WordPress Wednesday News: Almost 1 Million WordPress.com Blogs, Over 4 Million Themes Downloaded, and You Want More News?

Lorelle VanFossen

May. 02, 2007
6 min read

There are almost 1 million WordPress.com blogs. The counter should turn over any time. Got a prediction on when? A few days ago, the WordPress Theme Viewer clicked over 4 million WordPress Theme downloads. WordCamp 2007 is July 21-22 in San Francisco. There are a ton of new and fascinating WordPress Plugins and some oldies but goodies recently upgraded. And a ton more WordPress news here for you.

WordPress News

WordCamp 2007 – July 21-22: WordCamp 2007 will be July 21-22 in San Fransisco. Get ready for more information soon.

Turbocharge Your WordPress Blog: Weathering Heavy Traffic With Wordpress And Turbocharged by Turbocharged CMS is an interesting perspective and tutorial on how to handle heavy traffic with your WordPress blog. It also looks at how WordPress works on your server to generate each page.

Fixing False Positives with Akismet: David Dalka offers “Fixing Akismet Comment False Positives”, tips on how to overcome the problems of getting out of Akismet’s comment spam list if you get caught.

The Design Behind All Things Digital Explained: Alex King explains the design and development behind All Things Digital, one of the newest additions to the WordPress.com VIP hosting service.

WordPress as a Magazine: Abhijit Nadgouda takes you through the process of turning WordPress into an online magazine for Complete Wellbeing Magazine.

How to Write Code in Your WordPress Blog Posts: Blogosquare writes about the proper way to write code in your blog posts and features my tips with the character entity code conversions list to help you turn code into content on your WordPress blogs.

VOTE NOW! The Best Ideas for WordPress Development: Have you voted for your favorite WordPress Ideas? The most popular WordPress ideas right now are:

Easy Updating of WordPress
Plugin Update Notification
Tags! IN PROCESS
Thumbnail and image resizing
Default searching of both posts and pages
Improved Draft System
Make it faster
Plugins on wordpress.org DONE
Open ID Integration DONE
Deactivate All Plugins NEXT VERSION

Do you have a suggestion to improve WordPress? Or want to vote on one you think is a must-have for WordPress users? Go have your say.

WordPress.com News

More Top Bloggers Moving to WordPress.com: Many top bloggers are moving their hosted blogs to WordPress.com VIP accounts or the free WordPress.com service. Some recent bloggers include It’s Getting Hot In Here – Dispatches from the Global Youth Climate Movement and All Things Digital with Wall Street Journal journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.

Stumble Through WordPress.com: Our WordPress buddy, Engtech announces the WordPress.com Random Stumbling feature link you can use to allow your readers to “stumble” their way through your WordPress.com blog. For example, take a little rambling stroll through Lorelle on WordPress.

One Million Blogs on WordPress.com: The count is now at 922,029 blogs on WordPress.com with one million going to turn over any time. Do you have any predictions?

What’s Hot on WordPress.com? The hottest blogs on WordPress.com were:

The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Theme Viewer With 4 Million Downloads: Any minute now, the popular WordPress Theme Viewer has passed 4 million downloads. It now stands at 4,053,513 from 2,588 WordPress Themes. That’s an amazing milestone. Applause!

Update the MyGallery WordPress Plugin: Weblog Tools Collection warns that if you are using the MyGallery Plugin for Wordpress, update it immediately. A vulnerability has been found and fixed.

WordPress Mobile Plugin: The WordPress Mobile Plugin appears to do two things. It makes your WordPress blog “accessible” via cell phones, PDA, and PlayStation Portable, and it also allows you to post from your cell phone to your WordPress blog. It supports uploading images and files, as well as comments. A well-designed, web standard WordPress Theme should already include styles for cell phones and hand held computers, as well as print and other media uses, but if yours doesn’t, this Plugin will add the styles to make your blog fit the small screen. According to the reports, it adheres to W3C and mTLD dotmobi standards, amd comes with a feature to allow monetization with AdMob ads. MobileCrunch claims the Plugin author gets income from AdMob ads from those using the Plugin.

Another Mobile WordPress Plugin: There are a variety of WordPress Plugins which will help you blog from your cell phone as well as read your blog from your cell phone. Another recent Plugin is the BeeWeeb – Mobile Web Toolkit WordPress Plugin, a form of CMS system for mobile bloggers.

The Commodore 64 WordPress Theme: It’s the hottest WordPress Theme around – not that anyone is using it much but all are fascinated with the WordPress Commodore 64 Theme, which also harks back to the recent CLI WordPress Theme (Command Line Interface). I’m waiting for the Zork WordPress Theme…seen a mailbox lately?

Footnotes WordPress Plugin Updated: One of my favorite WordPress Plugins for footnotes is the WordPress Footnotes Plugin by Simon Elvery and it’s been recently updated. Footnotes are added simply and easily by putting ((double parentheses)) around the footnote and the Plugin automatically turns those into footnotes.

Role Manager WordPress Plugin: The Role Manager WordPress Plugin allows you to set the user levels for the various bloggers and contributors on your blog. It was recently updated and is perfect for those with multiple bloggers or moderators.

Modify FeedBurner WordPress Plugin to Include WordPress Feeds: Abhijit Nadgouda of ifacethoughts offers “Modifying the FeedBurner Plugin” with instructions on how to redirect feeds to categories, Pages, and authors from FeedBurner back to WordPress default feeds.

Alex King’s Popularity Contest WordPress Plugin: A request to make Alex King’s Popularity Contest WordPress Plugin cache-compatible has been made and he’s admitted that he’s thinking about it. If this is a Plugin you really appreciate, show your appreciation and encouragement to help him find the time to improve this very popular WordPress Plugin.

Prevent Repetitive Calls of the Same Javascripts in Plugins: D’Technology Weblog offers “WordPress: How To Prevent Repetitive Calls of Same JavaScripts”, tips on how WordPress Plugins can prevent calls to the same Javascripts which can slow down and overload a web page.

The Accidental Theme: Science Text offers a tip for creating a minimalist WordPress Theme – delete all the graphics in the Theme. It’s silly, but it’s a great way to see the bare bones of a WordPress Theme. Any WordPress Theme will work for you if the architectural layout will hold the content and design elements you want and need. The “pretty”, which so many web designs are judged by, doesn’t matter. It’s the bones you want to see. You can then add any pretty you want. For more on designing your own WordPress Theme see Designing a WordPress Theme From Scratch, Designing a WordPress Theme – Building a Sandbox, and The Secret of Successful Editing of WordPress Themes.

LeetSpeak WordPress Plugin: Do you need a little Leet (1337) Speak in your WordPress blog? The LeetSpeak WordPress Plugin makes it easy to embed a little Leet into your blog.

Weblog Tools Collection – One Plugin a Day: Weblog Tools Collection featured “A Plugin A Day” through April and has decided to continue their “APAD” through May. Excellent!

Most Popular WordPress Themes: The WordPress Theme Viewer now features 2,451 Themes and 3,908,713 Themes downloads. The top WordPress Themes are:

WordPress Plugin Directory: The new WordPress Plugin Directory is going strong and improving as it develops. According to their list, the most popular WordPress Plugins downloaded are:

More WordPress Plugins can be found on the WordPress Plugins Database.

WordPress Community News

New WordPress Community Podcast: The latest in WordPress news is out with the latest WordPress Community Podcast about WordPress 2.2 delayed, GSoC workers, and Aaron Brazell.

WordPress Joins Quantcast Internet Rating Service: Sys-Con announces that “Netscape, WordPress and Answers.com Join Quantcast Quantified Publisher Program”, a program by Quantcast, the world’s first open Internet ratings site and audience measurement system. The goal is to improve analyzing web statistics using state-of-the-art statistical models. You can currently sign up your own full version WordPress blog, or any blog which allows javascripts, for free.

Looking for a WordPress Expert? 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, and the WP-Pro mailing list.

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Know of any great WordPress tips and techniques articles? Let me know and it may end up on our weekly list.

More WordPress News

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.

The Melbourne Weblogger Meetup Group at Meetup.com With Darren Rowse and Alister Cameron in the planning stages. Stay tuned for more news soon.

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference in Chicago – May 11-12 – Many WordPress bloggers and experts should be there – Last chance to register!
New York City WordPress Meetup – May 19
Philadelphia WordPress Meetup – May 19
WordPress DK Meetup (Denmark) – May 20
Houston WordPress Meetup – May 26
WordCamp 2007 – San Fransisco – July 21-22
Blog Business Summit – Chicago – September 17-19

For a WordPress Meetup near you and other blogging events, check out the WordPress Meetup Group List.

For more news on WordPress, see:

Extra Tip of the Week

A Magical Date Approaches: At three minutes and four seconds after 2 AM on the 6th of May this year, the time and date will be 02:03:04 05/06/07. You will have to wait until 2107 to experience this moment again. Will you be there for that event? ;-)

Why not record this moment in time with a future post set for that very moment in your WordPress blog?

Each Wednesday on Blog Herald is WordPress Wednesday, featuring the news around the WordPress Community.

Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress.

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Lorelle VanFossen

The author of Lorelle on WordPress and the fast-selling book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging, as well as several other blogs, Lorelle VanFossen has been blogging for over 15 years, covering blogging, WordPress, travel, nature and travel photography, web design, web theory and development extensively as web technologies developed.