WordPress Planet

Lorelle on WP: Learning from the Voices of WordCamp Dallas

Lorelle VanFossen — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:52:44 +0000

Charles Stricklin, the host of WordCamp Dallas 2008 and The WordPress Podcast has released The Voices of WordCamp Dallas, a collection of quick interviews and questions I asked during the event.

I was so amazed at how open everyone was, willing to share their thoughts on WordPress, WordCamp, blogging, and the magic of the web today. I talked to bloggers who had been blogging for years and newbies, with only a few weeks under their belts. It was a collection of the whose who and whose upcoming in the blogosphere and thank you to Charles for sharing the magic that his efforts brought together in one place.

Some of the interviews are excerpted and I hope to bring them to you in their entirety soon, so stay tuned. In the 30 minute set of The Voices of WordCamp Dallas, you will hear:

00.10 Bill Sholar of Webfratelli
00.37 Dan Bates
00.59 Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today
01.45 Ptah Dunbar
02.34 Bryan Lee
03:14 Cory Miller of iThemes Media
03:44 Henry Pugsley
04:07 Kerry Webster of WEBsmith internet consultants
04:44 Wendi McGowan of Wendistry, LLC and Scott Ellis of vsellis.com
05:36 Dave Curlee and Katherine Curlee of RealCookN.tv
06:28 DB Ferguson of No Fact Zone
07:48 Alexander Frison of Not a Niche
09:18 Tony Cecala of Holistic Networker
10:04 Mike Borschow of MetroQ.com
11:55 Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection
12:30 Dorian Karthauser of DK Enterprises (beginner blogger)
17:35 Charlene Mullenweg (sister of Matt Mullenweg)
23:15 Jim Halloran of AlcoholismDiseaseFree.com
24:13 Ryan Joy and Michelle Greer of Volusion and Michelle’s Blog
26:41 Kathleen Ratliff
27:14 William Addington of Williamedia
28:31 Doug Smith of smithsrus.com and Hide a Pod
29:25 Ronald Huereca of Readers Appreciation Project and Weblog Tools Collection
30:23 Dimitri (blog not public - biotech)

I look forward to repeating this fascinating dialog in future WordCamps and blogging events I travel to and speak at. It’s a humbling experience as I come to teach and come away learning more than I ever expected. Thank you to all for sharing your thoughts and passions with me!

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

Matt: Community Tagging

Matt — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:48:13 +0000

I’m testing out a new community tagging feature, you should see a form to add people tags on photo pages now. Try it out, particularly on the Milan/WordCamp galleries - day one and day two. Proposed tags go into a moderation queue, so they’ll show up after they’re approved.

Weblog Tools Collection: Theme Designers And Print.CSS

Jeff Chandler — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:03:19 +0000

Here at WeblogToolsCollection, we see quite a bit of WordPress theme releases coming through our inbox and I’ve noticed a trend. Hardly any of them include printing support. The question I’d like to have answered is why? Is adding printer support to WordPress themes too hard? Does adding this feature take up time? Or is it that this feature is barely any use to anyone?

For those wanting to add this type of support to your theme, you can install WP-Print. WP-Print picks up where most theme authors have left off by providing printing support in such a way that end users can print either articles or comments, depending on how you have configured the plugin.

In fact, doing a search on the plugin database for the keyword of “print” brought up two pages worth of search results. Another solution for you theme authors out there is called Bunny’s Print CSS. This plugin provides two files, print-css.php which is the plugin file and print.css which is the print stylesheet.

A link to the print stylesheet will be placed in your theme’s header, providing it uses the wp_head() function/hook. An admin panel is added to the Presentations menu and it will allow you to edit the stylesheet if you make print.css writeable. You probably want to edit the stylesheet provided to your liking, though it will hopefully do most of the job if your theme is sandbox-based.

This method takes most of the hard work out of creating a print.css file, even though theme authors would most likely have to modify the stylesheet to make it compatible with their theme.

For those who would like to manually create the style sheet, there is an article on the Codex entitled “Styling For Print” which covers all of the basics necessary to make a pretty, yet functional print stylesheet to include with your theme/themes.

I hope that by linking to the Codex article and bringing this issue to light, we will start to see more themes being released with built in printing support. It’s not a deal breaker for me, but I’d rather see themes that support this feature than those that don’t. My personal opinion is that, printing support is a nice finishing touch to round off any theme, and having it built in allows me and a number of other users to stop using another plugin.

Now it’s time for you to sound off. Is this a trivial issue, or is there anyone else out there that would like to see this feature in more themes?

Matt: WordCamp Milan Photos

Matt — Sun, 11 May 2008 09:33:54 +0000

Day two in Milano; WordCamp Italy.

Weblog Tools Collection: Getting ready for WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5

Ajay — Sat, 10 May 2008 04:01:27 +0000

Good day. I am Ajay D’Souza. I blog at http://ajaydsouza.com/ and http://techtites.com/. Those of you who have been following this blog for more than a year may remember my daily release posts as well as the A-Plugin-A-Day series. MBA life has kept me busy since then, but that’s another story.

As part of my new assignment out here, I’ll be looking after the Plugin Competition. I’ll be maintaining the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog as well as making weekly posts both here and at the Competition Blog.

With the WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5 beginning today, I thought I’d just write in with a few tips on making your entry.

Firstly, read the rules to be followed are listed in the post. Please make sure that your entry does not break any of them.

Getting Inspired

One of the important rules that we have is that the plugins should be new, i.e. no updates to already existing plugins. One great place to get inspired is WordPress Ideas. WordPress Ideas is a place where the people from the WordPress Community, both users and developers vote for what they would like included in WordPress. Some have been implemented, while some may actually appear in future versions and still others that may not be. So, why not make a plugin to accommodate for the latter two?

You can also hunt for ideas in these posts or this posting in our News Forum.

Offering the plugin for download

Something that many authors forget in their zeal to develop a plugin (or a theme) is its documentation.

Firstly, make sure your plugin zip file contains a readme.txt. If needed, include a full fledged help section as well. You can also put this on the plugin release page on your site.

Next, create a separate page on your blog / site dedicated for the plugin. Posts are a no-no! They get lost in the crowd.

Make sure the page has the following:

Overview
Requirements
Features
Installation Instructions
Download Link
License
Method to get support

When linking to the download file, one method I follow is to link to a file without any version etc. e.g. it reads simply pluginname.zip. The purpose of this is that I can always update the zip file with the latest version of the plugin without bothering to change the link.

Old versions of the plugin can be archived as pluginname_v1.0.zip, pluginname_v1.1.zip and so on.

Sending it to us

You’ll need to send your plugin to us via email. We will reveal the email address that you need to send the plugins to in the second month of the competition.

The competition is on for another two months, which gives you plenty of time to release a feature rich plugin.

Before that, release a well tested version to the public. Fix any bugs that come up, try to provide more features as requested.

The WordPress community is demanding and extremely helpful at guiding you down your path.

All the best for now.

To the WordPress Community

I’m sure you’ll love the competition and many of the plugins that stem from it. Authors are always hunting for ideas and who better to tell them than you. Please feel free to post your ideas in the comments section below.

Or, you can also post them in any of these two posts or this posting in our News Forum.

If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact us. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives.

Stay tuned and please help spread the word.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 5/9

Keith Dsouza — Sat, 10 May 2008 03:58:14 +0000

Two Column Themes

K2 is a popular WordPress theme which is not fully compatible with WordPress 2.5. The theme now has options to dynamically reduce the number of columns to fit screen size and also support for Hooks and PHP. The theme also has Avatar support and Image gallery templates for WordPress 2.5 and above.

Daydreams

Daydreams is a 2 column minimalist theme for WordPress. The theme has not widget support.

Three Column Themes

Starscape

Starscape is a three column widget-ready theme which comes in three different colors, the theme also has a extended sidebar in the footer. You can turn the sidebar on or off from the Admin section.

Choice

Choice is a simple three column theme which has a configuration file in the back-end that gives you a nice selection of options that control color choice, column amount, number of sidebars and more among other things.

Aqua Marina

Aqua Marina a three column theme made up of blue colors, the content area is surrounded by two sidebars on either side. The theme also has a area on the top of the page which you can use to display latest posts, recent comments etc.

Weblog Tools Collection: Opt In To Subscribing

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:17:20 +0000

While reading Lorelle’s awesome post over at the blog herald entitled WordPress Wednesday I noticed a blip she mentioned about Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe To Comments plugin. Apparently, Mark has changed the way in which subscriptions are dealt with by default. In earlier versions, Subscribe To Comments would leave the Subscribe Box check marked by default, causing anyone who commented to automatically be subscribed to that blog post. This in turn created an opt-out way of thinking which has been and continues to be a bad practice.

Mark has changed this around and now leaves the subscribe box blank by default, leaving it up to the end users to decide on whether they would like to subscribe to the post or not. A much needed and welcomed change. Mark even set the plugin up so that even those who want to be subscribed to every post they comment on can do so via cookies:

I appear to have misread into Marks’ post as has been pointed out by both Mark and Lloyd Budd in the comments. What really changed with the plugin is the fact that the site admin now no longer has the configurable option of making the plugin opt-in or opt-out by default. According to Mark,

Before: option of opt-in or opt-out with default of opt-in for new installs. After: opt-in only, but with per-user checkbox stickiness. And yes, the change is old — I just have been getting a lot of e-mail about it and realized I never explained the change publicly.

I realize the change is old and the post I linked to was written in April, but because of the way I read into the post, I thought this was something that needed to be brought up due to the ethical nature of the changes that were made.

Matt: Milan Day One

Matt — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:00:46 +0000

First day in Milan.

Weblog Tools Collection: Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done

Mark Ghosh — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:11:48 +0000

Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done: Just like it sounds, LifeHacker lists the top 10 tools, according to them, to get the job of blogging done. If you have ever been to a WordCamp and heard Lorelle speak, she has some of the best power blogging tips that I have ever come across. JohnP has some pretty effective tips on power blogging as well.

Matt: Foxmarks Beta

Matt — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:32:38 +0000

The new Foxmarks beta works with Firefox 3 and seems pretty solid. Check out Foxmark’s WordPess-powered blog.

Matt: Kyle Skips OpenID

Matt — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:18:49 +0000

5 reasons I won’t be getting on the open id train, by Kyle Neath. Animated comment thread.

Matt: Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage

Matt — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:25:35 +0000

There’s an interesting post at GigaOM: Web 2.0, Please Meet Your Host, the Internet. It’s a good read, though could be shorter, but a few things struck me after reading it. I don’t disagree with him per se, I just think the emphasis is on the wrong thing. (Probably for effect.)

Infrastructure can be a competitive advantage today — the speed and reliability of WordPress.com has certainly put us in a favorable light with users, especially large customers — but that’s going to disappear over time. We’re very much at version 0.1 of things like Amazon’s web services and App Engine, but it’s not hard to read the writing on the wall and understand that level of abstraction is going to be the future foundation of web applications. I’m not counting on infrastructure to be a long-term competitive advantage for Automattic.

If you have a few minutes it’s worth reading On Grids, the Ambitions of Amazon and Joyent which has the real definition of a grid and Sunshine, which is worth it for the extended analogies to Greek mythology. (Both end in ads for Joyent.) Also check out Early notes on GoogleApps, Dave Winer groks where this has to go.

Second, Allan describes a case of a DDOS attack hurting a friend’s startup who had very little information about how to stop it:

Unfortunately, the poor site performance was not missed by the blogosphere. The application has suffered from a stream of bad publicity; it’s also missed a major window of opportunity for user adoption, which has sloped significantly downward since the DDOS attack and shows no sign of recovering.

We can all name startups or sites that aren’t particularly known for their performance, but that flourished in spite of it. Twitter and MySpace comes to mind. If we dug a little deeper we could also find thousands of startups who were prepared for the world to show up to their door, and it never did. Building something people want is much harder than scaling it. (In most cases.) If you solve the what-people-want problem, they’ll use you no matter how bad your interface is, how slow your site is, just give them somewhere worth waiting for. I would suspect the friend here isn’t seeing their usage decline because on their Techcrunch day the site wasn’t responsive, it’s that they’re probably still in the before market fit stage.

Third, I am a huge believer in the importance of performance, but most people forget that on the web 80-95% of performance is on the front end not the page generation time. (I realize I’m saying this on a site with a 140kb header graphic. :)) Yahoo has fantastic resources on this. When a website “pops” it probably has very little to do with their underlying server infrastructure and a lot to do with the perceived performance largely driven by how it’s coded at the HTML, CSS, and Javascript level. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons Google Gears is going to change the web as we know it today - LocalServer will obsolete CDNs as we know them. (Look for this in WordPress soonish.)

Finally, for the next few years before we have true utility computing, there are some great “hardware as a service” providers like Layered Tech and Server Beach that essentially handle everything from the power to the network to hardware, and let you take over from the operating system up. This is what we use for WordPress.com, Akismet, WordPress.org, and it’s great. It’s allowed us to focus on what matters — our software and service. You still need a pro like Allan describes to handle things at the OS level (most performance problems I see are badly configured servers, not hardware limitations) but leave networking and hardware to people with economies of scale. This comment nails it.

Update: I’m in a video Rod Boothby did asking What is Cloud Computing, good timing.

Matt: WordCamp Milan

Matt — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:02:26 +0000

I’m leaving tomorrow for Milan where I’ll be attending WordCamp Italy. Hope to see some of you there!

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 5/7

Keith Dsouza — Thu, 08 May 2008 03:55:10 +0000

Google Maps

The Google Maps plugin allows you to easily insert Google maps into your blog, making use of the new shortCode system in WordPress 2.5. The maps can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type, activate zoom using mouse wheel. This plugin requires a API key from Google Maps.

TW-Asides

Tw-asides is an asides widget for WordPress. It lets you publish short posts that appear in your sidebar rather than in the main content column. Asides posts won’t appear in your main content stream, whether it’s on the front page of your blog or when navigating via the next/previous post links.

WP-Crontrol

WP-Crontrol is a plugin that lets you manage the WP-Cron system and see what’s going on there. This includes adding/editing/deleting cron entries, as well as cron schedules.

Random Featured Post

The Random Featured Post plugin allows you to display a random post from one or more designated categories. The featured post will display the title “Featured Post” which is customizable along with the post’s title and content or an excerpt with link to full post.

WP-Offload

WP-Offload will boost the performance of your blog by seamlessly offloading static content like images, documents and movies. This will greatly reduce bandwidth consumption and the number of HTTP requests issued to your web server. Additional features such as remote image manipulation and thumbnail generation are provided.

Google XML Sitemaps with Multiple Domains

This plugin is a solution for those running both the Domain Mirror and the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugins together in WordPress. The plugin extends Google (XML) Sitemaps so that it creates one sitemap for each mirror set up in Domain Mirror. Sitemaps are created with the mirror URL prepended to the custom filename.

BT Active Discussions

This is a recent comments plugin that displays customizable number of blog posts with recently updated comment. The output is very similar to phpBB’s View Active Topics and vBulletin’s Today’s Posts functions.

Weblog Tools Collection: Farms 100 Big Ones Theme Pack

Mark Ghosh — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:01:53 +0000

Farms 100 Big Ones Theme Pack: Download this 100 WordPress themes zip file (17MB) and upload them to your blog to have 100 themes to play around with. Many of these themes are older but they are all widgetized, have a bunch of bug fixes, are internationalized, work on both WordPress and WordPress Mu and they have been time tested on Edublogs. I normally would not suggest that users download themes from sources other than the original theme authors’ site, but this is offered from a trusted source and the convenience of a single zip file added to the additional testing and bug fixing performed by Edublogs, is the icing on the cake.

[EDIT] James provided a preview of all 100 themes here.

Matt: Expo Keynote

Matt — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:29:18 +0000

Here’s a video of my “high order bit” keynote talk at Web 2.0 Expo. It’s succinct — 10 minutes — and covers WordPress.com and Automattic growth, the possibly related posts launch, and Monotone.

Weblog Tools Collection: A Unique Monotone

Jeff Chandler — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:56:49 +0000

While Matt Mullenweg attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco just a few weeks ago, he previewed a new theme which looks like might be the perfect WordPress theme for photographers called Monotone. Monotone was developed by Noel Jackson and is a very unique theme in that, the color scheme changes based on the photograph being displayed. Here are two screenshots showcasing the theme in action with two different photographs.

Monotone takes the first image attached to a post and samples colors from it for use in the surrounding layout. Each post needs to contain one image, and optionally, any text you want. The theme does the rest, pulling colors out of and resizing the images for use in the design. You can use the visual or the HTML editor in wordpress to input your image and supporting text.

One of the only problems I’ve seen with the Monotone theme is that, sometimes the link colors blend in with the background making them difficult to see. Other than that, some of the photos really pop out at you thanks to the surrounding colors.

Monotone is generally only available for WordPress.com bloggers because the images must be uploaded to WordPress so they can resize them and extract the colors properly. For more information regarding the Monotone theme, check out the WordPress.com April Wrap Up.

As a side note, if you would like to use this theme on a self hosted WordPress blog, you will need to visit the Automattic SVN and then download and package the following files.

Also, if you happen to be using the Monotone theme on your WordPress.com blog, provide us a link so we can take a look at it!

Matt: Mark on DRM

Matt — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:57:02 +0000

The day the music died.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 5/5

Keith Dsouza — Tue, 06 May 2008 03:55:58 +0000

One Column Themes

Simple Gray

Simple Gray is a one column theme which features dark tones of gray and mauve. The theme does not have any sidebars but does sport a extended footer.

Two Column Themes

Just Lucid

Just Lucid is a simplistic two column theme. The menu for the theme is shown to the left hand side of the page instead of the top. The sidebar and footer area are both widget ready. The theme contains stylesheets for 800px and 1024px width.

Three Column Themes

Written

Written is a 3 column widget-ready theme featuring a personal photo, full-width footer in black, white and blue/green.

Zoxengen

Zoxengen is a 3 column widget-ready theme with theme options. The theme uses a bright color and has a section for feature articles and 6 spots for adding 125*125 banners.

Four Column Themes

LivingOS TAU

LivingOS TAU is a four column widget-ready theme. The posts are displayed in newspaper of magazine style grid format.

Gravatar: Identicons Deploy

Matt — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:26:26 +0000

WordPress.com users now have more avatar options, to choose the new defaults we talked about previously.

Those options will also be included with WordPress 2.6!

Also — the PNG thing is on our radar. Will have to change some things up to make it work again, but it’s just code.

Weblog Tools Collection: Error Management for WordPress Plugins

Ronald Huereca — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:04:01 +0000

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a WordPress plugin. One of my goals was to have fancy and relevant error messages.

I contemplated writing my own error manager, and even began a very basic one. I experienced hurdle after hurdle, and finally I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t WordPress have its own error manager also?”

So I did a quick source-code search and came across the WP_Error class.

One of the hurdles I ran into in creating my own error manager was error localization. The WP_Error class makes localizing error messages extremely simple.

Adding Error Messages

To add an error message, the first thing you’ll want to do is instantiate your own instance of WP_Error.

$myErrors = new WP_Error();

The next step is to add in your error messages.

$myErrors->add('access_denied', __('You do not have permission to do that.',$myLocalizationName));

There are a few things to notice here. There is something called an error code, which you will use to look up the full error message. You also have the full error message, which uses the __ function for localization.

Retrieving Error Messages

After you have added in your error messages, you’ll want to retrieve them at some point.

Retrieving an error message is as simple as calling the get_error_message method and passing it your error code.

$errorMessage = $myErrors->get_error_message($code);

From there you can echo out your message in whatever manner suits you.

Applications

Using the WP_Error class is ideal for those with themes and plugins.

For plugins, it’s best to have your errors as a member of a class. Using the class approach assures that you can access the errors throughout your methods, and also avoid naming conflicts.

For themes, you can also create your own class, or have a prefixed variable so you don’t have possible conflicts with other variables.

Downloadable and Example Code

Here is some downloadable code with an example of how the class might be used in a theme. As stated earlier, plugin authors may want to use a class for this.

The code is assumed to be placed in a theme’s “functions.php” file.

class my_class {
	function my_class() {
		$this->localizionName = '';
		$this->errors = new WP_Error();
		$this->initialize_errors();
	}
	/* get_error - Returns an error message based on the passed code
	Parameters - $code (the error code as a string)
	Returns an error message */
	function get_error($code = '') {
		$errorMessage = $this->errors->get_error_message($code);
		if ($errorMessage == null) {
			return __("Unknown error.", $this->localizionName);
		}
		return $errorMessage;
	}
	/* Initializes all the error messages */
	function initialize_errors() {
		$this->errors->add('my_weird_error', __('Some weird error has occurred', $myLocalizationName));
		$this->errors->add('access_denied', __('You do not have permission to do that.',$myLocalizationName));
	} //end function initialize_errors
}
$myErrors = new my_class();
echo $myErrors->get_error('my_weird_error');

The above code has two helper methods, one which retrieves the errors, and one which initializes the errors. The example is very basic, but should give you a good idea on how to use the WP_Error class.

Conclusion

There are many features of the WP_Error class not mentioned here, but you can dissect the code yourself if you like. The class is found in the wp-includes folder under classes.php.

The WP_Error class is a simple and powerful way to store errors, and output them rather easily. And the best thing, the messages can be localized.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 5/3

Keith Dsouza — Sun, 04 May 2008 03:55:00 +0000

Two Column Themes

Statement

Statement is a clean and professional looking WordPress theme meant for intellectual blogs like education, science, culture, books etc. The theme is WordPress 2.5 ready with gallery functions enabled.

GreyBox

GreyBox is a two column widget ready theme with space for advertising 125×125 banners right at the top of the page. The theme is simple and has a thick black border surrounding the main content.

Three Column Themes

Revolution

Revolution Blog is a 3-column Widget-ready theme created with clean and elegant look. The theme is largely made up of blue colors and has 2 sidebars to the right of the content.

Peacemaker

Peacemaker is a three column, widget-ready WordPress theme. The theme sports a header from B-36 Peacemaker which was a strategic bomber. The theme makes use of sober colors which includes gray and white.

WhiteDust

WhiteDust is a fluid three column outfit, plain white background with a splash. The frontpage shows the latest post in full followed by titles of the latest eight aligned on the frontpage, while the sidebars are enabled with recent comments, flickr feed, enabled with flickr support, pagenavi support, related posts and recent comments.

Weblog Tools Collection: Create Your Own Admin Color Scheme

Jeff Chandler — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:31:42 +0000

Here at WeblogToolsCollection.com, we have already discussed how you can change the color scheme in the WordPress 2.5 administration panel from Classic to Fresh. We have also highlighted an awesome plugin that was written by Kaspars which gives users up to 8 different color schemes to choose from. However, what if you want to create your own color scheme? Thanks to a plugin written by James Dimick called Easy Admin Color Schemes, users can now create their own flavor of the WordPress 2.5 back end.

After downloading and installing the plugin, you can access it by browsing to SETTINGS-COLOR SCHEMES. There are three color schemes to start you off, Classic, Fresh and Washedout. The plugin does not allow you to delete nor edit the Classic and Fresh color schemes. This makes sense as you wouldn’t want to screw up a default skin only to have to reinstall WordPress to fix the issue. However, you can edit the Washedout color scheme which introduces you to the plugins functionality.

The plugin starts off by giving you the chance to name your color scheme. Next, give your color scheme four primary colors. If you don’t know of a six digit color code, there is a small arrow to the right of the text field that will open up a color picker. Opening the color picker and then selecting a color will automatically place the corresponding color code into the text field.

Once you have your four primary colors in order, the next step which is the longest of them all is to go through all of the CSS specific code and change the color code values to something else you prefer. There at least 10 different CSS files which make up the styling of the administration panel. There are more if you want to include support for RIGHT TO LEFT text. This plugin takes all of those CSS files and puts them in one place for you to edit, which makes things so much easier. Also, for those who have javascript enabled in their browser, you can view a live preview of what the changes will look like on an active WordPress administration page. Very handy as it cuts down on the browser refreshes.

One thing that I think this plugin is missing is an easy way for users to share their creations. If a download or save link could be added to the color schemes which would automatically package the necessary files together which could then be saved to my desktop for distribution, this would make the plugin a home run.

If you are looking at adding some spice to your WordPress back end, give this plugin a try. I don’t think it could be any easier than this plugin. The only problem with creating a color scheme is figuring out where each CSS class or DIV is defined. That’s where FireBug comes in.

Good luck and if you happen to create a color scheme using this plugin, be sure to say so in the comments.

Weblog Tools Collection: The Best and Worst Times to Post

Mark Ghosh — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:50:19 +0000

Want That Post to Go Popular? Here’s The Best and Worst Times to Post It He determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links. Interesting data and tabulation of said data to determine what is the best and worst time to publish a post. Data is derived from various information collected through aideRSS. I will not steal the original authors’ thunder by posting the answer here but I agree with the numbers for blogs which have a primarily US reader base. If your audience is from across the world (as on this blog), this might not be as relevant.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases For 5/1

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:37:55 +0000

One Column Themes

TJ-Clean

TJ Clean is a simple, clean cut yet feature-full WordPress theme which is great for sites where content is king. Ideal for personal blogs as it includes integration with Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music sharing) and status updates from Facebook/Twitter (and others). This theme is also XHTML Strict 1.0 and Valid CSS 2.1.

Two Column Themes

30April

30April was created by the theme author to celebrate his birthday. This theme contains widget support, is fixed width, contains an extra footer, theme options to make changing and editing the theme easy and built in gravatar support.

Milky Conversations

Milky Conversations is a two column, widget ready theme that is based off of the White As Milk theme, written by Azeem Azeez. The theme has been released under GPL and is fully compliant with the license. As the name implies, this theme is pretty white with black text and a little bit of orange thrown in via the RSS icons.

Three Column Themes

Khaki Traveler

Khaki Traveler was developed by Jeremy Clarke. It has a tan color scheme and a travel themed header. It is also a three column widget ready theme. It has gravatar support as well as tagging support. It has a top navigation menu with an easy to access log-in form.

Hybrid Themes - Themes Where The Number Of Columns Can Be Configured

Choice

Choice is a highly configurable theme that supports either 2 or 3 columns, is widgetized, theme options to control the themes background color, theme text weight, theme heading color, number of sidebars and whether or not your slogan appears. The theme also has native tag support.

Matt: Favorite Posting Bookmarklet

Matt — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:54:23 +0000

A question for Ma.tt readers: What’s your favorite posting bookmarklet? We’re starting to think about ways to make posting to WP from wherever you are on the web easier in 2.6, just curious what you guys enjoy the most and why.

Weblog Tools Collection: Take Crontrol Of WordPress

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:57:10 +0000

Not too long ago, a new plugin was released called WP-Crontrol. WP-Crontrol allows you to take control over what is happening in the WP-Cron system.

WP-Cron is a tangle of black magic that allows a plugin developer or a user to schedule commands to be executed. WP-Crontrol is a plugin that lets a blog owner see through that magic and figure out what’s actually going on

If you want a detailed introduction to this plugin as well as an explanation as to how to use this plugin in conjunction with WP Database Backup to create backups when you want them, be sure to check out this article: Add a new WordPress backup schedule with WP-Crontrol

Also on the radar today is a quick fix for the WordPress 2.5.x image uploader. Awsom.org is reporting that there is a no-flash plugin that is available which returns the previous image upload function from earlier versions of WordPress.

Weblog Tools Collection: Announcing WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5

Mark Ghosh — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:27:15 +0000

It is time for another WordPress Plugin Competition. Plugin competitions of the past have seen fantastic code, extremely useful and fun plugins and have generated a lot of interest in WordPress and plugin development. Prizes have been very generously donated by readers and well wishers and we already have some donations towards this year’s competition and are looking for more. The final list of prizes will be determined very soon. If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact me. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives. The plugin competition will begin on the 10th of May and will last till the 10th of July.

There will be prizes for first, second and third places and a consolation prize. The plugins should be officially submitted through email and the Plugin Competition Blog (which will be cleaned for the new competition) should be used as a launching ground for plugin ideas, updates, development news etc. The plugins will be judged by a panel of at least three judges and reader feedback will be an essential part of the judging process. At the end of the contest, we will put up posts for each submission and will open them up to our readers for two weeks. The contest results should be declared by the beginning of August.

All code must be GPL (or compatible) and should be available for download through the Competition Blog and preferably through WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferred vehicle of communication for all contestants.

Some relevant details:

Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.

More details to be added with time.

Stay tuned and please help spread the word.

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