The Road Ahead: Matt outlines the recent and far future of WordPress in the WordPress Development Blog

After a spirited IRC discussion, I decided to write a comment spam killing plugin. If you use it, ANY comment flagged for moderation will be deleted, w/o user intervention. No file modifications are needed, just drop into plugins and activate. Use with caution, this is weapons grade material. Read my blog post about it (recommended), visit the project page, or download the .zip file.

I (we?) need some ideas for plugins and hacks for WordPress 1.2 There is already an excellent requests page on the wiki which lists some of these. If you have something specific in mind for WordPress (except for multiple blogs) please leave a comment and I will add it to the list on the wiki. I know a couple of people have been looking for “stuff to do” with WordPress and this will satisfy both parties.

I am thinking of writing a Gallery mod of WordPress. Here are some thoughts as I mull over them. I have kept in mind my own programming prowess, time limitations, limited modification of the WordPress source code. This is more of a functional specification. 1) Upload of files has to be streamlined and simplified somehow. I am thinking of using the method used by Gallery. In other words, you create a folder called albums in your root directory, create a folder for an album, and upload all your pictures to that folder using FTP. The upload interface inside the admin will also allow individual uploads but only for a limited number of files. FTP is preferred. 2) An “album”, in my opinion, could be just a category. That keeps things simple and within the WP framework. That way, the default display would show the latest posted category, which is a […]

Christopher Schmidt has published an easy way to import all of your LiveJournal Entries into WordPress. Once they are imported, you can keep them all synced by using my autoupdate hack. 🙂 Here is the link to the tutorial. http://lj.crschmidt.net/import-wordpress.txt

If you have recently switched from Movable Type to WordPress, you might be missing your MT style titles. I saw a really nice plug-in in the forums which does just that. It cleans your post titles to make them look like MT by putting ‘_’ instead ‘-‘, killing the dots on decimal numbers and sanitizing non-english characters. There is great support for non-english languages built into this plugin. Find more information on the WordPress fora.

BlindMuse from the WordPress fora has written a word count add-on for WP. This plug-in: that not only shows how many words are in the entire post, not just what is current on display. The script will also count how many total images are the post and display that count as well More information here at BlindMuse’s How-to-WordCount section

The Location Manger is a utility add-on for WordPress 1.2, that allows you to save latitude and longitude pairs with a name, url, and a comment. You can access your saved locations from the advanced editing page (on basic editing WP uses the default lat/lon as usual). This hack adds a “Location” panel to the admin interface and a dropdown menu to edit-form-advanced.php. As a technology demonstration, it’s object-oriented, with the HTML output done from inside the class. I’ve uploaded a screenshots of the Location panel and and editing interface for your viewing pleasure. You can download the .zip file from my projects page, and leave comments & bug reports on this blog entry.