Remember Gravatar? That service Automattic acquired back on October 18th, 2007. It’s nearing two years since the acquisition and I don’t know about you but, I don’t feel as though Gravatar has gone mainstream. Just as a refresher course, the idea behind Gravatar is to host a globally-recognized avatar that is tied to an email address. This means that using your Gravatar is as simple as using the same email address to sign up to supported services/software that you used on Gravatar.com. Doing a bit of history, Gravatar has been around since at least 2004. At least that is as far back as the Web Archive has records of it which makes it all the more surprising that more services and software do not support it out of the box. For example, Twitter, Facebook, phpBB, all have their own way of handling avatars. No support what so ever for the […]

New Plugins Post Event You often ask how could you create event using wordpress, organize jobs meeting, party or holidays with your friends and contact them easily ? Then “Post Event” is THE events plugin for wordpress you are looking for! WP-IRC Plugin WP-IRC Plugin can fetch the number of users online in any IRC channel and can be scheduled to auto refresh it every x.minutes. The count thus fetched can be displayed in the sidebar of your blog using a sidebar widget provided by the Plugin. Easy Translator Easy Translator is a plugin to translate other plugins.Plugin authors who want to clean up their internationalization will appreciate Easy Translator because it does a fuzzy string matching to highlight possible repetitions and conflicts among key strings. Note that Easy Translator is not a blog page translator for a blogger. Text Hover Add hover text to regular text in posts. Handy […]

WordPress Theme Development Tools.: ThemeShaper puts together a list of many of the ingredients required to develop your own WordPress themes including the test content that helps to test the demo the functionality of WordPress themes and tutorials to help beginners get started. The inclusion of useful development tools such as Firefox extensions and even links to free text editors are appreciated. The one inclusion that I would have expected from the blog of a theme framework developer would have been a list of theme frameworks that a beginner could get started with.

Back in early July, I asked the question is WordPress a thankless community? Not surprisingly, this post struck a chord with both developers and end users. The point of the article was to raise awareness that there are a number of people who give to the WordPress community and it seemed as though a large portion of the community was not stopping to at least say thank you for the contributions. In the article, I present a few different methods for showing appreciation or for giving back but too many people in the comments focused on the monetary aspect of the situation which is not what I had in mind. In this post, I’m going to highlight a number of different ideas, comments, and blog posts that came out of the discussion. First, we have Matt Mullenweg who shares his thoughts on the idea that WordPress is a thankless community. […]

If you are a WordPress user, WordPress now have their own URL shortening service in the form of WP.me, short and sweet right.

Ringbinder Ringbinder has been updated; is a free WordPress theme, two-column, with a right sidebar, it’s now compatible with WordPress version 2.7 upwards, and all set for threaded comments Old Popular Yolk Old Popular Yolk is a free WordPress theme that is easy to customise and minimal, featuring a print stylesheet and some exciting CSS3 treats. Supports threaded comments for WordPress 2.7 and beyond. Aligned to a vertical and horizontal grid, with a whiff of the International Typographic Style wpShow [removed, premium theme] wpShow is a video theme for your blog enables you to feature videos as posts alongside with the regular blog posts. Widget and gravatar ready and supports three different styles. Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get listed in these releases.

Metisca Metisca is a 2-column right sidebar SEO optimized theme designed especially for Google Adsense 336×280 Ad unit and commonly available 300×250 Ad Units from Advertisers. The header has a simple yet elegant look with pearl white title and slogan text over a beautiful Sky Blue background. Electric XHTML Two column, widget ready theme in black Dark Side A dark colored, two column, widget ready and WordPress 2.5-2.8 compatible WordPress theme. Also, check out Enlighten from the same author. Playground A two column theme that comes widget ready. With Sociable and WP-PageNavi plugins preloaded. Using a green-brown color scheme. IMYJ Simple two column theme in white, with black text, and blue links.

If you don’t know by now, WordPress 2.8.4 has hit the public and it addresses a mild but hugely annoying issue. There was no advanced warning regarding the vulnerability but it was quickly patched in the core of WordPress for the next release. Unfortunately, word quickly spread and in fact, even my site WPTavern.com was affected by the problem as I received an email letting me know what my new password was even though I didn’t request one. Here are the details regarding the annoyance: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is […]