2007 Crunchies: The Winners: Automattic won both categories they were nominated for. I love the way “long tail” is misspelled (I hope) in the article. Congratulations to Toni, Matt and the rest of the Automattic team!

One of the downsides of having a popular plugin is the amount of support requests, bug reports, and feature suggestions that come in. Well, it’s not that bad, but sometimes it’s difficult to organize what features should be added, what bugs must be tackled first, and what can just be ignored. If you’re one of the few and the proud over at WP Extend Plugins, you have a nice tool at your disposal to keep track of all your plugin related needs. The tool, you ask? It’s the trac ticketing system over at the WordPress Plugin Repository. WordPress Plugin Repository WordPress Plugin Repository – Trac Each plugin hosted on WP Extend allows the plugin author to post and assign tickets to their plugin. In fact, any member of the WP Support Forums can post a ticket against any plugin hosted in the official repository. Logging into the WP Plugins Repository […]

WordPress Publisher Blog is (going to be) written by various team members at Automattic and their goal is to help all publishers get the most out of WordPress. They will cover features that are often overlooked, highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality and showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress. They are looking for publishers working on innovative projects using WordPress and would like to field questions from users. From the comment that Raanan left on PressedWords, it would appear that they want to focus on large WordPress installations that are doing lots of custom work and help publishers find the proper resources. A definite daily read!

Theme Releases Two Column Themes GreenTech GreenTech is a two column theme with pleasant colors. It makes use of a mix of brown and green colors. The background is creme in color. There are plenty of advertisement options available in this theme. Author comments on the blog are styled differently than the other comments. Overall a good looking theme. Widget Ready: Yes Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock. The header section appears broken in Opera. Validations: Invalid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 29 errors | Invalid CSS with 1 error Demo | Release Page | Download Three Column Themes My Starcraft 2 My Starcraft 2 is a theme based on Starcraft 2. The theme uses dark and vibrant colors with a mix of black and gray. The links are orange color making it more visible on the darker background. Overall […]

Quite often, we hear of the terms (permalinks or pretty permalinks) which can also be called SEO-friendly URLs. These URLs are not only SEO friendly, but I believe they are human friendly as well. By default, WordPress uses URLs that look like a mishmash of letters and numbers with a few question marks mixed in for good measure. These types of links are frowned upon by search engine spiders and as a human being, they are also hard to read. Fortunately, WordPress provides a way for us to change this linking structure to something understandable. WordPress calls these Permalinks. Permalink settings can be configured a number of different ways. One of the ways to quickly configure permalinks is by choosing one of the Common Options. These common options include: Default – http://www.domain.com/?p=123 Date and name based – http://www.domain.com/2008/01/15/sample-post/ Numeric – http://www.domain.com/archives/123 There is no sense in using the default option […]

One Column Themes DePo Skinny A very simple one column theme with easy integration for your Flickr pictures at the top of the page. It is a real bare bone theme and is only 500 pixels wide. Though DePo Skinny does not have a sidebar it makes it up in the footer with a bottom sidebar to display additional information. Being a one column theme main advertisement options are within the post itself. Widget Ready: No Sidebar Options Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers. Validations: Invalid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 30 errors | Valid CSS Demo | Download Two Column Themes Twister 2.0 Twister 2.0 is made up of dark colors with a mix of gray and black with on a grayish background. The links are white in color and easy to spot with the darkish […]

This post is not written by me but is reproduced, with permission, from a post in the Weblog Tools Collection News Forums. It was written by Weathervane. Since  Frank has downloaded 530 plus plugins, and most of his thoughts are well expressed and documented, this post might trigger some good conversation. Please chime in. As a new WordPress blogger, I wanted to customize my installation, so I began a review of the available plugins. My first installation of WordPress was version 2.3.1. Because this version was a significant change, there was a list of v2.3.1-compatible plugins, of which I downloaded and tried most of them. Since then, I’ve downloaded 530± plugins (this was what’s left after deleting extensions of commercial services), and tried/tested most of them. Five-hundred± is an incredible number and rivals, I think, Photoshop actions or plugins—and there are lots of those. The WordPress plugins community is impressively […]

CoverItlive.com is a free (for now) service that allows you to live blog events and publish items directly to any publishing platform. Now this is pretty commonplace and can easily be done with WordPress (and a few extra plugins) but CoverItLive makes it easier and quicker to embed a variety of media and interact with your readers in real time. There is also an instant replay function, which as inane as that might be, might become handy at some point. Now I barely ever liveblog anything, but I can see a lot of use for this at conferences. Have you liveblogged anything before?