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Where to Find WordPress News

James — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:05:06 +0000

The landscape of news has changed so much over the last few years that news about a particular topic or platform is readily available to anyone within an instant. With WordPress, I imagine that could be one of the perks of powering over 16% of the web, but it’s true that news is becoming incredibly accessible. In short, news is everywhere.

Speaking of WordPress in general, you can of course acquire official direct news from WordPress News, but you can also take a peak behind the curtain and follow news in the making at Make WordPress.org. Though it’s only specific to the WordPress.com blogging platform, WordPress.com News is also worth watching for WordPress development news, as WordPress.com users often get access to new WordPress features before they’re released, so you’ll be able to try new features rather than just read about them.

There’s more news than just direct official news, like I said earlier, it’s everywhere. You could subscribe to every general news site, every core developer’s personal blog, every premium theme shop, and every plugin developer, but why not subscribe to a few curated news sources instead? I guess you could call WordPress Planet the official curated news source, but it’s really just a collection of all news items from a particular set of curated blogs. For specific news items curated from sources through the entire WordPress community, subscribe to Post Status, and don’t neglect the power of allowing the folks you follow on Twitter, Google+, and/or Facebook to curate news for you.

Speaking of the WordPress community, you should get involved if you aren’t already. If you don’t even use WordPress yet, it’s time to get started with either WordPress.org or with WordPress.com, share your thoughts with the world, and maybe spread some WordPress news on your blog too.

The news is out there, and it’s well within your reach. If you can’t find the news, it’s time to make your own.

WordPress Theme Releases for 10/16

James — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 13:00:15 +0000

Exhibition is a perfect theme for any artist to showcase their portfolio and blog about their work.

Journal is a simple, attractive, one column theme that would suit a diary or journal site.

Terminal features multiple layouts, a custom Twitter widget, and theme options.

Questions To Ask Before Purchasing A Plugin

Jeff Chandler — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:43:29 +0000

Darnell Clayton of BloggingPro has published his list of questions you should have answered before you spend your hard earned cash on a plugin. While most of his questions are good ones, I’d say one of the most important is the aspect of support after you pay. Some commercial plugin providers have switched from unlimited support for the lifetime of the product to yearly subscriptions. For example, a plugin may cost $50.00 for the initial purchase which includes a year of support and upgrades but after the first year, you can opt to pay $25.00 for support or only the upgrades. So far, I’ve had great success with the money I’ve spent on commercial plugins but thoroughly do your research before you spend anything.

WordPress Continuing to Gain CMS Popularity

James — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:00:40 +0000

WordPress is continuing its climb to CMS fame, according to some impressive stats by Water & Stone.

Of note in the report, “The Big Three — WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal — remain ?rmly in command of the market,” and “WordPress has taken the lead in brand strength after a strong growth year.”

The report itself is quite detailed, and well worth an evening or weekend read.

Decreasing WP Auto Save Time

Jeff Chandler — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:22:42 +0000

How many times has the auto save feature in WordPress saved your butt? By default, WordPress auto saves posts every 60 seconds. Paul Maloney of WPZine.com has a snippet of code that you can add to your WPConfig file to decrease that time to increase peace of mind. If you don’t want to use the auto save feature, think about increasing the time to a week instead of disabling it completely.

While reading about this tip by Paul, I started to wonder if Post Revisions were tied to auto saves because if they were, decreasing the auto save time would substantially increase the number of post revisions which in turn, would substantially increase the size of the database over time. After performing some simple tests, I discovered that auto saves are NOT tied to Post Revisions. Unlike Post Revisions, there is only one auto save that is continuously over written. Also, Post Revisions are only created after the user saves the post either as a draft or an edit to an existing post. Just some food for thought.

Installing WordPress Without A Domain Name

Jeff Chandler — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:00:26 +0000

Miriam Schwab of WPGarage.com has a neat little tip that explains how to install WordPress without using a domain name. The trick involves editing the Hosts file on a Windows machine to specify a domain name for the server address the site is hosted on. Mike Little who published a comment on the article made note that it’s not a Windows only trick but can also be performed on Linux/Unix and Mac OSX. This trick enables the previous site to stay online until the last minute where a simple DNS change will switch to the new site.

Pretty URL For WordPress Login

Jeff Chandler — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:00:18 +0000

In a typical WordPress installation http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php is used to log in to the back-end of the site with the addition of a sub-domain if it’s in use. Personally, I have this link bookmarked so I don’t have to type it in all the time but Chris Coyier of Digging Into WordPress.com has shared a tip to make the log-in URL a bit more pretty. It’s a simple rule added to your .htaccess file. With Chris’s tip applied, the log-in URL will look like http://yoursite.com/login which is much easier to remember than wp-login.php.

How do WordPress Automated Upgrades Work?

James — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:00:31 +0000

Have you ever wondered how WordPress handles the automated core, plugin, and theme upgrades? Well, it’s time for some quick weekend education!

Long-time support forum volunteer, Ipstenu, has done all the thinking for you and has clearly laid out the inner-workings of the automated upgrade process.

It’s a quick read, and you might leave with a new respect for the automated upgrade system, and a new understand for why you should create a child theme if you want to modify your own theme.

Add Voice Search to WordPress

James — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:00:42 +0000

Do you have a WordPress blog? Do you want to add voice search to your blog? Well, thanks to Otto the Tech Ninja, you can with just a slight modification to your theme!

Yes, this will only work in Google Chrome if you have the Voice Search extension or if you’re using the latest development version, but with most computers shipping with built-in microphones these days, Voice Search certainly makes searching easy, and it’s a great way to impress your friends.

WPBeginners List Of Their Best Tutorials For 2010

Jeff Chandler — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:00:10 +0000

WPBeginners has published their list of the best tutorials they have written in 2010. Over the course of the year, WPBeginner has covered everything from how to install a plugin to useful configuration tricks you may not have noticed. They end the list by linking to some other cool tutorials they have discovered on other sites. Looks like WPBeginner had a great year.

Stay tuned to WeblogToolsCollection.com as I publish a two part series of our own showcasing WordPress news in review, WLTC style.

The Most Reliable Blogging Services

James — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 14:00:41 +0000

Pingdom, a popular website monitoring service, performed a two month experiment to find the most reliable blogging services.

From October 15th to December 15th, Pingdom ran a variety of checks every minute from multiple locations around the world on the homepage and four individual blogs from each blogging service.

In the end, WordPress.com came out as #2, just behind Blogger, which should be the expected winner since it’s backed by the entire Google network.

Adding Menus To The Admin Bar

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:00:29 +0000

As part of their ongoing series, WPEngineer has published a cool post that explains how to add new menus to the admin bar coming in WordPress 3.1. In the example, Frank adds a Codex Search button to the admin bar which is pretty convenient! He covers the function add_menu() and it’s various parameters as well. In the comments of that post however, Latz brings up an interesting point.

Oh great, now every plugin will put a menu in the admin bar, Next stop: a plugin preventing others from cluttering the admin bar.

While it’s pretty funny to think about the admin bar containing menus for all sorts of different plugins, it’s a potential problem that users may have to deal with in the future. Hopefully, plugin authors are diligent with not adding a menu to their options page as part of the default package of a plugin. For certain plugins, the idea works well but not for all of them.

So while this is a neat little tutorial on how to add menus to the admin bar, are you worried that plugin developers may take this too far?

Theme Malware Anatomy

Jeff Chandler — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:00:30 +0000

One of the biggest problems facing users of WordPress today especially when it comes to themes is malware. I’ve seen my fair share of websites using themes whose functions.php file contains base64 encrypted code that when decrypted, shows spam links. However, there also a number of themes that have code within them that installs malware onto the web server. After Chip Bennett, one of the Theme Team Reviewers noticed at least one of his themes were being made available on a website that claimed to have free WordPress themes, he discovered that something was not right. All of the themes available on the website contained some sort of malware that would be installed onto the users site once enabled.

Otto does a great job going in-depth and explaining exactly how this particular piece of theme malware works. Most of the explanation is over my head but it gives you a sense of not only how desperate but also how clever these spam kings are getting in having their way with your website. This is why we preach that you always get your free themes from the WordPress.org Theme Repository because each theme is now reviewed with human eyes to make sure none of that garbage gets into the repository.

The theme repository contains almost 1,300 themes but quite a few of them look like they were designed in early 2000. So I can understand why users would want to expand their reach and check out the wider marketplace of freely available themes but just remember, when you download and use a theme that is outside of the repository, you do so at your own risk.

As an aside, this video which was produced by Leland of Themelab.com provides a great explanation as to why you want to stay away from using Google when searching for freely available themes.

Goal: Not To Be Acquired

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:00:37 +0000

Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider both whom are in attendance for the LeWeb 10 conference were recently interviewed by TechCrunch reporter, Alexia Tsotsis. The interview doesn’t go into much detail but we do get a glimpse as to how things are going for Automattic as a company. WordPress.com is getting about 300 million unique pageviews a month from 30 million publishers that make up 10% of the websites on the web. In terms of revenue, Automattic is breaking even but as a company, they make a little under $1 million per month with all services combined. TechCrunch figures that this equates to $10 million a year. Perhaps it’s just me but if that is correct, that number seems pretty low considering how large WordPress.com is.

However, the best part of the interview comes down to the final question regarding any potential exit potential for the company. Their response: “Our goal’s not to be acquired“.

New Ways to Find WordPress Themes

James — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:00:42 +0000

There are thousands of themes available for WordPress. Today, the largest collection of WordPress themes can still be found through the official Theme Directory and its Tag Filter, but two new directories have brought some new concepts to the plate when it comes to finding your next WordPress theme.

WPCandy’s Theme Finder offers an elimination-style overview of available themes utilizing color, number of columns, and price (free v.s paid) as factors.

Theme Garden’s Layout Browser offers a very comprehensive directory of themes based strictly on layout.

While WPCandy’s Theme Finder is filled with mostly premium themes and Theme Garden’s Layout Browser is restricted solely to their theme marketplace, the two bring something new to a field that was long thought to be well saturated by the official Theme Directory.

What do you think of these new theme directories? Do you think that some of these features should be added to WordPress’ official Theme Directory?