Here in Northern Ohio, it’s been one of those chilly Winters. I wish I could attend the upcoming WordCamp in Miami, Florida on February 20th from 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM (ET). The event will be taking place on the University of Miami Campus so there is bound to be great internet coverage. The speakers list is still being arranged but so far, Scott Kingsley Clark is a confirmed speaker who will discuss the PODS plugin. Other notable members of the community that will be in attendance are Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith, Jane Wells and a host of other WordPress regulars. Registration for the event is currently open with tickets costing $30.00 each. Updated information can be found on the official WordCamp Miami website.

New Plugins Page Manager This plugin allow users to order pages easily in the page overview and also add some clarity to the overview. Show more pages With this plugin you or your clients can select how many pages they want to show per page in the overview. I Make Plugins A plugin for WordPress plugin authors to let them easily showcase their plugins on their own site, solely by updating the plugin’s readme.txt file. Easy Theme and Plugin updates This plugin allows for installed themes to be upgraded by using the Appearance > Add New Themes > Upload feature of WordPress. Without this plugin, themes can only be installed using this method, requiring you to first delete the theme before installing the newer version. Now features the same easy upgrading for plugins via the Plugins > Add New > Upload page. Events Calendar The Events Calendar plugin enables you […]

Do you find upgrading themes to be a pain? To be honest, I don’t upgrade themes very often if at all but if you do, there is a newly created plugin that ought to make the process much easier on you. It’s called Easy Theme Upgrades and was developed by Chris Jean of iThemes. It’s quite simple to use. Upon giving it a test run this morning, it performed flawlessly without any errors. I also confirmed that the backup zip file contained the changes I made to the files before they were deleted. This is very handy considering many people hack their themes to bits and pieces. This method insures that you don’t lose those changes forever but instead, can go into the archived files to copy and paste your bits into the new version. One of the biggest fears in upgrading a theme is the fact that you’ll lose […]

Zada News A professional looking Newspaper theme. Contains the features you’d expect on a news site such as breadcrumbs navigation and sub category menus. Has three columns, and is fixed width with straight lines. Code based on News Magazine Theme 640 by antisocialmediallc.com Chad from bleach anime This theme is focused on character referred as Chad from Bleach anime & manga Ipsum.ak Three column, fixed width, gravatar and threaded comments ready theme with .PSD file included kozuka Two column, fixed width theme made specially for photographers 5 Free Food, Recipe and Cooking WordPress Themes Widget-ready, gravatar-enabled, two column, fixed width themes

According to the WordPress.com support page on short codes they are defined as follows: A shortcode is a WordPress-specific code that lets you do nifty things with very little effort. Shortcodes can embed files or create objects that would normally require lots of complicated, ugly code in just one line. Shortcode = shortcut. Many WordPress plug-ins make use of short codes to easily make a call to a plug-ins functionality.  This can make maintaining your WordPress based site very easy but what happens if you decide to shift from one plug-in to another and that specific short code is not used in the new plug-in? Let me give you an example.  I used to use the WordPress Adsense Manager Plug-in on WindowsObserver.com to place my Google Adsense ads.  It allowed me to build the ad and then use a short code to place it on a page or in a […]

Quite recently, is_home() and is_archive() stopped working for me. I mean, that these conditional tags stopped working for me and the intended code I had was not performing as expected.

New Plugins cbnet MBP Auto-Activate MaxBlogPress plugins require a two-step registration/activation process, as well as a forced opt-in to an email-list subscription, in order to use them. This plugin circumvents those requirements, enabling unrestricted use of the plugins. BFT Autoresponder This is the easiest to use sequential autoresponder plugin. Allows scheduling unlimited number of emails, members, import/export and customization of the emails. The HTML code of the registration form can be placed anywhere in the blog or in some other site.The plugin allows double opt-in and attaches unsubscribe link to all messages cbnet Ping Optimizer Do you know your WordPress blog pings unnecessarily every time you edit a post? Think how many times you click on “Save and Continue Editing” or “Save” button. Your blog will ping unnecessarily that many times you click on those buttons. Save your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. WP […]

This post written on the WeblogToolsCollection.com forums as a news submission has been well received by plugin developers that have taken notice. The article explains how to include CSS and JavaScript conditionally so that the code is not loaded on every page of the site. If you think about it, there are many plugins that only do something once in a blue moon. Table of contents, text manipulators, galleries, sliders, etc, etc. If only they loaded their frontend code strictly when necessary, most page loads would suddenly become much lighter. This technique if implemented by plugin authors sounds like it could have a significant impact on end users websites, especially when it comes to loading times. I’m always impressed with the speed of WordPress when I install a fresh copy without any plugins. WordPress loads very quickly both on the front and back ends. However, once I activate 30 or […]