New plugins Ad Injection allows you to inject any kind of adverts into the existing content of your pages, without you having to change your existing pages. CleanAdmin is a clean and relaxing custom admin style. Updated plugins Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so you can focus on more important things. All in One Webmaster has options to add Google, Bing, Alexa, Blog Catalog, Yahoo’s Webmaster and Analytics code (meta tags). CleanCodeNZ Exclude Page hides pages from navigation or other purposes using custom fields. DukaPress is an open source and free to use e-commerce platform. DynamicWP Contact Form adds a collapsable AJAX contact form to the side of your site. Facebook Members enables Facebook Page owners to attract and gain Likes from their own website. Ultimate Taxonomy Manager is an easy to use taxonomy manager with a great UI.

Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider both whom are in attendance for the LeWeb 10 conference were recently interviewed by TechCrunch reporter, Alexia Tsotsis. The interview doesn’t go into much detail but we do get a glimpse as to how things are going for Automattic as a company. WordPress.com is getting about 300 million unique pageviews a month from 30 million publishers that make up 10% of the websites on the web. In terms of revenue, Automattic is breaking even but as a company, they make a little under $1 million per month with all services combined. TechCrunch figures that this equates to $10 million a year. Perhaps it’s just me but if that is correct, that number seems pretty low considering how large WordPress.com is. However, the best part of the interview comes down to the final question regarding any potential exit potential for the company. Their response: “Our goal’s […]

The aspect of community-powered support is definitely one of that factors that has lead to the popularity of WordPress, but despite millions of users, only a handful regularly volunteer in the support forums. How can you support WordPress? What kind of questions will you encounter? What if you aren’t an expert? These just a few of the questions that Automattic Happiness Engineer Sheri Bigelow answers in her WordCamp Portland 2010 session, How to Support WordPress. I became a volunteer in the WordPress Support Forums six years ago, one week after installing WordPress. I was what some would call a “n00b,” but while I was waiting for an answer to my question, I noticed a few installation questions that I could answer. Fast-forward six years later, and everything that I know about WordPress today was learned from answering questions on the WordPress Support Forums. If a lack of knowledge is preventing […]

Users are advised that WordPress 3.0.3 has just been released and is a security update. This release fixes issues in the XML-RPC remote publishing interface. This release fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts. If you have remote publishing enabled on your site you are urged to upgrade. You can do so easily via the built-in automatic upgrade feature. If upgrading the old fashioned way is your cup of tea here is the list of revised files … wp-includes/version.php xmlrpc.php readme.html wp-admin/includes/update-core.php

If you use the Comment Rating plugin for your WordPress powered site, you are highly encouraged to upgrade to the latest version as it fixes a security vulnerability. More specifically, a Cross-site Request Forgery attack. According to the report at OSVDB.org which is an Open Source Vulnerability Database: The flaw exists because the application does not require multiple steps or explicit confirmation for unspecified sensitive transactions for the admin function. By using a crafted URL (e.g., a crafted GET request inside an “img” tag), an attacker may trick the victim into clicking on the image to take advantage of the trust relationship between the authenticated victim and the application. Such an attack could trick the victim into executing arbitrary commands in the context of their session with the application, without further prompting or verification. There is no known workaround for versions lower than 2.9.21. Kudos goes to KrebsOnSecurity for reporting […]

Emporium is a two column theme for WordPress and the eShop plugin. Valentine is a modern style css3 layout, with a fixed header and footer, and embedded fonts.

Joseph Scott who is working on the Akismet plugin for WordPress notified everyone via the WordPress core development blog that there would be some changes coming to Akismet, starting with version 2.5. In version 2.5 of the plugin, there will be some new files added such as admin.php, akismet,css, akismet.js, and widget.php. There will also be a test mode included with 2.5 which can be activated when WP-DEBUG is set to TRUE or when AKISMET_TEST_MODE is set to TRUE. When test mode is enabled, comments marked as spam will not be sent back to the Akismet servers for learning. There will now be a spam check history section where each comment and interaction that occurs with Akismet will be displayed. Each comment will also have an indication as to what Akismet did with the comment. There are a number of other improvements as well mentioned in the blog post. Anything […]

WordPress is certainly the most popular open source blogging platform, but how are development decisions made? You may have heard that WordPress is a democracy, that Matt Mullenweg makes all the decisions, or that Automattic governs the development of WordPress. Of course, neither of those are true. WordPress is actually a Meritocracy. It’s really quite simple and efficient, but the more you contribute to WordPress, the more weight your opinions carry when it comes time to make decisions. Probably the best example of this is Andrew Nacin. When Nacin began contributing to WordPress, he could only submit his bug fixes and enhancements for review. After showing his commitment to the WordPress community over three months and a hundred patches, Nacin was asked to be a core developer. Now, Nacin’s bug fixes and enhancements go right to the core. I could write pages upon pages describing how everything works, but I’d certainly […]