During the WordPress development chat today, one of the topics of discussion centered around the suggestion of changing the Hello World post that is seen with every new install of WordPress to something that contained useful WordPress specific information such as links to the release mailing list, the codex and other helpful material. I’d like to break down how this change came about to show how easy it is to contribute to the WordPress project without writing a line of code. It first started out as a discussion on the WordPress Hackers mailing list concerning the addition of email notifications to the core of WordPress to keep administrators abreast of new versions of WordPress as they were released. The discussion became long winded but a response by Lynne Pope provided one of those why didn’t I think of that moments. Change the sample data – instead of, “this is a […]

New Plugins Local Time Using JavaScript, Local Time automatically transforms all dates and times on your blog into the visitor’s timezone. Fytch Comments Fytch is a fully featured plugin that provides comment publishing to http://fytch.com It allows to assign a Fytch topic to each post so that wordpress comments are co-published under the appropriate topic on http://fytch.com. It not only allows to publish comments to http://fytch.com but to Twitter and FriendFeed as well. vlam-a-post vlam-a-post automatically creates a vl.am URL for every post you publish and keeps track of the number of clicks the vl.am URL received. After publishing your post you can easily post your vl.am URL to twitter. Amazon Affiliate Linker The Amazon Affiliate Linker Plugin allows easy linking to Amazon.com products by only using the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). It also allows you to embed your Amazon Associate link so that you can pick up affiliate […]

Antonio Lupetti of Woorkup.com has created and released an awesome visual cheat sheet for WordPress 2.8. The cheat sheet contains a practical reference guide to 2.8 with references to WP Template Tags as well as sample code. Definitely worthy of being added to your resources bin. Check out the live demo before you download the guide.

Here’s a quick one: If you had access to a desktop application that could connect to your WordPress site and allow you to manage it, like the web-based control panel currently allows, would you use it? Would You Use a WordPress Desktop Application?(answers) If you choose “depends”, let me know why in the comments. Also, feel free to put in your opinions no matter what you choose. What would such an application need to be able to do? Everything the web-based app can do? Just a subset of the features? What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

ExtizeMe A WordPress theme written mostly in JavaScript. Layout, behavior and look&feel are made with Ext Js Library ThrillingTheme Two column theme with three widget ready areas and available in three color schemes. Color3 Colorful clean and stylish theme with two columns, right sidebar dropdown menu and widget-ready. Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get these listed in our release posts.

How cool would it be to take a look at a Google map to see if there are any WordPress fans near your location? Thanks to a new site called WPWorldmap.net, now you can. The site is made up of a Google map with a draggable window that contains the options to sign up or to apply filters such as fans, core developers, users/bloggers, etc. The other neat thing about this site is that it shows upcoming WordCamp events across the world. Signing up was a breeze and if you use Twitter, you can use your account to sign up while also following anyone who has registered to the site already. Of course, WPWorldMap is only as helpful as the amount of people who decide to signup and appropriately apply their approximate location so if interested, sign up and leave your mark. You might be surprised by the number of […]

New Plugins Fortune Kookie This WordPress plugin adds a sidebar widget to display a random fortune cookie fortune. The database hosted on FortuneKookie.com has over 1500 unique fortunes and each fortune includes the front message, the back word(s), and the lucky numbers. Custom Login Page WordPress Custom Login Page allows you to customize your login page beyond any plugin previously available. Your background image, logo image, and form div background are all customizable. Category Checklist Tree Prevents checked categories from going to the top of the checklist on the post editing screen. WP Content Slideshow WP Content Slideshow is the perfect Slideshow for WordPress. It displays up to 5 Posts with Tile, Description and Image for every Post. JR_Quotes This plugin allows you to display geek quotes, pop quotes, general quotes, religious quotes and sci-fi quotes, all with a simple widget. Updated Plugins Regenerate Thumbnails Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to […]

One of the most difficult tasks I see for the WordPress project in the next 1-2 years is creating a place to harness the power of the WordPress community into a central location. In my opinion, the WordPress community is like peanut butter, spread across the web really thin. You have to be subscribed to a bunch of different blogs throughout the community in order to get a grasp as to what is happening with the WordPress project. Other than enthusiast sites, you have to know which mailing lists to subscribe to, the developments prologue site, attend the developer chats, and occasionally read a WordPress centric blog post or two from one of the core developers in order to figure out what is going on. I don’t like this situation. Instead, I would love to see a community portal developed on the WordPress.org site that contains the tools necessary to […]