Back in October, we told you about the new compatibility box that was added to the plugin pages within the repository. However, we’ve learned that this feature has one major drawback which is the crux behind this idea proposed by shinephp. I propose to add the field e.g. ‘Problem description’ required for input if visitor click ‘Broken’ button in the Compatibility widget. I’ve talked with a number of plugin developers and they have all said the same thing. The compatibility box is useless if feedback can not be tied to the rating. Sure, a support topic can be opened for the plugin but there is nothing tying that forum post to the broken rating. Mark Jaquith weighed in with an even better idea. They should get a chance (or a mandate) to provide feedback, and that feedback should open a new support thread. However, first, plugin authors need to be […]

I have hard time understanding the basis of this article but I wanted to link to it because I know many in the WeblogToolsCollection audience are coders themselves and it would be interesting to see the conversation that arises from Andrew’s post. WordPress coders have no class. At least, that’s what Andrew says in his post that discusses object oriented code being used in a non-object oriented environment. What do I mean by a non-object oriented environment? Well, firstly WordPress still does not require PHP5 for core code so there are limits to how many of the techniques it can use anyway. Secondly, WordPress has been around for a long time and has been developed by many contributors looking to achieve specific things with each patch without having a particular architecture imposed, except by committee. WordPress developers tend to start as users who learn PHP in fits-and-starts when they need […]

In a blog post titles “6 Steps to Kill Your Community“, Matt listed “Allow Spam Through” as the second step and “Don’t Participate in Comments” as the fourth step to killing your community. We treat comments and reader participation very seriously at Weblog Tools Collection. We highlight commenters, try to identify the frequent comments who participate willingly and heuristically remove nofollow tags from the links of commenters who participate in the community. I have personally chosen and thanked frequent commenter by providing them deeper access and rights to the various portals, elevating and applauding their presence within the community and have chosen most of my co-authors based on their participation and passion within the communities that I purvey. In short, I agree with Matt in that relevant comments and passionate participation are the lifeblood of any community. But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are […]

New Plugins PlaceWidget PlaceWidget for WordPress simplifies the process of adding a PlaceWidget to your WordPress blog. You can create and configure your PlaceWidget right in the WordPress Dashboard, then embed it in your sidebar with a standard WordPress widget. Category Ancestor Category Ancestor is a plugin that adds a function you can use anywhere in your theme : get_category_ancestor($thecat) to retrieve the highest level parent of any category. FAQ You It is a simple FAQ plugin where you can create Categories and put Questions in them. You can easily insert them in a page with the WYSIWYG editor. Able to turn JavaScript on or off. Free Stock Images Plugin Spice up your blog with high quality free stock images & photos created by professional photographers and illustrators: Easy to use search interface with advanced filtering and Drag & Drop functionality. Favicons Choose a favicon to make your site eye-catching […]

Detox The Detox BuddyPress theme, clean magazine style for a BuddyPress powered site with the brandnew Detox WordPress Theme theme, featuring a three column fluid theme layout, spiced up version of the Detox 3.17 WordPress Theme, enabled with flickr support, pagenavi support, frontpage slider, options panel, related posts and recent comments are built into the theme. Unwakeable The Unwakeable WordPress theme and is a combination of K2 and Unsleepable. It uses K2 as a starting point, and replaced the default K2 header with a modified header from Unsleepable. Bright Sky Two column theme with support for twitter and lifestream integration and an advertisement area and admin features You Name It You Name It is a simple WordPress Theme with two sidebars. Three sidebars support Adsense format 160px and 250px. Sysyphus Sysyphus is a 2 columns, Widget Ready, JQuery Powered, WordPress Theme, with carefully hand-crafted graphics and W3C Valid Code.

Last week I wrote up a post to review the Real-Time Find and Replace Plugin and the comments on that story about other methods to make site wide changes permanent sent me in search of another way to search and replace information in my SQL database. Now I consider myself pretty decent at geeky things but directly editing and messing with my site’s SQL database does not top my list of things to do.  Neither does manually going through nearly 1,000 postings to make changes. What I found was a terrific plug-in that lets me perform a few different functions to make corrections or change info throughout my site. Caveat: Before I get started – this plugin does make changes to your database. Play it safe and back up your info to protect your original data. With that said let me now introduce you to the Search Regex Plugin written […]

The WordPress Blog came out with some good news for the Open source and GPL community. Matt Mullenweg has officially started out the WordPress Foundation, a charitable organization to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

Craig Tuller of StudioPress.com has put together a post that contains information that needs to be repeated on a weekly basis. The basis of the post explains how downloading a theme or plugin from the wrong place can ruin your site. In the article, Craig publishes a small exchange that occurred between StudioPress and a customer who installed a non-purchased copy of a StudioPress theme. As it turns out, the non-purchased copy of the commercial theme contained code which generated links to porn sites on the customers website. This happens more often than it should but going down this road means you inherit the risks that come right along with it. Not only should the advice Craig gives near the end of the article be heeded, but you should also read this article written by Leland of ThemeLab.com which goes into more detail with regards to nasty stuff that can […]