WordPress.com turns two. WordCamps in Beijing and Israel announced. WordPress.com is censored in Turkey. Expect a mandatory security release of WordPress soon. New dates in the WordPress Roadmap. Lots of news on WordPress.com and WordPress Plugins!
WordPress News
International WordCamp Events: WordCamp Beijing is scheduled for September 1, 2007 with Registration active now and an interesting Schedule of Speakers. Work has stared on WordCamp Israel with more information coming soon.
WordPress Plugins Competition: The Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition is still taking your votes on which of the WordPress Plugins you like the most. There are some amazing entries on the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition Prize and Plugins List! I’m playing with some of them now. Have you found some favorites and can’t-lie-without WordPress Plugins on that list? Go vote for them.
Update WordPress: The latest update of WordPress is out. WordPress 2.2.2 and 2.0.11 have been released and are security-related upgrades, thus are mandatory upgrades for all full version WordPress users. Mark Jaquith reports on some of the security issues covered by this update.
ALERT: Blog Security reports a security flaw has been uncovered and reported to WordPress. Expect a new security update to be released soon as WordPress stays actively on top of these issues.
Protecting Your WordPress Blog: Blog Security has updated Hardening WordPress with htaccess, a great post with two simple tips on improving your WordPress blog security through the .htaccess file, preventing access to different areas of your blog without permission.
WP-Scanner WordPress Plugin Updated: Blog Security announces an update to the popular WP-Scanner WordPress Plugin, featured recently in light of announcements of security flaws in WordPress Themes. It “scans” your WordPress Theme for common vulnerabilities and flaws and reports back.
Matt Cutts at WordCamp 2007: Matt Cutt’s program, “Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers”, at WordCamp was very popular and the video is now up and the talk has been transcribed, so everyone can share in the experience.
WordPress on Your Calendar: While subject to change, the following are dates you need to put on your calendar regarding WordPress releases, as found on the Wordpress Roadmap:
- WordPress 2.3 – September 24, 2007 (at least ready for testing then release) – to include tags and improved caching among many other new features under the hood.
- WordPress 2.4 – December 12, 2007 – to include a new WordPress Administration Panel interface, improved caching, and a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
- WordPress 2.5 – April 1, 2008
- July 2008 – WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco (okay – this is speculative but it helps to plan ahead)
Changing the Web Forever With Translations: Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection announces a new WordPress Plugin called WordPress Plugin for the Worldwide Lexicon Project:
[Worldwide Lexicon] WWL is an open source project that creates collaborative translation tools for websites. WWL enables a website’s readers to translate posts (and edit/score translations) to any of the languages they speak. This is a simple and effective way to make blogs multilingual because any site with any audience will have bilingual readers, often without knowing it. They have developed a WordPress Plugin for the Worldwide Lexicon Project that is in beta.
I’ve long said that the next version of the web must cross the language barrier in order for the web to grow and remain viable. I’ll be watching this with great joy, won’t you?
Change Blogroll Back to Links: An idea under consideration for WordPress development is to change “Blogroll” back to “Links”. I’m in favor of the name change, which has jumped back and forth over the years, but what do you think? Go have your say on this issue that could once again change the menu item on the WordPress Administration panels.
Vote for WordPress Ideas: The WordPress Ideas section on WordPress is an open forum for you to have your say on the features you would like to see added or removed from WordPress.
Here are some interesting ones that deal with comments on WordPress, worth considering, voting, and having your say:
- Admin Reply to comments
- Bulk administration – posts, comments, etc.
- Social Bookmark Comment Grabber
- Show/Hide Comments
- Threaded Comments
WordPress.com News
No WordPress.com Access in Turkey: According to Matt Mullenweg, WordPress.com continues to be blocked in Turkey, similar to what is done in China. According to a letter received by Automattic and WordPress.com, the blockage is due to a court decision in response to a “failure” of WordPress.com to remove blog content by and in reference to a “defamer” of Islam and Turkey. Instead of blocking the specific sites in question, the courts issued a blanket penalty against the whole company. Should WordPress.com be held responsible for one country’s attitude about free speech? Matt is still asking for input on what to do about this.
Making an Impact on the Blogosphere with WordPress.com: Matt Mullenweg reports more on the growth of WordPress.com, the free hosted version of WordPress:
Webware just publish some Nielson numbers that show WordPress.com as the #4 blog site in July, after Blogger, TMZ, and Typepad. Number four isn’t that hot, but the year over year growth was 398% which is 7-10x more than those above us.
Happy Birthday, Wordpress.com: WordPress.com turned two on August 20, and it’s been an amazing two years. With more than 1,356,854 blogs now online, WordPress.com is changing how people blog.
Theme Preview: WordPress.com has added Theme Preview to the Presentation Panel. Click on the image of the WordPress Theme to see a lightbox effect of the Theme at almost “life size”.
New Stats Charts: WordPress.com announces the stats charts will now feature three options: Days, Weeks, and Months. This should help you track your blog further across the time periods to see how it is doing.
Honoring the Languages of WordPress.com Blogs and Bloggers: This week, it’s time to honor WordPress.com Blogs in Français. To translate these into another language, you may use Google’s Translate Tools by copying and pasting in the link into the “translate web page” option.
- Les Amateurs de Stars
- Youpil
- Sports, chars et femmes
- Le FC Sion autrement
- Movies, Internet & Politics
- Le Monde de Reon
- SecondLife Observer France- SLObserver.com
- Solidarité Ouvrière
- Le pire de Skyblog
- Voyeur Plage
What’s Hot on WordPress.com? The hottest blogs on WordPress.com were:
- CNN Political Ticker
- I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
- Lovely Lielani
- GigaOM
- A Hot Mess!
- Console Me
- FORTUNE: Legal Pad
- ShakedownSports
- Web Worker Daily
- Say Hey: A Bay Area Sports Blog
The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:
- Artist sees red over Pink video
- Rivals criticize Clinton for Iraq praise
- How a Goalie Scores an Own Goal
- i mak sur he never getz this shu on again
- Heinze to Join Hammers?
- Nottingham to be locked down for the arrival of Leeds..
- Jens, Theo And A Tad More
- Monster.com’s bad summer
- Schmidt: Google will ‘Probably’ Bid on Spectrum
- Seditious! Seditious! Hang Him!
WordPress Plugins and Themes News
Fix for Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin: Quark-o-blog offers the Ultimate Tag Warrior fix for WordPress 2.2.1 which may allow the popular Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin to work in the latest version of WordPress.
The SandPress WordPress Theme Has Been Updated. Has Yours? The popular Sandbox Theme Competition entrant, SandPress WordPress Theme, has been updated due to the amount of interest and usage from the competition. Have you checked your WordPress Theme to see if it has been updated? Check your Presentation panel and click the link to the Theme author’s site to see if they have updated the WordPress Theme you use. Even if you’ve made changes to their original Theme, check anyway!
Security Vulnerable WordPress Themes: Blog Security has released their “Top 10 Vulnerable WordPress Themes”, a list of Themes which feature some of the common WordPress template flaws. Consider checking your WordPress Theme if you are a designer, author, or tweaker to see if your WordPress Theme is vulnerable.
300 WordPress Plugins: As if there aren’t enough lists of WordPress Plugins out there, Mashable offers “WORDPRESS GOD: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog”, an overblown list of WordPress Plugins sorted by various categories. It’s not the biggest list of WordPress Plugins ever presented, and, unfortunately, the list doesn’t tell you which version of WordPress the Plugins will work in, and if they really work “for” your blog. It’s just a list with simple descriptions. Still, it’s a big list of WordPress Plugins. Many of these WordPress Plugins were featured in my own month long series featuring WordPress Plugins.
Content Specific Styling: The WordPress Theme designer behind Minimology shares some techniques involved in producing that WordPress Theme, including some great tips on using content-specific styling for posts in a specific category.
Interesting WordPress Plugins: Here are a few interesting WordPress Plugins I found over the past week:
- WP-chunk WordPress Plugin is great if you are tired of commenters leaving huge and cumbersome links in comments. It automatically puts the long link in an HTML anchor tag and truncates the link text without hurting the link itself. Personally, I’d prefer people learn how to leave links in comments. Until then, fix it with a Plugin.
- WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier is a neat example of how to make the WordPress XML-RPC API work for you. If you get a comment on your blog which needs your attention, such as it is put in moderation, this Plugin adds an icon to your computer’s system taskbar which alerts you to the comment on your blog.
For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection of WordPress Plugins released daily.
Most Popular WordPress Themes: The WordPress Theme Viewer has been cleaned up and now features 1,626 WordPress Themes with 6,472,454 downloads. The most popular WordPress Themes are:
- Africa theme 1
- Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1
- Sodelicious Black 1.0
- Yourblog 2.0 theme
- NetWorker 1.0
- Pop Blue
- Naruto Strikes Back
- LoseMyMind 1.0 with Sidebar
- Red Secret 0.1
- Talian 1.0
WordPress Techniques and Tips
Here are some featured articles and videos from around the WordPress and the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, the source to turn to first for your WordPress help.
NOTE: If you would like your WordPress tip and technique included in this list, see Tips For Writing Good WordPress Tips.
- Designing Headers in WordPress
- I Make Changes and Nothing Happens
- Stepping Into Template Tags
- SEO Your Wordpress Blog – Part II Video
- Installing Semilogic Pro Theme to WordPress Video
- Podcast using WordPress
- Advice for Your WordPress Blog: Customize Your 404 Page
- Use TinyMCE Throughout WordPress Application
- Five Ways To Highlight Your First Post on a Multi-Post View in a WordPress Theme
WordPress Community News
WordPress Events: Listed below are events associated with WordPress and WordPress bloggers. If you are hosting or know of an upcoming event involving WordPress, please let me know so we can publicize it here.
WordPress Jobs: WordPress Jobs is a new “service” announced by Weblog Tools Collection. It features jobs for WordPress experts and WordPress experts looking for work. Currently, the service is free as it is still in beta testing. Give it try.
WordPress Installed For Free: If you have problems installing the full version of WordPress, visit Installing WordPress for Free (aka Install4Free WordPress). This free, volunteer-driven service is limited to personal blogs only, and they help only with installations, not upgrades.
Looking for a WordPress Expert? Do you want a custom WordPress blog? Want to convert your website into a WordPress blog or use WordPress as a CMS? If you are looking for an expert in WordPress Themes, WordPress development, WordPress Plugins, or other WordPress-related expertise, check out the list of WordPress Consultants on Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, the WordPress Jobs listings, and the WP-Pro mailing list.
WordPress Events
The following are upcoming WordPress group meetings and meetups, and a few special blogging events you may want to attend. If you know of any I’ve missed, please post them or contact me on my WordPress Events Page or via email.
- New York City WordPress September Meetup – September 15
- Blog Business Summit – Chicago – September 17-19
- WordCamp Beijing – September 1, 2007 – Registration and Schedule
- WordCamp Israel – Information Coming Soon
For a WordPress Meetup near you and other blogging events, check out the WordPress Meetup Group List.
Even More WordPress News?
For more news on WordPress, see:
- WordPress Planet
- WordPress Development Blog
- WordPress.com Blog
- Weblog Tools Collection
- BloggingPro’s WordPress News and Tips
- The WordPress Community Podcast
- Lorelle on WordPress
- Planet WordPress from Planet Ozh
Each Wednesday on Blog Herald is WordPress Wednesday, featuring the news around the WordPress Community. If you have a WordPress news item or tip to suggest, please contact me at this special email address: lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com