How Do You Do That?

Why isn’t this plugin working with my theme?

How come my URLs are yucky?

Can I have a link to login to WordPress somewhere in my theme?

Dev Blog: WordPress Wins CMS Award

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/17

New Plugins

Updated Plugins

Weblog Tools Collection: Download WordPress 2.9 Beta 1

Weblog Tools Collection: How to Create an Author Info Section in WordPress

Dev Blog: Core Contributors at WordCamp NYC

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 2.9’s post image feature

WordPress.tv: This (Past) Week on WordPress.tv: Nov 8—Nov 14

Dougal Campbell: Server Reconfig

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/14

Peter Westwood: Beta Testing in your language

Alex King: Appearing on WordPress Weekly (next week)

Weblog Tools Collection: I Wish I Was At WordCamp

Dev Blog: WordPress 2.8.6 Security Release

WordPress.tv: Installing WordPress Locally Using WampServer

Weblog Tools Collection: WordCamp Phoenix Live Video Stream

WP Blackberry: Speed Improvement, UI Enhancements, and Video Library Support

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/11

New Plugins

Updated Plugins

Matt: Published on CNN

Matt: First Impressions of Sony X

WordPress.tv: Liz Strauss: Meeting Your Audience Where They Are

Publisher Blog: WordCamp NYC 2009

Weblog Tools Collection: For Our Canadian Friends

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/09

Weblog Tools Collection: Darn You WordPress!!

WordPress.tv: This Week on WordPress.tv: Nov 1—Nov 7

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/07

New Plugins

Updated Plugins

WordPress.tv: WordPress for iPhone 2.0

Dev Blog: Bug Hunt in Progress!

Weblog Tools Collection: Watch Out For The Gumblar Botnet

WP iPhone: 20,000 downloads of WordPress for iPhone 2

Weblog Tools Collection: The Best-Of Series: Download Managers

Dev Blog: Upcoming WordCamps

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 2.9 Revamps Hello World

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/05

New Plugins

Updated Plugins

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 2.8 Visual Cheat Sheet

Matt: CoPress