Farms 100 Big Ones Theme Pack: Download this 100 WordPress themes zip file (17MB) and upload them to your blog to have 100 themes to play around with. Many of these themes are older but they are all widgetized, have a bunch of bug fixes, are internationalized, work on both WordPress and WordPress Mu and they have been time tested on Edublogs. I normally would not suggest that users download themes from sources other than the original theme authors’ site, but this is offered from a trusted source and the convenience of a single zip file added to the additional testing and bug fixing performed by Edublogs, is the icing on the cake.
[EDIT] James provided a preview of all 100 themes here. (8)
5/2/2008 ↓
The Best and Worst Times to Post
Want That Post to Go Popular? Here’s The Best and Worst Times to Post ItHe determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links. Interesting data and tabulation of said data to determine what is the best and worst time to publish a post. Data is derived from various information collected through aideRSS. I will not steal the original authors’ thunder by posting the answer here but I agree with the numbers for blogs which have a primarily US reader base. If your audience is from across the world (as on this blog), this might not be as relevant. (8)
4/29/2008 ↓
Need something designed? Crowdsource it.
99 designs is an interesting site. It fills a niche that I have carefully treaded in the past and have received negative feedback for (rightfully so). 99 Designs allows you to crowdsource your design needs. If an organization or an individual seeks a new design, they hold a “contest” of sorts using the tools built into 99 Designs and offer up some money for their project. Designers are then allowed to post entries for these and the contest holder is allowed to pick and choose the best design(s) and distribute the money based on the winning design. In the past designers have turned up their nose on design contests for a variety of reasons, most of which I agree with. However, the surprising thing about 99 Designs is the popularity of the site and the sheer number of designs that have been submitted for existing contest. Some of the work submitted is top notch. My question for designers is to find out whether competition has become so fierce and economic conditions so strained that contests are now fair game or have the rules changed a little? What do you think of the submitted designs on the linked site? (16)
4/15/2008 ↓
How-To: Use WordPress 2.5 Tooltips
How-To: Use WordPress 2.5 Tooltips Ozh has done it again! Have you noticed the cool little hover over tooltips on the WordPress 2.5 admin interface? Ozh’s small tutorial (with example code) shows us how to add your own tooltips to your cool WordPress plugins. (4)
4/12/2008 ↓
Javascript advice for WordPress Plugin Developers
Load Javascript With Your WordPress Plugin: Sage advice from a seasoned and proven plugin developer for WordPress. Ozh talks about some neat javacript loading options and dos and don’t s for plugin developers who need to load various javascript libraries. If you use javascript in your plugin and are not aware of wp_enqueue_script, you need to head over to Ozh’s post. (4)
The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress Loop: Ah, the famed WordPress loop that runs it all. Ronald has done a very nice job of identifying global variables in the WordPress loop in the past. Much like that post, this guide is for themers and plugin developers who want the inside scoop with some technical details on how things progress and what each of the pieces of code mean and how they do their job. The release of the fantastic 2.5 Brecker, all of this useful documentation being put together by the community and the tremendous theme designs being released, makes me want to add some fuel to the fire and build up the fever pitch. Stay tuned to this channel for some exciting news. (3)
4/3/2008 ↓
Organizing A WordCamp Part 1
WordCamps are awesome events that take up an extraordinary amount of time and effort to put together. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the recent WordCamp Dallas and I must admit, Charles Stricklin along with John Pozadzides did one heck of a job putting on a great conference. I thought it went over rather well and I have yet to hear anyone complain about any aspect of the event.
As promised, Charles has published the first in a series of articles which will cover in detail what it took in order to turn WordCamp Dallas from an idea, into a reality. The first article contains information related to the very beginnings of a WordCamp event. This is the brainstorming session.
The first three steps you should consider before going any further include:
Gauge interest.
Determine the overall structure of your WordCamp.
Pick a weekend, and maybe even a few alternate weekends
Charles plans on tackling the subjects of venue selection, pricing and sponsors so be sure to keep an eye on his blog for those posts. (6)
Jason Blanton of BloggingTips has put together a nice little article which covers five things you should do after you install your self hosted WordPress blog. These five things include:
Changing the permalink structure
Change the default theme
Update your ping services
Activate the akismet plugin
Burn your feed with FeedBurner
One item that I would add to this list is to figure out which stats program or service to use. You can use WordPress.com Stats which is a detailed stats plugin or you can use something like Google Analytics or MINT. One thing that I wish I could do if I could start over would be to integrate one of these nice statistical packages as they really come in handy down the road.
Jason mentions that this is only the first in a series of articles which will cover various things that you might want to tweak as you go along with using WordPress.
Although this short and quick guide is great for newcomers to WordPress, what about those who have established blogs? If you could go back in time and change the way or ways in which you began to use WordPress, what would those changes be? (27)
3/21/2008 ↓
Battle of the comment add-ons
Battle of the comment add-ons: Webware performs a comparison of six comment add-ons for WordPress and MT and puts together a list of the various features that each of them have to offer. Disqus comes out on top in their opinion. (4)
Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins: I am a sucker for top 10 lists about WordPress, especially if they contain useful information. This list of top ten plugins put together from the experiences of a professional design firm, will help you create a full CMS out of a WordPress blog. I have used a few of these myself on various projects and their flexibility and speciality together with WordPress’ versatility and extensibility make a phenomenal combination. From the post: For moderately sized sites (including simple e-Commerce sites), WordPress does a pretty good job as a CMS, making it easy to maintain your site, and update your content. Of course, it does this best with the help of a good theme, and some great plugins. The strength of WordPress is the community of developers who have already done almost anything you can think of with it. Here are the best plugins we’ve run across, the ones we install for nearly all of our client’s sites. Thanks Adam, via WordPress News(16)
3/2/2008 ↓
Two side-by-side columns in WordPress
How to organize posts into two side-by-side columns in WordPress: A quick tutorial on setting up the front page of a WordPress blog to display two side by side columns with posts alternating between the two columns. The tutorial does require some simple PHP code that is not included (but should be, pseudo code is provided) but the concept is interesting, especially for theme developers looking for the next new thing. In my experience, side by side posts are more applicable for blogs that are heavy in embedded media and light on text. (10)
Gravatars Without a Plugin
Connor Wilson has published a tutorial on how to setup Gravatars on your WordPress blog without the use of a plugin.
If you are comfortable editing theme files and don’t want the overhead of a plugin, then this technique should work for you.
I’ve added in my input in the comment’s section on how to use his technique in the sidebar of a post as well, which should be useful for blogs with multiple authors. (17)
2/1/2008 ↓
Instapaper: Easy, Personal Bookmarking
Instapaper: I came across this service via Techeme and was impressed with the ease of use. Although I barely ever have to “read something later”, one could use Instapaper to quickly and easily bookmark sites, blogs or news items for later reading which could then be cleaned up. Signup is incredibly easy and they provide you with a bookmarket to use. Would you use something like Instapaper? I wonder how they would monetize it? (13)
1/29/2008 ↓
List of WordPress Tutorials
List of WordPress tutorials: A bunch of WordPress tutorials on various topics in the form of screencasts. Topics include various tasks such as installation on a variety of platforms and tasks inside the WordPress admin. (3)
1/26/2008 ↓
WPTeX: WordPress to pdf ebook with LaTeX
WPTEX: Turn you wordpress blog into a pdf ebook using LaTeX Now I wrote my Masters Thesis in Microsoft Word and I would rather pull my hair out one at a time than do that again. However, I bring that up because I jealously watched as the other cohorts of my MS class put together their thesis with LaTeX with relative ease and perfect formatting. WPTeX will let you publish your blog as a PDF eBook using LaTeX and includes a lot of very cool features such as auto indexing and TOC generation. It is released under the GPL I will have to show this to my blogging dad who will love to have an eBook made out of his blog on research of health and wellness! (11)
1/22/2008 ↓
Matt Cutts On Securing WP
Matt Cutts has published an article which highlights three different ways to secure your WordPress installation. The first tip involves locking down your Admin directory. Matt configures his .hatccess file so that only his IP address is allowed to access the WP-Admin directory. For the second tip, you should create a blank index.html file to place into your wp-content/plugins directory. Not doing so allows your plugin folder to be wide open, giving nosy people an idea as to what plugins you have installed.
Matt’s third and final tip involves subscribing to the official WordPress development blog - http://wordpress.org/development/feed/ As we should all know by now, this is the best way to stay up to date.
Matt also offers a bonus tip where he suggest removing the line of code within your header.php file that publishes your WordPress version.
All of these are excellent tips. But what do you do to secure your WordPress installation?(18)
Powered by 
Designed by 
