Otto, who is a well known and respected member of the WordPress community has published a pretty cool article (WordPress 2.7 Comment Enhancements) which explains the various comment enhancements that have made it to the core of WordPress 2.7 thus far. Otto’s reasoning behind the post was to allow theme authors to gain a head start on creating themes which will be compatible with WordPress 2.7. One thing to keep in mind while reading this article is that, this information was compiled from using the latest developmental version of WordPress 2.7. This means things may not be set in stone with further additions or retractions possible before the initial release.
Here are some of the enhancements that Otto covers:
StayPressed is a free WordPress theme, with a double-column right hand-sidebar and a magazine style - kept simple, to let your blog content do the talking
Case is a dark WordPress theme with blue accents. It has an Ajax box in the sidebar that allows you to switch between categories, tags, recent comments, and recent posts without reloading the page and without taking up a lot of space, which keeps your blog nice and clean.
Iris is a a two column WordPress theme with Iris like colors. The theme is mostly purple, with pink, and blue, with nice gradients and textures. It has nice rounded corners on every post to separate them and drive focus to the content. It is widget ready and ready to demo and download.
With the impending release of WordPress 2.7, Otto has written a very nice article explaining how to get a theme ready for 2.7 to take care of the comments enhancements.
Matt Mullenweg #14 most influential on the web - BusinessWeek.: According to BusinessWeek, Matt Mullenweg is one of the 25 most influential people on the web. He shares the accolade with the likes of Steve Ballmer, Steve jobs, Joi Ito and Jon Stewart. At first I thought that this was a ranking much like the 50 most important people of the web from PC World but this appears to be more of a collection. Matt is labelled as “The Publisher” and WordPress as “the blogging service that most serious bloggers turn to”.
The associated article is more about how the web is magnifying the influence of jon Stewart and others like him in engaging the American Public in online discourse about the political campaigns. Be sure to check out the whole slide show.
We recently ran a reader survey to have you answer some basic questions that we had about Weblog Tools Collection and would like to thank all those who participated in the survey. We were not looking for specific answers but were trying to gauge some sentiments and help shape ourselves to serve you better. We are also looking for a better understanding of where we should spend our resources to provide the most value to our readers. In that spirit, most of the answers were helpful and some of the comments made us look a little closely at the mirror.
Here are the results from the survey
Where did you first hear about Weblog Tools Collection?
WordPress Dashboard 76.2%
WordPress Planet 4.8%
Google Search 11.9%
Link from Another site 4.8%
User Suggestions/Discussions 2.4%
Other (please specify) 0.0%
Are you subscribed to Weblog Tools Collection to receive daily updates?
Subscribed via RSS 25.0%
Subscribed via Email 0.0%
Already on Dashboard 50.0%
Read it on the web 23.8%
Subscribed via other means 0.0%
Other (please specify) 1.2%
Satisfaction ratings for Weblog Tools Collection
Overall satisfaction: 60% voted satisfied, 26% very satisfied
Frequency of posts: 50% voted satisfied, 35% very satisfied
Features of blog: 65% voted satisfied, 20% somewhat satisfied
Advertisements
Are they usable? 45% Undecided, 35% No
Have you ever clicked on any of them? 65% No, 35% Yes
Are there too many ads? 45% No, 35% Undecided
Are you an advertiser? 95% No
Site Features
Did you know that we offer a news forum? 55% No, 40% Yes
Did you know that we have a video site? 50% No, 40% Yes
Did you know that we have offer translations in 9 languages? 50% Yes, 35% No
Would you participate in future surveys to help us make the site better? 90% Yes
Did you know that registered users see far fewer ads? 80% No, 13% Not Important
The final question asked how we could improve the user experience on Weblog Tools Collection and about a quarter of the respondents sent us comments. Many of the answers were critical of our design. One simile in particular to a web 0.1 site made me shiver. There were comments on removing some of the ads and suggestions on how to make our posts better with more plugin reviews and more articles on design, development and WordPress technology. The primary sentiments expressed in the polls were also reflected in the detailed comments. We appreciate your feedback. Your opinion matters to us and helps us make the right decisions.
WordPress 2.7 UI Survey #2: Search box, Favorites menu, Future Publish.: You wanted more surveys and you got them! This time the WordPress 2.7 UI survey is about the search box, the add new post button and the future publish button. The poll is set for 5000 responses and will close thereafter. Have you voted yet? (0)
G4B Photo Gallery is a free, flexible plugin for WordPress. It provides a simple and effective way to include a complete gallery anywhere on your site, just by typing in a keyword.
This is a plugin that brings the anti-spam power of Mollom to WordPress. WP-Mollom protects your website against comment and trackback spam. The difference with other spam services is that Mollom takes care of everything. The idea is to relieve you, the administrator, editor, maintainer,… of whatever moderation or clean up tasks you would normally need to perform in order to keep your blog spamfree.
This plugin will help you and your readers to keep you on track for reaching your targets. We created this wordpress plugin that monitors the various blog goals and in an effort tries to engage your readers more effectively.
The Brokers Edge developed this free plugin to provide website owners with true easy to manage easy to configure menu solution for WordPress or WordPress CMS sites.
WordPress Help Desk is a comprehensive integrated help desk and trouble ticketing system that helps site admin to support there users and resolve issues quickly. Users and support personnel can interact in real time to report, diagnose and resolve issues quickly and with as little pain as possible. [EDIT] This plugin is ONLY compatible with WordPress MU
Instead of making the user agree to the Terms of Use when they join the site this plugin makes them agree to the terms and conditions the first time they login.
When the user navigate through the comments via page selector,only the comments area will be send to the client,not the full page.This actually save your server load and bandwidth thus making your blog faster and more responsive.
comment2tweet is a WordPress plugin which will automatically post new comments from a WordPress blog to a twitter account. The comment posted to twitter will be an excerpt 140 characters long, and includes a short url link back to the comment.
Instead of quickly giving up when a visitor reaches a page that doesn’t exist, make an effort to guess what they were
after in the first place. This plugin will perform a search of your posts, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested
URL. If there’s a match, redirect to that page instead of showing the error. If there’s more than one match, the
404 template can use some template tags to provide a list of suggestions to the visitor.
Talian is a 3 colomn premium theme with several new features (Post styling options, mini social bookmakers) and option pages e.g. custom sitemap, custom archives and custom link pages
Wp Foto theme is single layout theme designed for photo blogger. It uses custom fields for displaying thumbnail in home page, archive page, category and tag page.
PhotoQ is a WordPress plugin that turns your blog into a photoblog. If you have a lot of pictures to post, PhotoQ is your ideal companion. With PhotoQ you can mass upload several photos at the same time thanks to its batch upload functionality.
Admin Drop Down Menus rearranges the existing default Dashboard/Admin menus into javascript driven dropdowns, making navigation around your Wordpress Admin quicker, easier and considerably more efficient.
Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box.
Tabbed interfaces are the most common on newspaper type website where they can save a lot of vertical space and make it look less cluttered. This plugin allows you to create them.
The Blinko Broadcaster Plugin gives any WordPress user the opportunity to create their own broadcasting page, by signing up to an evaluation account to Blinko just by filling in an email address, all through a user-friendly interface in the Admin Panel.
WP MarkItUp! is the Wordpress plugin that replaces the old “quicktags” toolbar with MarkItUp!, a jQuery plugin written by Jay Salvat that allows to turn any textarea into an highly customizable markup editor.
Automattic Has Acquired IntenseDebate’s Enhanced Comment System: Automattic has acquired IntenseDebate for an undisclosed amount according to TechCrunch and this post on the IntenseDate blog. They are planning to delve into a closed beta once again while they ramp up their hardware for an onslaught of new users from Automattic. Plans include a tight integeration with WordPress (I am assuming with WordPress.com initially and maybe as a plugin for WordPress.org, thus the need for ramping up resources) but will continue to exist as a separate service and will be available for other platforms beside WordPress. Expect more news on this front very soon. Matt and Toni also talk about the acquisition.
It is no secret that Weblog Tools Collection is a magnet for comment spam. I am not sure if this is something to brag about but Akismet has caught over 3,588,568 spam comments as of writing this article. We spend a considerable amount of time moderating comments on this blog and lately the time spent has increased many fold. Let me explain.
Since automattic spamming of blogs has mostly been reduced to a trickle due to the likes of Akismet, spammers are now individually targeting blog posts with highly relevant, and in many cases highly convincing comments. I moderated and subsequently spammed a comment today that was over a hundred words long, on the pros and cons of one of the themes on our daily theme posts. I thought the comment was a very well written review of theme until I looked closely. The URI of the poster was a refinancing Made For AdSense page. One click of my itchy index finger and it was gone. Take that sucka!
This sort of relevant comment spam is not new but the time and effort spent on writing them seems to have increased quite a bit, where legit comments are harder to distinguish from spam. They now come with more Kung Fu and we need to spend more time and effort in identifying them. We use a plugin written by Alex King on this blog that can delink the comment authors. However there is lurking danger in just delinking a comment author since if the author was really a spammer, authorizing a comment is akin to authorizing them to post comments on your blog without moderation (they still have to go through Akismet even if the author was previously authorized). So if the comment looks really legit but has a lurking spam link in the URI, and Akismet thinks it is ham then you as the blogger never see it because it never gets put into the moderation queue and the spammer is successful.
In addition to much better comments from spammers, trackback spam have gotten clever as well. Spammy trackbacks from Russian and Chinese sites have increased considerably. They are much harder to identify as spam because of the language barrier and we have resorted to deleting them if they look anywhere close to being suspicious or add nothing to the conversation. We also delete any and all trackbacks from scraper sites. As a matter of fact, we use the blacklist feature to remove them from contention completely but scapers are another story for another day.
So we are spending more time moderating comments and often feel guilty that we might be spamming or deleting legitimate comments from folks whose site/blog look spammy to us (there was a poker blog that looked spammy but was written by a legitimate poker fan). Sadly, one persons’ spam might look to another person like ham and vice versa. It is getting harder to determine the spamminess of a comment because the distinguishing features that separate ham from spam continue to get more and more blurry. Please be (more) careful when approving a comment because you might be letting a spammer in.
“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”
Inspired on Wired Magazine look, Clean News is a theme with a large content area, but it also has a wide sidebar that allows to display even a 300px width ad. Home and single sidebars are independent, both widgetized, so you can easily choose what and where to display. A lot of white space to make your content stand out, low weight and no plugins required. It will load in the blink of an eye.
Many of you may or may not remember a WordPress podcast that was hosted and produced by yours truly called WordPress Weekly. The show made it through 22 episodes. Some of those included staple interviews with Matt Mullenweg, Lorelle Van Fossen, and Alex King. Because I took on more work, it became increasingly difficult to produce the show on a weekly basis for no pay. Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast doing it but I have to pay the bills. Therefor, I opted to concentrate on the work that would pay me versus doing the show for nothing. After I stopped producing the show, comments, emails and feedback through instant messaging started coming in, letting me know how much you enjoyed the show. Many people who had just discovered the show let me know that they were disappointed there would be no more episodes after 22.
I’ve taken all of your feedback to heart and have decided to bring the show back. Mark and I have decided to produce the show for WeblogToolsCollection as part of our content on this blog.
Little Bit Of History:
WordPress Weekly was a weekly podcast that discussed what happened within the past week within the world of WordPress. Generally every show was an open round table discussion. I had a number of people who would call in and chime in on stories I discussed during the show. Sometimes, this would be anywhere between 3-7 people on the phone at once, talking over each other but generally, having a good time. This time around, I plan on changing things up a bit. For starters, the show will now have a co-host. If there is anything I’ve learned while doing WordPress Weekly for 22 episodes, it is that having someone to talk to, to bounce stories off of is much better than facing the possibility of talking to myself, or a room of empty people. Two people engaging in a conversation is much better than what I can do single handedly. Also, I don’t have to worry if whether or not people will call in to the show to be part of the round table.
Introducing My Co Host:
My co host is more than qualified for the job. His name is Keith Murray and resides in Canada. He has been working with WordPress for a little while now. He is the author of the Admin Links Sidebar Widget plugin. He works as a systems administrator at his place of employment and his role on the podcast will be to discuss the development side of WordPress. I take things from an end users perspective, so we should match up pretty well in discussions.
WordPress Weekly Information:
WordPress Weekly is a weekly oriented podcast that takes place every Friday evening at 8PM EST starting on October 3rd, 2008 on Talkshoe.com. The format of the show will remain close to what it has been in the past. The co-host and I will discuss the WordPress news of the week. This could be plugin updates, releases, themes, version releases, development updates, a tutorial written by someone in the community, could be anything as long as it relates to WordPress. At the end of each show, Keith and I will give out our plugin of the week. This plugin is picked individually by us and is tested prior to the show.
I am aiming for a relaxing atmosphere where WordPress Users can gather around for 1 hour every Friday evening and discuss the latest happenings with everything WordPress. You could almost consider the show a virtual WordCamp.
Listener Participation:
So how can you be a part of the show? The easiest way is to create an account on Talkshoe.com. Then, download and install their client software (Talkshoe Pro). The Talkshoe software serves as a bridge of communication between the host, and his/her listeners. The software contains a chat room as well as phone number information to call into the show.
However, you do not need to install the software in order to listen to the show live. Friday October 3rd, at 8PM EST, look on the front page of Talkshoe.com or click on the LIVE NOW button and look for the Wordpress Weekly show. Instead of clicking on the JOIN IN button, click underneath where it says LISTEN ONLY. This will tune you into the live stream.
If you want to call in to the show via telephone, Skype, payphone landline, etc, dial 724-444-7444 and follow the audio instructions. *Note* In one of the recent updates to Talkshoe, anonymous calling is now supported. This means you can call in and participate without the need to create a Talkshoe account. However, if you have a Talkshoe account, your registered name will show up within the Talkshoe client letting others know who is speaking. I also want to let you know that Talkshoe has had problems with people calling in anonymously, trying to crash peoples shows or prank call hosts. Having a registered user account will give you a better chance of being on the air. When you dial into the show and you want to speak on the air, press *8 on your dial pad. This is the request to talk feature and will let me know you want to chime in on the discussion.
You can also use SIP clients such as ProjectGizmo or X-Lite. For example, when I use X-Lite to dial in, I type in 123@66.212.134.192 and then follow the audio directions. If you would like to use X-Lite but are unsure in how to configure the software, I highly advise you to check out my in depth tutorial (Installing And Configuring X-Lite)which explains everything you need to know.
Remember this information as it will be required when you want to dial into the show.
Talkcast Name: WordPress Weekly
Talkcast ID: 34224
Phone Number: 724-444-7444
This would also be a good time to remind you that Talkshoe now has a web client that you can access without the need to download or install any software. The web client makes it as easy as pie to participate in the show.
Subscribing To WordPress Weekly:
The first is by listening to the live stream. Every Friday at 8PM EST starting on October 3rd, a live stream of the show is enabled, allowing you to listen to the show LIVE as it is being recorded. You can listen to the live stream via the web application which allows you to chat, or you can listen to the stream only. It’s your choice.
The second option is to wait until the final show notes are published on WeblogToolsCollection. When the show notes for WordPress Weekly are finalized, I always embed a talkshoe player at the end of the post which allows you to listen to the show on the website.
The third option is to subscribe to the Talkcast RSS feed. Each Talkshoe player that is displayed on the website has a small RSS icon near the top right corner of the player. Clicking this icon will allow you to subscribe to the feed, and will download the latest episodes into your Feed Reader.
The fourth option is to subscribe to the show via Itunes. Talkshoe provides a link you can use to subscribe to a Talkshoe show through Itunes. If you want to subscribe via Itunes or RSS, the best thing to do is to visit THIS PAGE and click on the Itunes button or the RSS button.
The fifth option is to manually browse to the talkcast homepage and manually download each episode as an mp3 file. When you visit the homepage, click on the DOWNLOAD button and that will download the appropriate episode in an mp3 format that has no DRM attached to it.
Last but not least, if you would like to be reminded of the show via email, please create an account on Talkshoe.com and then visit my Talkcast page. After you create an account, you’ll be able to click on the FOLLOW THIS button, which will add your email automatically to the mailing list. Each time I send out a reminder of when the show will air, an email will be sent to the email address you configured when you created your Talkshoe account.
Things To Consider:
Unlike the other WordPress centric podcasts that are available, this one is not pre recorded and thus, the audio is not studio grade quality. With that said, my audio has always sounded great with my X-Lite/Talkshoe combination. But, I can only control the audio quality for myself and no one else. So while Keith and I may sound great, someone who calls into the show with a crappy cell phone may sound terrible and there will be nothing I can do about it. The show is produced as is. If you partake in the discussions, I prefer that you please refrain from using expletives during the show. I believe points can be made without using these types of words. I’d also like to keep the clean rating for the show on iTunes.
Do You Have Ideas:
I have a renewed sense as to how I want the show to be from here on out but I am open to ideas and suggestions to improve the show. At this point, I’d like to know from you, what are you looking for out of a WordPress centric podcast? Do you want more interviews rather than commentary on news? Do you want to know about themes and plugins more than anything else? Would you like us to do a roundtable show once a month or more? Would you like us to cover WordPress only or should we sometimes branch out and discuss topics that are related to blogging and not just WordPress?
If you can’t answer those, simply tell me in the comments what your expectations are for an excellent podcast centered on WordPress that you would listen to every week.
Thank you for taking the time to read this mile long manual. Keith and I will see you on Friday, October 3rd at 8PM EST.
Listen To Past Episodes:
By the way, if you would like a sample of WordPress Weekly before our relaunch, listen to some of my past episodes via the Talkshoe player. Pressing the play button will initiate episode 22 where I interviewed Alex King.
C4F Textarea Toolbar is a plugin for WordPress aimed at providing a simple yet very useful and precise tool to insert emoticons and markup in the comments’ textarea.
Simple Image Link lets you easily add images to your sidebar, be they advertisements, buttons of support or buttons of protest without the need for any HTML.
MTR Podcast Recorder offers real-time recording that is saved on the same server where WordPress is installed. All recordings will be saved into the MP3 format using LAME encoder.
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