Author Archive

Bulk Plugin Upgrades In 2.9

8
responses
by
on
October 29th, 2009
in
WordPress

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 […]

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What Is The Immediate Future Of bbPress?

15
responses
by
on
October 28th, 2009
in
bbpress

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 […]

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Are Your Plugins Compatible?

30
responses
by
on
October 27th, 2009
in
WordPress

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 […]

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Is PodPress Back?

16
responses
by
on
October 24th, 2009
in
WordPress Plugins

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 […]

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Using Conditional Statements In WordPress

8
responses
by
on
October 22nd, 2009
in
WordPress

Addicott Web has a great little article online that goes in depth on the uses of WordPress conditional statements. The Conditional Tags can be used in your Template files to change what content is displayed and how that content is displayed on a particular page depending on what conditions that page matches. These statements enable a wide range of flexibility when it comes to when and where to display content. In fact, I use conditional tags all the time with my use of the Widget Logic plugin. I tell the widget which page I want it to be displayed on with a conditional statement and it only shows up on that page. I love these things. Let me know in the comments what you’ve been able to achieve using them in your own theme or widgets.

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Which OpenSource CMS Has The Best Brand Strength?

7
responses
by
on
October 21st, 2009
in
LinkyLoo

CMSWire in partnership with Water And Stone has released their 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report. The report is free if you care to dive in and look at look at the results which were comprised of over 1,000 respondents. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to know that the top three systems represented in the survey are Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. However, unlike last year, all three switched top metrics with Joomla taking the popularity prize. However, WordPress dominated the brand strength category. According to CMSWire, they think that having two projects with the same name contributed a large part to the branding strength of WordPress. WordPress.com the free hosting service enables users to get their feet wet encouraging them later on to take the plunge to self install WordPress. To veterans in the WordPress community, this branding is a nightmare but it’s obviously had a positive […]

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WordPress 2.8.5 Out The Door

35
responses
by
on
October 20th, 2009
in
WordPress

WordPress 2.8.5 has officially been tagged and is now available for download. If you don’t see the upgrade nags in your administration panel already, give it a few hours and upgrade when it becomes available. This release has been dubbed a security hardening release meaning, more preventive measures have been taken to secure WordPress. Worthy of note though is an issue that was addressed dealing with a trackback spam denial of service attack which was discussed on the WP-Hackers mailing list the other day. This exploit takes advantage of the WP-Trackback.php file which would exhaust a servers resources when used. This has specifically been addressed in 2.8.5. Thanks goes out to Steve Fortuna for releasing a fix to this 0 day exploit. The release also contains a few bug fixes as well.

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Gravatar Encouragement

11
responses
by
on
October 19th, 2009
in
WordPress Plugins

Back in August, I asked the following question: Why Is Gravatar Still Not Mainstream?. You folks supplied a wealth of answers to the question but many of the answers suggested something along the lines of making it easier to obtain a Gravatar through registration if they didn’t have one. While I’ve yet to see news on such an integration, there is a plugin that has been developed by Milan Dinic called Gravatar Signup Encouragement which enables you to encourage Gravatar registration to anyone who is not a registered member on your WordPress powered site. Message can be shown to: unregistered commenters when they leave text input field for e-mail address registered commenters to whom their registered e-mail address is checked registered users on their profile page, to whom their registered e-mail address is checked users who fill registration form when they leave text input field for e-mail address You can […]

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Theme Authenticity Checker

22
responses
by
on
October 16th, 2009
in
WordPress Plugins

Outside of the WordPress.org theme repository and the GPL commercial theme vendors, there are few spots where you can download a variety of themes which do not contain some sort of sponsorship or encrypted code. One site still cranking out great, quality free themes is Themelab run by Leland. However, in most of the theme release posts that are published on WeblogToolsCollection.com, the theme has to be downloaded from the authors website. We do not install and test every theme mentioned in these release posts. However, if you are worried about downloading a theme that contains malicious code or obfuscated code, this somewhat new tool called Theme Authenticity Checker may help you out. The Theme Authenticity Checker is a plugin that scans all of the files for all installed themes looking for links, malicious code, etc. Not all obfuscated code is bad but generally, it is not placed in a […]

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