WordPress Planet

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 14:00:15 +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.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress for the Desktop… Would You Use It?

James Dimick — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:02:44 +0000

Here’s a quick one: If you had access to a desktop application that could connect to your WordPress site and allow you to manage it, like the web-based control panel currently allows, would you use it?

Would You Use a WordPress Desktop Application?(answers)

If you choose “depends”, let me know why in the comments. Also, feel free to put in your opinions no matter what you choose. What would such an application need to be able to do? Everything the web-based app can do? Just a subset of the features? What do you think?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

WordPress.tv: The AStickyPostOrderER Plugin: Overview

Ryan Markel — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:45:51 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 11/03

Perurry — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:10:23 +0000

ExtizeMe

A WordPress theme written mostly in JavaScript. Layout, behavior and look&feel are made with Ext Js Library

ThrillingTheme

Two column theme with three widget ready areas and available in three color schemes.

Color3

Colorful clean and stylish theme with two columns, right sidebar dropdown menu and widget-ready.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get these listed in our release posts.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Warriors From Across The World

Jeff Chandler — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:45:33 +0000

How cool would it be to take a look at a Google map to see if there are any WordPress fans near your location? Thanks to a new site called WPWorldmap.net, now you can. The site is made up of a Google map with a draggable window that contains the options to sign up or to apply filters such as fans, core developers, users/bloggers, etc. The other neat thing about this site is that it shows upcoming WordCamp events across the world. Signing up was a breeze and if you use Twitter, you can use your account to sign up while also following anyone who has registered to the site already.

I'm that guy in Northern Ohio

Of course, WPWorldMap is only as helpful as the amount of people who decide to signup and appropriately apply their approximate location so if interested, sign up and leave your mark. You might be surprised by the number of WordPress fans in your neighborhood!

Donncha: WP Super Cache Developer Documentation

Donncha — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:32:28 +0000

I’ve finally found the time to write up some documentation for developers who want to work with WP Super Cache.

It’s a work in progress but should help other plugin developers who want to interact with the cache.

Suggestions and comments welcome.

PS. If you’re in Cork on November 14th, head along to BarCamp Cork III. I’ll be giving a talk, “How WP Super Cache Works”. It’ll be less technical than this but I’ll answer questions too. Check out the other sessions too.

Related Posts

WordPress.tv: Effectuer une mise à jour de WordPress

Ryan Markel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:15:02 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 11/01

Perurry — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:30:28 +0000

New Plugins

Fortune Kookie

This WordPress plugin adds a sidebar widget to display a random fortune cookie fortune. The database hosted on FortuneKookie.com has over 1500 unique fortunes and each fortune includes the front message, the back word(s), and the lucky numbers.

Custom Login Page

Wordpress Custom Login Page allows you to customize your login page beyond any plugin previously available. Your background image, logo image, and form div background are all customizable.

Category Checklist Tree

Prevents checked categories from going to the top of the checklist on the post editing screen.

WP Content Slideshow

WP Content Slideshow is the perfect Slideshow for Wordpress. It displays up to 5 Posts with Tile, Description and Image for every Post.

JR_Quotes

This plugin allows you to display geek quotes, pop quotes, general quotes, religious quotes and sci-fi quotes, all with a simple widget.

Updated Plugins

Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for all of your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images.

RSS Cloud

Adds RSSCloud capabilities to your RSS feed.

New User Email Set up

The function of the plugin is to provide a basic interface so that admins can define a custom email that is sent to users when they first register. Subject, Text Body, From Address, Admin Subject and Admin Text Body can all be defined, to allow for a more personalised feel to your blog, that doesn’t have such a generic ‘welcome’ email.

Clicky Tracking

Helps you integrate Clicky in your website. Clicky Web Analytics helps you monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site’s traffic in real time.

Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox is an online media viewing application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

Store Locator

The Store Locator plugin empowers web developers & web site owners to easily manage and display any set of important stores, products, or other locations on their website in an easily searchable manner. Uses Google Maps.

jQuery Lightbox for Native Galleries

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.

WordPress.tv: This Week on WordPress.tv: Oct 25—Oct 31

Ryan Markel — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:34:53 +0000

Happy Halloween!

This week, we took a little break from WordCamp videos to post a couple of tutorials, a couple of interviews, and one introduction to a different way of using WordPress.

We published one tutorial on a newer feature of WordPress.com: the Image Widget. If you’re a self-hosted WordPress user and like the widget in the video, there’s a great suggestion in the comments for a plugin you can use.

Matt Gibbs sent us a great overview of the basic functionality of the Pods CMS plugin. You’ll need some basic PHP knowledge, but if you’re interested in some of the different ways people are using WordPress, it’s definitely worth a look.

We also made available two French language tutorials:

Lastly, we posted more in the series of interviews with Matt Mullenweg, one with his thoughts on the current state of the WordPress platform, and another regarding the role and importance of open source to WordPress.

This week, there’s been some great discussion after the event on some of the video from WordCamp Seattle. Check the list of sessions here, and if you see something that interests you, join the conversation!

Next week, we have even more from the WordPress community, and we’re looking forward to more WordCamp sessions from around the world. If you have a tutorial or other WordPress-related video you’d like to share with the community, please send us a note and we’ll be happy to check it out.

Dev Blog: Upcoming Bug Hunts!

Jane Wells — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:28:00 +0000

As we near completion of the 2.9 milestone, it’s that time of dev cycle again, when we ask all you community developers who’ve been putting off contributing to core to dust off your dev environments and help us get closer to being release-ready. How? Bug hunts! Yes, that time-honored tradition (in the time of WordPress, anyway) of everyone pitching in to test patches and report the results, working on solutions to major bugs, and helping to clear out Trac has come around again, and we’re scheduling not one, but two bug hunts over the next couple of weeks to ensure that everyone has enough time to prepare and participate.

#1 – The first bug hunt of 2.9 will be Thursday through Saturday, November 5-7, 2009. This should give people a few days to plan for it, upgrade their dev environments if they haven’t been following trunk, and figure out how to allot their time. We’re stretching over both weekdays and weekend to try and accommodate everyone’s schedule.

#2 - The second bug hunt will be a week later, Saturday through Monday, November 14-16, 2009. This should make it possible for anyone who needs more than a week to set some time aside to participate. This bug hunt will coincide with WordCamp NYC, where a special Hacker Room will be set aside for people to go and work on 2.9 bug tickets alongside regular core contributors including Mark Jaquith and Matt Martz (sivel from IRC).

The Goals

Test, test, test existing patches! You can see all tickets with patches that need testing by checking this report. When you’ve tested a patch, report your results in the ticket comments, so core committers can see how the patch is faring.

Fix known bugs! You can see the bugs that need patches by checking this report. Look for the ones that seem that they’ll affect the most people or have the biggest impact by being fixed. Edge case bugs should be lower priority.

Report new bugs! As you’re testing out the development version, if you come across a bug, search trac to see if someone has reported it yet. If so, add a comment with your experience to the ticket so we’ll know it’s affecting more than one person. If no ticket exists yet, create one.

Core committers will be around (in the #wordpress-dev channel at irc.freenode.com) both weekends to review patches that have been thoroughly tested, answer questions as needed, and give feedback on patches that need more work before being commit-worthy.

If you’ve never participated in a WordPress bug hunt before, but you’d like to get involved, we’d love to have you join us! To prepare, you’ll want to set up a test environment, start using the current development version/maybe install the beta testing plugin, join us in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel, and read up on automated testing.

Donncha: WordPress MU 2.8.5.1

Donncha — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:58:00 +0000

Update! WordPress MU 2.8.5.2 has a tiny fix for a post publish bug. You can download it from the usual place.

WordPress MU 2.8.5.1 has just been released and may be downloaded immediately.

This is a security and bugfix release and a recommended upgrade for every WordPress MU site. What happened to 2.8.5? I had it tagged and ready for release when Luke reported a little problem. It wasn’t possible to edit blogs! It was an easy bug to fix but code had been tagged and zip/tarball archives created so I had to create new ones. Thanks Luke! Saved the day.

Thanks to everyone else who contributed and helped in any way during the making of this release. Your help is invaluable.

This release also fixes a problem with slashes in blog and site options. You’ll be prompted to run the site upgrader. Please run it on all your blogs. For a more comprehensive look at what has changed recently, take a look at the Trac Timeline.

Related Posts

Weblog Tools Collection: How Would You Leverage The WordPress Community?

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:18:37 +0000

One of the most difficult tasks I see for the WordPress project in the next 1-2 years is creating a place to harness the power of the WordPress community into a central location. In my opinion, the WordPress community is like peanut butter, spread across the web really thin. You have to be subscribed to a bunch of different blogs throughout the community in order to get a grasp as to what is happening with the WordPress project. Other than enthusiast sites, you have to know which mailing lists to subscribe to, the developments prologue site, attend the developer chats, and occasionally read a WordPress centric blog post or two from one of the core developers in order to figure out what is going on. I don’t like this situation. Instead, I would love to see a community portal developed on the WordPress.org site that contains the tools necessary to create a collaboration hub.

I hesitate to mention another project on a WordPress focused site but I believe there are lessons that can be learned from how Joomla has handled this situation. Joomla has a site called http://community.joomla.org/. The front page of this site acts as a portal to vital aspects of the project including team member blogs, events, featured articles, translations, etc. It’s as if everything I would need to know or have quick access to is right on the front page housed within this portal.

On the WordPress side of things, you have to dive into the documentation to find the Codex article that discusses WordPress in your language. The site contains one blog, the development blog for announcements specifically dealing with the software. It’s not like the good old days when multiple posts per month covering all aspects of the project would be published here. Now you’re lucky to see two posts or more a month on it. Each WordPress team member has their own blog, most with a WordPress category that is tied into a separate entity called the WordPress Planet that is accessed in the dashboard called Other WordPress News. Not only are the team members added to this site, but so are a number of other projects/sites that are not strictly WordPress related. I realize the team members are busy and some of them contribute to the WordPress project not employed by Automattic but I would like to see more posts published by them focused on the WordPress project. For example, I attend some of the developer chats and I see requests for unit tests or explanations as to how tickets in Trac should be treated yet I don’t see consistent information published to the public explaining this. Sure, the end user facing crowd has no interest in this, but there are a ton of plugin and theme authors as well as enthusiasts who would be. To be frank, I think that if it were not for websites such as Weblogtoolscollection.com and a host of other WordPress centric community sites, a majority of us would have no clue as to the progress of WordPress except for when a release was imminent.

I would love to see is a complete redesign of WordPress.org which served as a portal. A portal that could be visited daily to see posts from team members regarding the project, latest posts in the WordPress forum, upcoming WordCamps, a featured WordPress.TV Video, links to some of the most important pages in the Codex, the 3 or 5 newest themes and plugins added to the repository, etc. This post may be premature though as the best thing that could happen to the site is the redesign, plus the ability to use BuddyPress as a means of creating the collaboration hub of it all. I know the BuddyPress situation is currently being worked on and may end up being a reality some day on WordPress.org but for everything else, there is certainly room for improvement across the board.

What Say you?

First off, what do you think of the current way WordPress.org the project along with the website is laid out? If you had the opportunity, how would you completely restructure the website and team members to turn the site into a collaboration/information hub all about WordPress?

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/30

Perurry — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:44:36 +0000

Ines BuddyPress

The Ines BuddyPress WP theme, edgy styles for a BuddyPress powered site with the brandnew Ines BuddyPress Theme, featuring a three column fluid layout, enabled with options panel, widgetized sidebars and footers, flickr support, pagenavi support, frontpage slider, orelated posts and recent comments are built into the theme.

cleanPRESS

Two column, feature rich theme with support for featured articles, post options and twitter options

Bare Minimum

This theme uses the bare minimum files that are needed for a WordPress theme – The theme uses no CSS and contains everything needed to run the theme in index.php.

Moi Magazine

Moi Magazine is a free 2 column magazine style WordPress Theme. It looks very modern and elegant from the front end and offering vast Admin options at the back end. With wide variety of tune able Theme options in the admin menu you don’t need to edit .php files manually to do basic theme adjustments.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get it listed in these posts.

BuddyPress: Doubling Up

Andy Peatling — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:03:47 +0000

I’d like to congratulate John James Jacoby (aka jjj) for doubling the size of the core development team and gaining commit access to the project!

BuddyPress is growing, and at a pace that just one core developer cannot possibly keep up with. I’ve been looking to expand the size of the core development team for a while now and I’m excited to be able to announce the first stop along that road.

If you’re a regular in the forums or trac you’ll already know who John is. He has been an unrelenting force for some time with quick responses to questions and quality core patches.

John will be helping with bug fixing to begin with, then looking to take on some of the new features listed on the roadmap. Congratulations again John, I’m very excited to have you on the core team.

WordPress.tv: Supprimer le compte Administrateur de WordPress

Ryan Markel — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:18:14 +0000

WordPress.tv: Pods CMS: Basics

Ryan Markel — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:10:25 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: Bulk Plugin Upgrades In 2.9

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:49:40 +0000

As mentioned by WP Engineer, WordPress 2.9 recently had a new feature added to it called bulk plugin upgrades. The interesting thing about this feature is back on September 11th, Matt published this through his Twitter feed:

Just upgraded three plugins in about 30 seconds using one-click upgrade — wish you could do them all at once though.

Well, now you can. I attended the WordPress developers chat today and according to the devs, the bulk upgrader works, all it needs now is to be tied into the API along with some cosmetics. I’m sure there are plenty of you, including myself that is pleased to see this addition to WordPress. However, I wonder what happens if during a bulk upgrade, one of the plugins fails. Does the upgrader skip the plugin and move on to the next one or does it ruin the entire upgrade? Looking forward to the answer in the comments.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress for iPhone 2 Now Available in App Store

Keith Dsouza — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:57:18 +0000

WordPress 2 for iPhone is now available for downloads in the App Store. The new app is packed with lots of features which include:

A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
Passwords are now stored in the keychain
Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded/

Please note: The WordPress for iPhone 2 is a completely new application. If you are using a older version of WordPress app for iPhone, you will not be able to upgrade it, you will have to download the new application instead. You can safely remove the older version of the app, once you have installed version 2.0.

Download WordPress for iPhone 2 from App Store

Joseph: rssCloud WordPress Plugin Update – 0.4.1

Joseph Scott — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:31:12 +0000

Update – 5 Nov 2009:
These features are now available on WordPress.com as well – http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/rsscloud-update/

Version 0.4.1 of the rssCloud WordPress plugin is now available. The biggest change is adding support for the domain parameter in notification requests. This means that rssCloud updates processed by the plugin are no longer limited to being sent to the IP address that the request came from. Support for the domain parameter is live on WordPress.com as well.

When a domain parameter is included with a notification request the verification process does the following:

Sends an HTTP GET request to the {domain}:{port}{path} URL
That HTTP GET includes to pieces of data: url and challenge. The url field contains the URL of the feed that we’ll been sending pings about. The challenge field contains a random string of characters
The response back must have a status code of 2xx and the body must contain EXACTLY the contents of the challenge field. If both of those conditions are not met then the verification process will consider this a failure

For notification requests that have no domain parameter the verification process is unchanged from before.

Another item that some may find helpful is a new constant – RSSCLOUD_FEED_URL – if that is defined they it will be used as the feed URL of the blog instead of determining it via get_bloginfo( 'rss2_url' );. For plugin authors that provide options for an alternative feed URL note that can override the default in WordPress via the feed_link filter. That filter can be used instead of the RSSCLOUD_FEED_URL constant and will bubble up through the get_bloginfo( 'rss2_url' ); call.

BuddyPress: BuddyPress at WordCamp New York

Andy Peatling — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:45:17 +0000

This year at WordCamp New York there will be a whole track dedicated to WordPress MU and BuddyPress. Some of the topics being presented are:

Getting off the Farm:
WPMU Beyond Blog Hosting. We all know that WPMU can be used to host multiple blogs for public or internal signups. But what else can you do? How far can you stretch it? I’ll be showcasing a number of sites that use WPMU in interesting ways. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Writing Plugins for WordPress/MU:
This session will be directed toward plugin developers. We will discuss platform differences & guidelines to keep in mind when writing a plugin for both WordPress & WordPress MU. Speaker: Ron Rennick.

User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems.
Speaker: Casey Bisson.

How-to with MU: Using Multiple Domains, and Building a Member Directory.
A two-part session where we will dig in to two different concepts. First up, we’ll cover how to domain map member blogs, and the difference between multiple sites and multiple domains. The second half will cover how we built a business/member directory and what plugins we used to accomplish this so you can build one too. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Growing Community with BuddyPress:
Speaker: Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Creating Killer Group Extensions in BuddyPress:
In this session learn how to build highly custom feature extensions to BuddyPress groups. Andy will be talking through how you can use the new group extension API to build Twitter stream integration right into your groups. Speaker: Andy Peatling.

Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub:
In this presentation, I’ll discuss some of the BuddyPress development I’ve done to bridge the WordPress/bbPress/MediaWiki platforms, taking BP beyond its roots as a social networking platform and turning it into a collaboration hub: a space where users can find, friend, and team up with each other (the social networking part BP that does well), work together to produce content (that’s the “collaboration” part), and feed the content back into BP (that’s the “hub” part). Speaker: Boone Gorges.

Other soon-to-be confirmed sessions: Setting up BuddyPress (workshop); BuddyPress theme framework.

For a full list of sessions please see the program page.

It should be a fantastic event with space for up to 1000 people. Tickets are selling out fast so if you’re thinking of attending, now is the time to hop in and buy a ticket. It looks like this is going to be the east coast WordCamp to attend. I’ll see you all there!

WordPress.tv: Matt Mullenweg: WordPress Now

Ryan Markel — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:37:39 +0000

WP iPhone: WordPress for iPhone 2 now available in the App Store

MT — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:15:17 +0000

We’ve just received word that WordPress for iPhone 2 is now available on the App Store. Woohoo!

A quick note about installation: WordPress for iPhone 2 is a new app, and the previous version won’t automatically update to 2.0. Installing it won’t overwrite any previous version you have installed. When you launch the new app, you’ll immediately see “Version 2.0″ at the bottom of the screen. When you’re no longer using it, you can safely remove the previous version from your device.

Our efforts were focused on creating a better user experience — the beginnings of a user interface overhaul that we’ll continue with the next version, and eliminating the bugs and incompatibilities with some self-hosted WordPress setups that was the source of the majority of the support requests we see in the forum.

So, what’s new in version 2?

A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
Passwords are now stored in the keychain
Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded

WordPress for iPhone, just like WordPress itself, is an Open Source app. Our source code is publicly available, and anyone can contribute to it. On behalf of all the developers, thank you to everyone who wrote code, submitted their ideas or bug reports, built and tested new features with the iPhone Simulator, and installed our beta releases. They helped bring you this app, and we’re excited to have you all start using it!

Just a reminder: we’ve started a new blog called Making WordPress for iPhone, where we’ll talk about the features we’re tackling for the next version of the app, and keep you up to date on our progress. We’re soliciting your ideas and feedback there, so if you’d like to help guide the direction of WordPress for iPhone, that’s the place to be.

In the interest of keeping comments on topic, please don’t post support requests here—instead, we ask that you post them in the WordPress for iPhone forums.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/28

Perurry — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:15:41 +0000

New Plugins

Ponticlaro Media Settings

It has a really nifty [media] shortcode that hacks into the great built-in WordPress gallery. You can put one [media] in your post and it will access the first image in the gallery without any code.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator (TOCC) automatically generates a dynamic site wide table of contents that is always up-to-date. All entries are navigable making your site extremely SEO friendly. TOCC can be configured to display static pages, blog entries and forum comments. Another great feature of TOCC is the ability to include anchor tags marked with a special class. This feature allows links to articles, downloads or even other sites to appear within the table of contents as if they are part of your site’s navigation.

Posty Widget

Displays the contents of two custom fields in a Sidebar Widget. The widget can stay the same (and in the same place) but the content can be dynamic and set to provide more information about the post you’re looking at.

WP Grins Lite

A “lite” version of the original WP Grins plugin using the lighter-weight jQuery library. This plugin allows smilies to be inserted into your comment form.

Static Random Posts

Allows the display of random posts, but allows the admin to determine how often the random posts are refreshed. With Static Random Posts, the random posts will remain the same for a set amount of time.

SyntaxHL-Editor

Offers an easy to use graphical user interface for Syntax Highlighter and Code Colorizer for Wordpress. You can easily enter and modify source-code highlighted in your posts as well as specify options for every single snippet.

Updated Plugins

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.

AVH First Defense Against Spam

The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before any content is served. Spammers are identified by checking if the visitors IP exists in a database served by stopforumspam.com, the Project Honey Pot or a local blacklist.

Yet Another Featured Posts Plugin (YAFPP)

Yet Another Featured Posts Plugin provides an easy interface for featuring and unfeaturing posts.

Page Meta

Adds the ability to override the page meta title and add in meta descriptions and keywords for pages.

Extended Page List

Add custom configured page lists to your posts, pages and sidebar.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will check your posts, custom fields and the blogroll for broken links and missing images and notify you if any are found.

Alex King: WordPress HelpCenter Shares Revenue and Knowledge

Alex — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:34:33 +0000

We’ve launched an affiliate program and a public knowledge base at WordPress HelpCenter (WPHC), two things that I’m very excited about. We’re getting closer and closer to my overall vision for the service.

Affiliate Program

The affiliate program is really core to how we want the HelpCenter to work (note: anyone can join the affiliate program). It creates a formal relationship between WPHC and plugin and theme authors so that we can support the great WordPress development community. It sets up:

WPHC to pay plugin and theme authors when we do paid work with plugins or themes they created.
Makes it easy for plugin and theme authors give us FAQs and tips about the things they have built so that we can provide great support for them.
Builds relationships with plugin and theme authors so we can send them bug reports and contact them with advanced issues we are dealing with.
Rewards affiliates for referring business to us.

We have a collection of badges that plugin and theme authors can place on their web sites and in the WordPress admin pages for their plugins and themes to direct people to the WordPress HelpCenter to get support (and earn affiliate payments).

We also have released a WordPress plugin that does two things:

it adds a WordPress HelpCenter support tab to the admin interface to make it easy for people to contact WPHC for support.
It creates a system profile that details key information about a WordPress installation that is very useful in troubleshooting and debugging. This system profile can be sent to WordPress HelpCenter.

Affiliates can download a customized version of this plugin that includes their affiliate code so that they receive a referral payment in addition to any payments for work we do with plugins and themes they have registered with us.

We think that this may be something that plugin and theme authors may want to distribute along with their work. Additionally, developers that create WordPress powered sites but may not be in position to provide on-call support for them may want to install this on sites they create for their clients.

The system profile page created by the plugin uses standard WordPress filters to enable plugin and theme authors to add information to it that may be relevant for their plugins or themes.

I’m really excited about the affiliate program because it provides a monetary reward for plugin and theme developers while actually removing a burden from them and potentially freeing them up to spend more time building great things for the WordPress community.

Over the years I’ve thought and brainstormed quite a bit about ways to provide financial incentives for WordPress developers. Our affiliate program is a start. It’s a true win-win arrangement, and it will only get better as the WordPress community continues to grow.

Public Knowledge Base

The public knowledge base is another core element to WPHC and our vision of what we want it to be. We do troubleshooting and debugging of WordPress, plugin and theme issues every day, and this gives us a way to share the solutions we find with the community.

In addition to our own notes, when affiliates register plugins and themes with us they have the opportunity to add FAQs and tips about those plugins and themes. As appropriate, we then make that information publicly available.

Even better, the affiliates can come back and add additional FAQs and tips at any time. This is something I’m really excited about because the way that plugin README files work, they always lag one release behind on wordpress.org.

We have a section on the site for plugins and for themes. There are a few resources up there now, I’m looking forward to watching these areas grow in the future as more affiliates sign up and register their plugins and themes with us.

I expect this to become a very useful resource for the WordPress community; one that grows nicely over time.

I view the WPHC from several different perspectives.

As the founder and a partner in the business, I want it to be financially viable so that we can maintain a great staff and provide top notch service.
As a WordPress professional, I need it to be a place I trust and feel comfortable referring my clients to for support.
As a WordPress developer, I want users of my plugins and themes to be able to get great support. I also know that with the growth of the WordPress community and the responsibilities I currently enjoy, I am no longer in a position to provide that support directly.

From all of these perspectives, it is of paramount importance to me that the WordPress HelpCenter be a shining and trusted member of the WordPress community. The team and I are very committed to making that happen.

If we are able to continue to build it as we envision, the WordPress HelpCenter will be a great asset to the entire WordPress community. With these new features, I believe we’ve taken a few big steps in that direction.

Dev Blog: Plugin Compatibility Beta

Mark Jaquith — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:11:39 +0000

The number one reason people give us for not upgrading to the latest version of WordPress is fear that their plugins won’t be compatible. As part of our continuing efforts to make WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades as painless as possible, Michael Adams developed and launched a beta of a new “Compatibility” feature in the plugin directory, powered by your votes. When viewing a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-downs. If there has been feedback about this WordPress / plugin version combination, we’ll show you what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible vs how many marked it as incompatible.

If you log in, you’ll be able to help us gather this information! Just select a WordPress version / plugin version combination and click the “Works” or the “Broken” button. Please note that this shouldn’t be used to report minor issues with a plugin. You should mark a plugin as “Broken” only if its core functionality is truly broken when run on the specified WordPress version.

Right now we’re just in information gathering mode. So get out there and vote! Don’t just vote on broken plugins… cast a “Works” vote for every plugin that works on the version of WordPress you are using. This can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our data and prevent a few mistaken “Broken” votes from weighing too heavily.

For developers, we’re now including this data in our API. The plugin_information action now returns a “compatibility” member with the multidimensional array format:

array( {WP version} => array( {plugin version} => array( {% of reporters who say it works}, {# responses} ) ) )

If the API knows which version of WordPress you are using (for example, if you are making this query using the plugins_api() function from with WordPress), the API will only return compatibility information for your version of WordPress.

Eventually, we’d like to gather this compatibility feedback from within WordPress, allowing you to vote directly from your plugins admin screen. The ultimate goal is to use this information to inform you of plugin incompatibilities with a new version of WordPress during the upgrade process. For that to be useful we need a large set of high quality compatibility data. Start voting!

Weblog Tools Collection: What Is The Immediate Future Of bbPress?

Jeff Chandler — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:46:47 +0000

That’s the question Matt Mullenweg is asking on the official bbPress.org support forums. The post highlights the fact that bbPress is not going away and that it is an important project for the WordPress community. After all, it powers the WordPress.org plugin repository, the support forums, and TalkPress, Automattics hosted forum service.

Strategically the most important thing we need to figure out is how to integrate bbPress better with WP more for people who want that — right now it’s easier to use one of the WP plugins for forums than bbPress.

I’ve only installed bbPress locally once to check it out but it’s not my cup of tea. I think the bbPress forum software is aimed at developers since it comes with all the basics to build on or around but doesn’t contain the feature set of modern forum software out of the box. For example, the SimplePress plugin for WordPress Matt mentions is packed with more features than the dedicated forum software. One idea I’ve heard Matt discuss with Sam that I think has a ton of potential is to replace or add onto the WordPress comment system with bbPress. This type of tight integration between the two is what I believe Matt wants to figure out. It would be awesome to have such an easy way to not only have a forum where visitors can start their own conversations, but also leave comments on articles on the blog side of things. I hesitate to mention Vbulletin but it’s the software that comes to mind that takes this to the next level by offering their own CMS with the forum software built into it.

One of the best things bbPress has going for it right now is the work of Andy Peatling. In BuddyPress 1.1 Andy rewrote the forums component from the ground up to provide one click internal bbPress forum integration enabling users to setup forums in a fraction of the time. BuddyPress is gaining traction and as Matt says, has all the ingredients to become as large and successful as WordPress. I think the more people that use BuddyPress, the more that will use bbPress building that community simultaneously with BuddyPress.

Your Thoughts:

You tell me, or Matt. What is the future of bbPress you would like to see turn into a reality? Also, if you use bbPress, tell me why and how.

WordPress.tv: The Image Widget for WordPress.com

Michael Pick — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:05:21 +0000

Alex King: Chain Reaction

Alex — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:13:35 +0000

I’ve experienced a weird and unfortunate chain reaction over the last 48 hours.

A flood of comment spam
Akismet not accepting connections from my server¹ and/or not catching the spam
The email notifications from all the spam comments sending to my mail account
My mail host started blocking all mail from my server (due to the high volume of comment spam)

This has presented me with a choice between receiving email and accepting comments on this site, and that’s an easy choice.

I disabled comments, and once the flow of spam mails stopped my mail host seems to be accepting mail again. It’s sad to see the problems caused by comment spam extending beyond the annoyance of having them appear on your blog.²

I’m taking some additional steps to try to get the mail situation set up a little better (domain migration so I have better DNS control, sending mail directly to Google Apps and then forwarding to my primary mail account from there). I’m hopeful that I can get the Akismet connection issues resolved and enable comments again in the near future.

Regardless, it’s been a genuine pain in the arse having to deal with this. Apologies for the impact it’s had on anyone looking to comment here and/or receiving emails from my server.

UPDATE: re-enabling comments, hoping for the best.

It allows connections at times, but then doesn’t for long periods of time. [back]
They can also cause server scalability issues. [back]

Weblog Tools Collection: Are Your Plugins Compatible?

Jeff Chandler — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:59:51 +0000

A few days ago, something new showed up on each plugin page throughout the repository. This new box on the right hand side is a way of enabling the community to say whether a plugin is compatible with the newest version of WordPress or not. Normally, the plugin information within the FYI box tells you which version of WordPress is required and which version the plugin is compatible up to. Unfortunately, the version the plugin is compatible up to is not updated that often which is why some plugins which state that they only work up to WordPress 2.5 end up working with the latest release. If you have a WordPress.org forum user account, you’ll need to log in in order to vote. The voting is simple. The first box enables you to select which version of WordPress you’re running, including the latest version being worked on. The second box allows you to choose which version of the plugin you are running. After setting those two options, you click on the broken or works buttons to place your vote.

As per the screenshot, the majority of those using WordPress 2.8.5 with version 3.1.7 of the Google XML Sitemaps plugin reported that it’s working. The beauty of this system is that it leverages the community in order to figure out what works with what. However, just because it works for the majority of users is no guarantee it will work on your particular setup. But using these statistics, it should make it easier to figure out whether the issue is with the plugin and WordPress or with your setup.

One of the biggest fears users have when it comes time to upgrade WordPress is whether their plugins will work on the newest version or not. There are a large handful of people who upgrade to the latest version of WordPress as soon as it’s released and the hope is, these folks will visit the plugin page and report their findings for others to take advantage of. If more users see that their plugins work on the newest version, they are more likely to upgrade.

What are your thoughts on this system? Any ideas to enhance it?

Joseph: MakeItLink Update

Joseph Scott — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:01:24 +0000

With the upcoming release of WordPress 2.9 I thought this would be a good time to re-sync my original MakeItLink PHP class. I went back and did some additional checks with the make_clickable function in WordPress and found a few cases where it wasn’t generating the expected URL. That resulted in ticket #10990 and just like before filosofo did a great job of improving my fix.

After a few rounds of tests (from text_includes_formatting.php) the various example strings all worked as expected. The last diff by filosofo has been committed to -trunk and will be part of WordPress 2.9.

I expanded my MakeItLink page with an updated version of the code (0.2.0), a basic example and some background. For those who want to go right into the code it’s available here.

WordPress.tv: Concevoir un thème en parallèle avec Theme Test Drive

Ryan Markel — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:31:53 +0000

WordPress.tv: Matt Mullenweg: WordPress and Open Source

Ryan Markel — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:33:04 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof Your WordPress Blog

Mark Ghosh — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:37:59 +0000

5 Free Ways to Bulletproof Your WordPress Site: Eric’s presentation from WordCamp Seattle that can also be watched on WordPress.tv Some of the interesting parts include backup, security, performance and general tips including improving search and usability, all with links to relevant plugins and tools. If you are new to WordPress or want to refresh your blog, this is a good read through. Thanks Linked In messages.

Matt: After the Deadline now Open Source

Matt — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:28:25 +0000

After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.

BuddyPress: BuddyPress Updated to 1.1.2

Andy Peatling — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:25:42 +0000

BuddyPress 1.1.2 is now available via an automatic upgrade or manual download.

This is an important security release and fixes two vulnerabilities found in version 1.1.1. To stay protected it is essential that you upgrade to this version of BuddyPress regardless of the version you are currently running.

For a full list of fixes and closed tickets please consult the release history.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/25

Perurry — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:26:05 +0000

WP Full Site

A Hybrid child theme built for small businesses that that is tailored towards the basics of gaining customers.

THATSimple

Two column theme with a custom header and theme options

Furvious

This beautiful theme has 5 different style to choose from with built-in related post, pagination and others – customizable through its cool Theme Options page.

Boxpulse

Two-column Hybrid child theme that offers a certain elegance and includes a template made specifically for the included slider.

Modern Blue Dark

Modern Blue Dark is a sleek, modern design in blue with a dark background and Web 2.0-inspired wraparound headings. Widget-ready, gravatar-enabled, and set to download.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get it featured in these posts.

WordPress.tv: This Week on WordPress.tv: Oct 18—Oct 24

Ryan Markel — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:43:42 +0000

Another week, another great set of presentations published this week from WordCamp Seattle. This week brings the Seattle video to a close, and we hope you’ve found the presentations to be informative and useful.

The first set of sessions posted this week were a neat experiment from the Seattle organizing team: WordPress presentations done “Ignite-style”, where each presenter was given only five minutes in which to deliver their talk. As a result, you’ll find these talks move quickly and give you lots of information in a short amount of time:

We also published the closing session from Seattle, given by Liz Strauss:

Liz Strauss: Context, Campaigns, and the U Community

Remember that if you missed any sessions from WordCamp Seattle, you can view the whole list of them here.

Next week, we have a small series of videos that have come in from the community to publish while we wait for a short lull in WordCamp activity, but with WordCamps happening over the next few weeks in more places all over the world, we’re looking forward to more sessions from great speakers.

Stay tuned for more from WordPress.tv!

Weblog Tools Collection: Is PodPress Back?

Jeff Chandler — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:52:30 +0000

Dave Moyer who hosts the WordCast Podcast tipped me off to this development. Apparently, development on the PodPress plugin has resumed thanks to a couple of different things happening with the plugin author.

My work schedule is now setup to allow me to be more active in the community again, which means I can now get podPress dev and my Podcast going again.
Tons of people keep bugging me for updates, and I have appreciated every one of them
And special thanks to the new sponsor for giving me the final push that was needed to get going on development again.

However, the post on MightySeek.com was published on August 16th. There are a few other posts from the same time period yet the MightySeek blog has gone silent once again so I am unsure as to whether or not the plugin will actually be coming back. I’ve tried to get in touch with the author of the plugin but to no avail.

How many of you would like to see PodPress make a triumphant return?

Dougal Campbell: SimpleBits switches to WordPress

Dougal — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:49:30 +0000

Dan Cedarholm, web design guru extraordinaire, has switched his SimpleBits blog to WordPress.

Well, after 6+ years on an ancient and highly customized install of Movable Type 3.15, and 4+ years on various homegrown CMS solutions, I’ve finally upgraded the guts of this site. I chose WordPress. Sure, there are several other excellent options out there to power the blogs of 2010 and beyond, but the familarity of WP, its plugins, pricetag and other factors all fed into the decision. Plus, I told Matt in the halls of SWSW in 2003 that I’d try his little weblog project. I’m finally following through on that.

In addition to running the SimpleBits blog and web design company, Dan is the author of Web Standards Solutions, Bulletproof Web Design, and Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design.

WordPress.tv: Liz Strauss: Context, Campaigns, and the U Community

Ryan Markel — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:45:15 +0000

WordPress.tv: Mark McLaren: WordPress and the Social Web

Ryan Markel — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:30:16 +0000