New plugins Snow Storm displays falling snow flakes on the front of your WordPress website for a festive presentation. WordPress Gzip Compression enables gzip-compression if the visitor’s browser can handle it. This will speed up your WordPress website drastically and reduces bandwidth usage. Updated plugins Easy FancyBox enables the FancyBox 1.3.4 jQuery extension on all image, SWF, YouTube and Vimeo links. WordPress SEO is the most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog.

WordPress 3.0.2, the first mandatory security update in quite a while, was released not too long ago. The update patched an exploit which allowed an Author-level users to gain access to the site well above their user level, but the real story here is the overall efficiency of the volunteer developers. With a team unpaid volunteers keeping WordPress in tip-top shape, you might be surprised to hear that this particular update went from initial disclosure of the exploit to final release in no more than four hours! That particular time frame is almost unheard of, even amongst commercial projects. To further sweeten the pot, the VaultPress team automatically pushed a hotfix the next day to all VaultPress-enabled blogs, ensuring that all VaultPress users were protected from the exploit, even if they had not had a chance to apply the 3.0.2 update. With such an efficient team of volunteer developers, and […]

Atmosphere 2010 is a simple but pleasant two column narrow theme, based on the atmosphere theme published back in 2007. Liquorice is a simple and clean vintage looking theme build on Google’s font API Lobster font. tweaker2 is a theme especially built for those who love tweaking their own themes.

Andrew Warner who produces the video show Mixergy has published his interview with Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon. While Groupon has recently been given a 5 billion dollar acquisition bid by Google, it wasn’t easy getting started. In fact, Andrew cobbled together scripts and blog posts on a WordPress powered website to get things off the ground. All we did was we took a WordPress Blog and we skimmed it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post with the points embedded. It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We’d say in the right up, ‘This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large. If you want a different color or size, email that to us.’ We didn’t have a form to add that stuff. We were just, it was so cobbled together. It was enough to […]

Automattic has launched the official WP Swag Store!  Now, you too can own a piece of WordPress memorabilia. Proceeds from the sales go to benefit the donation of swag to WordCamps around the world. Of course, one can’t help but notice that the store has launched just in time for the holiday season, and what would make a better stocking stuffer than a 3GB WordPress USB drive? Even if you don’t celebrate any of the traditional gift-giving holidays, there are plenty of WordPress-themed warm clothing options for the cold winter months, and even a mug for your warm drinks. Are you collector of WordPress swag?  If so, we’d love to see your collection!

So we have not made it a secret on this blog that we are big fans of VaultPress as a product (Disclosure: They are advertisers on this blog). I have been using it on this blog (amongst others) for our protection and have happily paid for our privilege and peace of mind. It has been a little rocky to get started and we have offered and received help and feedback for the issues we ran into during the initial sync with VaultPress. The peace of mind is satisfying, the support is very reasonable, the product is a “set it and forget it” and as such, it runs on its own. I check the security area once in a while and marvel at the number of comments and other statistics that are mildly interesting but not all that helpful. Then I noticed something last morning that made me think. I know that does not […]

Alex King who’s been a fantastic member of the WordPress community since the creation of the project has published what I consider a fascinating post on his blog regarding his open-source motivations. The post contains his answers to questions provided by David Hobson who is currently performing research into the business/financial models as well as the motivations for open-source projects. There are a number of things that come up during the article that are worthy of discussion. I used to get about $100-200/month in the way of donations through my website. Unfortunately due to changes in the way plugins are presented on WordPress.org that has dried up to about $5/month. While that quote may look like Alex King is looking to rake in some money via donations, the truth is, the Plugin pages have been redesigned and the donation link is now housed within the FYI box with a tiny […]

New plugins CleanCodeNZ Geo Posts creates custom post types with geo locations for back end data entering. Google Maps Api v3 is used to display geo posts on a map with a clickable marker overlay. Gallery2 Importer allows you to import albums, images, and comments from a Gallery2 installation into your WordPress site. Albums will be saved as pages containing the [gallery] shortcode, and images will be saved as attachments. Updated plugins Easy ReTweet lets you add retweet or Tweet This buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count. Exploit Scanner searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames. Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Plugin Test Drive lets you test any plugin before […]