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• Akismet: Akismet Plugin for Akelos PHP Framework
  
  

  Bermi Ferrer wrote an Akismet plugin for the Akelos PHP Framework, a Rails port to PHP. Check out his documentation on the Akelos wiki and grab the code here.

        
• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/13

  New Releases

  Simple Link

  Simple Link is a plugin that enables you to add links to a posted post on certain text you selected with just a click.

  Remote Database Backup

  Remotely create and download wordpress database backup in form of SQL dumps. You can then use these dumps to sync the local version of your site with the online version.

  RefTagger

  This plugin provides an easy way to use the RefTagger Bible reference tagging script from Logos Bible Software.

  Stumble!

  Stumble! for WordPress extends WordPress to support a “random article” feature, similar to StumbleUpon’s StumbleThru and Wikipedia’s (Mediawiki’s) ran.

  Wordpress Single File PHP Gallery

  Wordpress Single File PHP Gallery is a gallery in one single PHP file. All you have to do is copy the file to any directory containing JPG, JPEG, PNG or GIF images to make a gallery.

  Most Comments

  Display posts with the most comments, as a widget or on a page using the template tag. Customize the look with specific settings.

  Updated Plugins

  Lightbox Plus

  Lightbox Plus is a plugin that implements Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar. Lightbox Plus is used to create overlay display images on the webpage and to automatically add the correct overlay links to images. Lightbox Plus captures the image title for display using a fairly robust regex to capture most character that may appear as part of the title.

  Facelift Image Replacement

  Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element with text can be replaced: from headers (h1, h2) to span elements and everything in between!

  wp-classified

  The wpClassified plugin allows you to add a simple classifieds page in to your WordPress blog.

  myTreasures

  The myTreasures project derived from the idea of presenting your own dvd collection nice and informatively in the internet.

  CommentLuv

  Appends a titled link using AJAX to the authors last blog post on their comment giving back some luv to the people that join your discussion

• Gravatar: Gravatar Importer for Google Contacts
  
  

  Arik Fraimovich has released an open source .NET app that syncs your Google contacts with their Gravatars, using the Google Contacts Data API.

        
• Dougal Campbell: It’s Time for Some Changes

  I’ve been saying for years that I want to redesign this site, but I still haven’t made many substantive changes. One of my favorite sayings is, “The cobbler’s children oft go without shoes.” It certainly applies to this site, as I spend a lot of time doing web development, studying programming, CSS techniques, SEO, user interfaces, and many other related disciplines that make up this craft. But my own site rarely changes, and I certainly haven’t applied all of the things I’ve learned. I think it’s time for that to change.

  Starting Real Soon Now, you will start seeing some improvements around here. For one thing, I’m going to start posting more frequently. My current plan is to post at least once per week, with a new series called “WordPress Wednesday”. Every Wednesday, I will be posting something WordPress-related. It might be something short, like a pointer to some other article worth looking at, it might be a long article of my own, it might be an update to one of my plugins, and it may often be notes about changes I’m making to this site. I’m also thinking that I might occasionally have “Fun Friday” and “Media Monday” posts. I had originally considered “Music Monday”, but “media” is more general, and lets me cover movies, television, books, etc. I probably won’t do those every week, but expect to see them from time to time.

  Also, as I just mentioned, I’m going to start making site design changes. I will probably continue to work on a completely new theme in the background, for launch in the indefinite future. But in the meantime, I will make improvements to the current theme. I want to give more prominence to features like feed and email subscriptions, my WordPress plugins and other projects, and “lifestream” features like my delicious bookmarks, Flickr photos, and Twitter messages. I will also make more subtle design changes, like tweaks to fonts, text size, colors, etc., as well.

  While I will probably continue to post the occasional personal item, but I will focus mostly on more technical, web development topics. I think that these changes will make this site more useful to you, my readers. Of course, I’m open to suggestions, so if you have an idea that you think would improve this site, or a topic that you would like me to write about, contact me, and I’ll put it in my idea box!

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress MU Plugin Competition Winners Announced

  WPMU.org - WordPress MU plugins Competition Winners Announced. The team over at WMPU.org just announced the winners of their own Plugin Competition for WordPress MU. Go over there to congratulate the winners and check out the rest of the plugin entries. FYI: most of these are ONLY WordPress MU compatible.

• Lorelle on WP: The Real Benefits of Sponsoring a WordCamp
  
  

  Roxanne Darling, the organizer of Podcamp and WordCamp Hawaii, October 24, 2008, is encouraging everyone to help make this Podcamp and WordCamp a success and supporting their sponsors by blogging about them.

  While you should blog about them and support sponsors of WordCamp and WordPress Events, there is a bigger benefit to being a WordCamp sponsor. The rewards are invaluable, going way beyond just links!

  As you plan your WordCamp event, Hawaii is a prime example to follow. Look at the list below carefully.

  Most WordCamp organizers I’ve worked with stick with “known” sponsors related to blogging and web technology. While Hawaii includes many web tech companies as sponsors, they’ve reached out beyond to travel and tourist industries, Johnson and Johnson (known more for health care products than blogging), hotels, advertising and marketing agencies, and even a center for disability studies. This is a prize example of being inclusive rather than exclusive with a WordPress or tech event.

  Why wouldn’t your attendees be interested in more than just web tech companies? While our blogs are dependent upon host servers, video services, podcast services, and search engines, why not be inclusive to a wide variety of industries to help promote and cover the financial burden of your event?

  Bloggers blog about anything and everything. They also have niches such as sports blogging, medical blogging, political blogging, science blogging, home and garden blogging, knitting blogging, bowling blogging - why not help them connect with representatives of their interests?

  These businesses also have a lot to learn about the social web and want and need connections with bloggers and social media experienced experts.

  The list of sponsors for Podcamp/WordCamp Hawaii include:
  

  • Wyland Waikiki Hotel
  • Viddler
  • Vantage Counsel
  • Road Runner High Speed Internet
  • RawVoice
  • Projection Presentation Technology
  • Hawaii Prince Hotel
  • Podcast Connect
  • Pacific Direct Connect
  • PacRim Marketing Group
  • KnowHow Cafe
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • Hawaii Convention Center
  • Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau
  • Blue Hawaii Lifestyle
  • Blip.tv
  • UH Center on Disability Studies

  Learning Social Media from a Concrete Company

  At Blog World Expo in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I met Bruce Christensen and Tom Vail of Cart-Away Concrete, exhibitors. They caught the attention of many of the attendees and other sponsors because they were there to learn, not sell. They didn’t have anything to offer bloggers or blog businesses. Yet, they brought their portable cement mixer to the Las Vegas Exhibition Hall along with their bight neon yellow t-shirts, business cards, and brochures. Why?

  Tom and Bruce came to the event with minds and hearts open. They knew they had to get into this “social media stuff” and they had to learn hard and fast. They have a national franchise and network that connects construction experts with jobs and jobs with construction experts and equipment, in addition to providing concrete and construction equipment. With the changing economy, they know they have to work harder within the new virtual economy with this new “social thing” to get the exposure and connections they need.

  Not knowing where to turn for a fast education in the new social media, they paid their way into the biggest meeting of social media experts: bloggers.

  Think about this. If they wanted to learn about online social networking and capital, they could have bought a book. They could have turned to someone in their home town who may or may not have the experience they needed, paid them a little money, and be no better off than they were. They could cast a wide net and spend a lot of time interviewing so called “social media experts” in marketing, public relations, and web development, and still outlaid a lot of cash, but with no basis to help them decide who is the right expert for their business, it’s money paid without faith in a return.

  Not knowing what to do or where to start, they decided to put themselves right in the middle of the snake pit and just ask for help. It’s cheaper in the long run, and exposed themselves to thousands of people who had the answers.

  Think they didn’t get a boost back for dragging their concrete mixer from McMinnville, Oregon, to Las Vegas, Nevada?

  • 100k Job From Home - hile The Economy Is In Recession, The Blog World Is Bubbling Up
  • Dr. Forgot - Blogworld Expo
  • John Hawkins Unrated - Forward Thinking and Cement Mixers
  • Marty Fahncke - Market where you will stand out from the crowd
  • Stars and Muses - Blogworld08, Part II
  • Ben Spark - My Interview with Cart-Away
  • John Chow - Blog World Expo - Why?
  • Asymmetric - Report from Blogworld: Blogging is still fun
  • Small Business Survival - Why is Cart-Away at BlogWorld Expo?
  • extra For Every Publisher - Blog World Expo Business Cards

  When you prepare yourself to talk to potential sponsors, use Cart-Away Concrete as your example. By being surrounded with bloggers and social media experts who were fascinated by the total incongruity of a cement mixer being at a blogging conference, they won. They also won by being with business people who admitted, “Hey, we don’t know what you do but we want to be a part of it. You know how to do this. Tell us what you know.”

  Who wouldn’t love that!

  Few booths attracted the attention these two guys did. Even if no one was talking to them, they were talking about them throughout the conference. “Hey, did you see that cement mixer? What is a cement mixer doing at a blog conference? Instead of selling me something, these guys wanted me to sell them on blogging. Go figure!”

  What more could a sponsor want?

  
  

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  Site Search Tags: wordcamp, wordcamp news, wordcamp hawaii, wordcamphawaii, blog world expo, bwe08, cart-away concrete, cart-away, sponsors, wordcamp sponsors, wordpress events, wordpress event sponsors, event sponsors, wordpress news, finding sponsors

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  Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

  Posted in Blogging Tips, WordPress News      
• Matt: Jose Saramago on WordPress.com

  Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago has two blogs on WordPress.com: O Caderno de Saramago and El Cuaderno de Saramago. Saramago, 85, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. One of his novels, Blindness was turned into a movie of the same name, released this month. (Hat tip: Antonio Dias)

• Weblog Tools Collection: Custom Fields Made Easy

  Nathan Rice who is a prominent theme author within the WordPress community has published an article that explains an easy way to retrieve the contents of a custom field. Instead of doing things the conventional way, Nathan explains how to simply use a function in order to call the contents of the custom field into a theme. This article should be especially useful to theme authors out there who are looking at providing custom field functionality into their work.

• Lorelle on WP: Hawaii Geek Week Features Podcamps, WordCamps, and Lorelle
  
  

  October 18-25 has been declared Hawaii Geek Week in honor of a packed week of technology conferences, and I’m going to be at most of them!

  The special proclamation (pdf copy) honoring Hawaii’s contributions to technology was facilitated by Hawaii Macintosh and Apple Users Society (HMAUS) and their Secretary and Ambassador Eugene Villaluz.

  There are a ton of mostly free events, workshops, conferences, and meetings, during Hawaii Geek Week. They include:

  Mactoberfest - Saturday, October 18, 2008: A free annual event by HMAUS with guest speakers covering computer technology, blogging, WordPress, and photography, and features keynote by Lorelle VanFossen on how WordPress changes lives, and a panel discussion on the past, present, and future of technology, as this is event is part of the 30th anniversary of the organization.

  Web Weavers Workshop - Wednesday, October 22, 2008: A day long workshop on blogging, social media, and WordPress with Lorelle VanFossen, author of “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”.

  Social Media Club Workshop - Thursday, October 23, 2008: is a one day workshop featuring Social Media Experts Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells from San Francisco, Beth Kanter from Boston, and Roxanne Darling from Honolulu.

  Windward Community Tech Fair Workshops and Exhibits - October 24, 2008: Windward Community College presents a free day long Tech Fair covering a wide variety of web and tech topics such as Google Docs, Digital Workflow for Educators, blogging, social media, and iChat Video Conferencing. Lorelle will be speaking about blogging as a career and business strategy.

  Podcamp and WordCamp Hawaii - October 24, 2008: features top podcasters, WordPress experts, social media experts, video bloggers, business blogging, and everything you need to know about today’s social media. Matt Mullenweg will be speaking on WordPress 2.7 and Lorelle VanFossen will be speaking about Woopra, the new web analytics program, Shane Robinson covering WordPressMU, and more.

  I’m excited about this packed week in Hawaii and I’m there to learn as much as to share with others. Hawaii is a hot bed of diversity issues and cultural clashes, and no where to escape from them. They have had to learn to live together as the cultures crossed borders and combined.

  With the world crossing borders every day on the web, we have a lot to learn from the lessons of social interaction and conflict management that Hawaii lives every day as proof of the possible. Expect a lot of lessons on what I learned coming to you over the next few months from my Hawaiian social experiences.

  Lorelle’s Upcoming Events

  There are a lot of workshops and keynotes in the works, but the ones set right now are:

  • The semi-un-not-so-official WordPress Upgrade Party at CubeSpace - Portland, Oregon - November 10, 2008
  • WordCamp Las Vegas 2009 - Las Vegas, Nevada - January 10-11, 2009

  Hope to see you there and anywhere I go. Want to bring me to an event near you? Let’s talk.

  
  

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  Site Search Tags: wordcamp, wordpress news, wordcamp news, wordcamphawaii, wordcamp hawaii, hmaus, hawaii, mactoberfest, geek week, hawaii geek week, hawaii macintosh and apple users society, social media, windward college, tech fair, podcamp, podcast, talks, speaking, speak, events

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  Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

  Posted in WordPress News      
• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/11

  Orange

  

  Orange consists of a fluid three column outfit, with widgetized sidebars and footer columns, built in are recent comments with gravatars, related posts, social bookmarking enabled and Flickr is enabled in the themes options panel.

  Emphasis

  

  Emphasis is the newest WordPress theme release from Jasonetics. It is a very simple theme, with subtle colors. The posts are bordered with a very light grey, and the links are green and hover orange. This theme is called emphasis because almost all of the focus is on the content and posts.

  Helium

  

  Three column, widget ready, gravatar ready theme with ability to post images to index page automatically

• Weblog Tools Collection: All In One SEO To Go

  In this highly optimized episode of WordPress Weekly, I interviewed Michael Torbert who is more commonly known as hallsofmontezuma throughout the WordPress community. He is now the developer of the most popular plugin in the plugin repository, theAll In One SEO pack. We discuss what it’s like to maintain an insanely popular plugin, how difficult it has been to work with the WordPress code, thoughts on SEO in general, and the question of the night went to David Peralty for asking if SEO could be damaged by mis configuring the plugin. You’ll have to listen to the show to get the answer. On top of that, I give my plugin pick of the week, the WordPress job of the week and much more on episode 24 of WordPress weekly.

  Ad Copy:

  WordPress Weekly is brought to you by the fine advertisers on WeblogToolsCollection.com. Without their continued support, this show would not be possible. I would also like to personally thank each and every one of you who download and listen to this show. Your continued support is greatly appreciated. If you are interested in advertising on WordPress Weekly, please contact Mark Ghosh via this contact form.

  News:

  WordPress 2.7 is nearing feature freeze. Once that happens, we should start to see announcements in the dashboard regarding beta releases. Based on everything I have read, 2.7 is on schedule to be released on November 10th. If something major is discovered during the beta trials, the date of release will obviously be changed.

  Didn’t get the chance to mention this on the show but I wanted to pass along a happy birthday to HackWordPress.com as they have turned 1 year old.

  Feedback:

  I cover feedback related to last weeks episode. We encourage any feedback you may have with regards to the show. You can either email me via jeffro at jeffro2pt0.com or you can simply leave us a comment on the blog.

  Plugin Of The Week:

  Jeff - Exclude Pages – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus). Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.) You could do this just as easily by adding exclusion arguments to the WP_LIST_PAGES function but this plugin takes those steps out of the process.

  WordPress Job Of The Week:

  This job was published on October 10th on the WeblogToolsCollection.com Job board. Sure Foods Living is looking for someone who can upgrade WordPress 2.1 to the current version. The individual at one point had someone to help them customize their site but that person is no longer available. Also, because of the upgrade, this person needs to change templates since the current one is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress. The potential client is asking for people who are qualified and for quotes on how much this project would cost. If you are interested in this job, please contact alison at surefoodsliving.com

  Announcements:

  Jane Wells who works for Automattic in the user experience/usability department will be our special one hour guest on Halloween night. That is Friday, October 31st, 2008. So if you’re interested in talking usability in WordPress, definitely mark this date on your calendar.

  WPWeekly Meta:

  Next Episode: Friday October 17th, 2008 8P.M. EST

  Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

  Length Of Episode: 58 Minutes

  Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode24.mp3

  Listen To Episode #24:
  

  While not broadly advertised, I happened to catch Brian Gardner for about an hour to discuss his announcement regarding going open source. During the interview, we discuss topics such as the grey area of the GPL, his new business model, his new approach to themes, how similar his business model is to the WordPress.com model, the state of themes in WordPress and much more.

  Listen To The Brian Gardner Interview:
  

• Matt: Gravatar Anniversary.

  It’s now been one year since Automattic acquired Gravatar. “Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers. 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server.  That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day.  That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests daily!” Wowza!

• Gravatar: Gravatar, one year later
  
  

  Wow it’s really been 1 year since Gravatar joined the Automattic family.  Time sure flies when you’re having fun!

  Gravatar has come a long way from the service that it was back in October 2007.  My wife likes to laugh at me because I’ll pick something up in one room, like a remote control, and move around the house fidgeting with it.  Then I’ll absentmindedly leave it in some random place like the bathroom, or the freezer.  One year ago we picked up a small avatar service with a great name and an awesome fan base.  Now, in an attempt not to leave it in a random location, we’re looking back on the last year (and letting you look with us.)

  The service was running version 2.0, and set up on two rented (or collocated, I don’t honestly know) servers.  The servers were running at loads of around 20, and could spike to well over 100 (that’s a lot.)  It was obvious that we needed both some stop-gap fixes and a plan. The first thing we did was throw some caching servers in front of the service — a couple of varnish servers as I recall.  This dropped the workload of the two boxes considerably, and allowed us to look at Gravatar without bringing the service down.  Next we replicated the setup 1 for 1 to two of our own (more powerful) servers.  This gave us a bit more breathing room.  And we began to plan.

  It was obvious, from the very beginning that the service was going to have to handle a constant torrent of requests from the internet.  Most of those requests would be for email addresses with no Gravatar and come from URLs that could be crafted in an unlimited number of ways.  On top of that we knew that we wanted to make all the paid features free, and expand the size a Gravatar could be from 80 pixels to 512 pixels.  So basically instead of our goals being to make the undertaking less daunting we we’re actively making it a more intense challenge than it could have been.  But that was OK with us, because our goals for Gravatar weren’t to make it easier but to make it better.  We wanted to make Gravatar the kind of free service that we could use, would want to use, and would be proud to share with the world.  I know that last bit sounds like marketing crap, but that’s really what we wanted to do and is really how we look at Gravatar.

  Pretty much the next thing we did was port Gravatars code from RoR (Ruby on Rails) to PHP.  As I mentioned when we announced this change the reason for this wasn’t about Ruby or Rails.  Simply put we’re a PHP shop, and once rewritten in PHP we have many more great minds that we can easily throw at it than if it were still in RoR. Since we ported it *pretty much* directly from rails there are some left-over rails-isms in Gravatars code that you wont find in, say, WordPress. Shh…. Don’t tell Matt

  In the rewriting we tried to tackle the largest scalability problems with the design of the service.  You can imagine that for an avatar serving service… storing, searching, and serving avatars is paramount.  Gravatar 2.0 (pre PHP) suffered from some pretty significant inefficiencies in this regard, and I think that a big part of that was limited resources (time and servers.)  Luckily we we’re now not significantly limited by either of those things.

  – warning beginning technical details which may be safely skipped over if you don’t care –

  The way that images were stored originally was: a complete image was made for all sizes between 1×1 and 80×80 pixels, a directory made for each rating, and a symlink placed from the rating to the appropriate image (either the users image or the default image in case the rating was too high.)  So that’s 80 images, 5 directories, and 240 symbolic links.  The reason for this, I believe, was to attempt to serve the avatar content without any database interaction whatever.  The files were then archived, uploaded to Amazon S3, and an entry added to Amazon SQS.  Finally the SQS entry was retrieved by the serving server, the file downloaded, extracted, and placed on the filesystem.  So this is why it took several minutes once you uploaded and cropped your image for you to be able to browse the rest of the site again.  You can imagine how many files Gravatar was comprised of by the time we got a hold of it!  We knew that this would simply NOT work for our new 512×512px avatar sizes.  Lastly there were a couple of directories which had several hundred thousand entries (either files or other directories) which were nearly impossible to even get a listing inside of.  So we had a list of things NOT to do.  We just needed to figure out what TO do

  So we decided that we would render all our avatars dynamically from the highest quality copy of the image we can manage… down.  We would only store one version of the image, though we would store it in multiple places (a local file server for speed, and S3 for redundancy.)  We would still rely heavily on caching.  And we would asynchronize as much of the workload as was possible, so that you don’t have to wait for things to happen after you finish cropping (to do this we employed various techniques and hacks best left for another day and another story.)

  – ok this batch of details has been concluded –

  So the problems were many, one year ago, and the challenges were fascinating.  I recall being overwhelmed by support requests for quite some time.  I would get 40 emails on a good day, more on a bad.  And believe it or not your emails very much shaped the future of Gravatar.  I would group them into specific problems, and always fix at least the largest problem (volume wise) each week.  Over time the service has grown quite stable, support requests have gone down to just a handful every day, and things are generally peppier than ever.

  We had some some bumps tuning our caches… for a while there we accidentally told your web browsers never EVER to re-validate an image. But we got that handled in short order… and things are zipping along quite nicely.

  Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers: 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server.  That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day.  That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests daily! 96% of all of those requests are served directly from cache.  These days we get around 5,000 uploaded images every day.  Even with this staggering increase in the number of requests we’ve been able to make Gravatar faster, and more reliable than it’s ever been.

  So here we are, one year later, looking out over the vast frontier of the internet and contemplating the future of Gravatar.  There are a great many things that it could become.  We know that we don’t want to loose focus on the core of the project: Serving your avatars (that’s what it’s all about!)

  We know that an avatar is “a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet,”  But it’s also “an embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.”  And that is exactly where we are headed:  Making Gravatar a place where you can do more than just store an image, making it a place that can be your presence online.  So we’ll be rolling out more features in the near future to allow you to store more data inside Gravatar — and more importantly to allow you to use that information in other places on the internet through open standards.

  We hope that you’ve had as awesome a time using your Gravatars as we’ve had making it all work.  And we look forward to the future — to when your identity doesn’t have to be cemented to a specific site, but is fluid and flexible, and persistent.  We hope to see you there!

  Cheers!
  Demitrious Kelly

        
• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/10

  New Plugins

  LibDig

  Adds a Lib Dig box to WordPress posts and pages

  scrnshotsRSS

  This plugin for WordPress allows you to show Scrnshots.com captures on your sites

  eFiles Backup

  This plugin for Wordpress allows you to download backups of your Uploads, Themes and Plugin directories. It also allows you to download the entire wp-content directory. Not suitable for WPMU without alteration, or for large sites.

  WP-UDIF-Entrecard

  This plugin enables a simple method of displaying an Entrecard Widget on your Blog and will also display a “U Drop I follow” Image below it for members of the U Drop I Follow Moment

  Updated Plugins

  AVH Amazon

  The avh-amazon WordPress plugin gives you the ability to add a widget which will display a random item from your Amazon wish list, baby registry and/or wedding registry.

  Related Posts by Category

  Display related posts based on their category. (Page in German)

  DasboardZone

  Displays statistics about your posts and post frequency on the WordPress Dashboard

  Event Calendar 3

  Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.

  Alt Link Text

  Alt Link Text adds “Alternative Link Text” and “Alternative Title Attribute” fields to the Write Page and Manage Page screens.

  Pods

  Pods is a Wordpress plugin that adds CMS abilities to blog posts.

  Drain Hole

  Drain Hole is a centralized download manager with full monitoring, statistics, versioning, SVN support, and proper SEO download URLs

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/09

  Blue Grace

  

  Blue Grace is a simple three column WordPress theme with a rotating header image

  Fancy

  

  Two column WordPress theme which really lets your blog stand out from the crowd. Make your blog unique by changing the main blog color (pink, yellow, green), background pattern (available over 20 background variations), banner etc through an options page. In addition you have the ability to choose the color of sidebar blocks (violet, yellow, green).

  Acosmin v4

  

  Two column, white and grey, gravatar theme with ad ready stops with psd files included

  Hello Red

  

  Hello Red is a 2 column red, white, and black, widget ready WordPress theme.

  Retrospective

  

  Three column, widget ready, fast loading, search engine optimized theme

   

  On the subject of themes, Matt has a tutorial Separating Pings from Comments in WordPress 2.7.

• bbPress: bbPress 1.0-alpha-2 released

  The next installation in the bbPress 1.0 alpha series has been released. bbPress 1.0 alpha 2 introduces new features and fixes most of the issues raised by testers from the previous release.

  A lot of the features were covered in a previous post. You can view the changes in bbPress between 1.0-alpha-1 and 1.0-alpha-2, as well as the changes that have been made to BackPress between revision 109 and 161.

  The XML-RPC functionality now built into bbPress 1.0 alpha has made possible a new plugin for WordPress called “bbPress Live“. Currently this plugin can grab a list of forums and latest topics for display on a WordPress blog. Two configurable widgets are provided to pop the information into sidebars. Future versions of the plugin will allow WordPress posts to be copied to a bbPress forum, much like the bbSync plugin does for earlier versions of bbPress. The difference is that bbPress Live does not require the bbPress and WordPress sites to be on the same server, as all interaction is via XML-RPC calls rather than direct database queries.

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/08

  ZdMultilang

  ZdMultilang is a Multilingual plugin for Wordpress allowing you to blog in more than one language. You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel.

  Gravatar Recent Comment

  Gravatar recent comments is a plugin allowing you to display recent comments using Gravatar instead of just the name of the user.

  Ovulation Predictor

  This plugin displays functional ovulation and due date predictor. It can be used from women to check their future fertile time and due date.

  Better Howdy

  Remove ‘Howdy’ and restructure the ‘Howdy’ line.

  WP Super Cache

  WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

  Post Revision Display

  Display the list of revisions for a post, without having to go through the admin interface

  nkthemeswitch

  This plugin was written do allow usage of different themes for logged in users. It is intended for theme developers who want to test their themes on live sites without breaking things for visitors.

  Wp2BB

  Wp2BB integrates your WordPress blog and your phpBB forum. It automatically creates new topics in the forum for every new post in your blog.

  Comment Toolbar

  This plug-in adds up to six buttons at the end (or the top) of every comments to automatically insert Comments Navigation, Reply and Quote functions

  Zina

  Zina is a graphical interface to your MP3 collection, a personal jukebox, an MP3 streamer.

• Donncha: WP Super Cache 0.8.3 “Speedy”

  WP Super Cache version 0.8.3 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

  Double Caching

  This releases fixes a long standing compression bug. In older versions of the plugin, the cached page was compressed twice. Once to display to the current visitor, and once again for the cached files stored on the server. This has now been fixed and there’s a noticeable speed increase for anonymous visitors. Unfortunately as a side effect, it’s not possible to display the “super cache gz” html comment now. To verify that html pages are being served from the supercache directory you’ll have to add an error_log() somewhere and check that visits aren’t logged.
  The plugin now uses fopen() instead of gzopen() which according to a comment on the gzopen() manual page is unreliable under high load.

  IE7 Fixes

  Apparently IE7 has problems when gzipped files are served as “x-gzip” files, under certain circumstances. This is an obscure bug but this has been fixed. If you’re upgrading, either remove wp-content/cache/.htaccess and visit the admin page and that file will be regenerated, or edit that file and change “x-gzip” to “gzip”.

  A number of smaller bugs were also fixed. Check the changelog for further info.

  

  Related Posts

  • Want to test super speed caching?
  • WP Super Cache 0.6
  • WP Super Cache 0.6.7

• Weblog Tools Collection: Where Is That Settings Page?

  One of the things I’ve noticed since using WordPress is that after you install a number of plugins, it becomes clear that there is no standard for where to place the plugin configuration link. Sometimes, the configuration link for a plugin shows up in the dashboard while other times, the link appears within the Manage panel. To top things off, many of the plugins provide links to their specific settings in the Settings panel. How much time do you think you have wasted so far by always searching for a particular plugins settings page?

  Over the weekend, I happened to come across a post written by Andrew Rickmann which showcased an idea to create a configure link next next to the usual Activate/Deactivate Edit links found within the Plugin Management panel.

  

  Andrew’s point of view is that, instead of adding top level menu items to the WordPress administration panels, it would be far easier to click on a configure link that would open up a sliding panel which would present anywhere from 1-5 configurable settings. Not only does this idea make configuring plugins faster, but it makes browsing the WordPress administration panel much easier as the top level navigation system is not filled with links. On top of that, the configure link makes complete sense to be located next to the Deactivate/Edit links. In doing so, configuration options are in a predictable location.

  

  In my opinion, here are a couple of reasons why we are not seeing something like this already being used. Number one, WordPress is open source meaning anytime you try to implement anything close to a standard, it probably won’t work. People will come up with their own solutions to the problem which is one of the beauties of Open Source but can also be a contributing problem. Secondly, this was brought up over two years ago. You can see the initial forum thread here and the post on the WP-Hackers Mailing List from Owen here. Considering we have gone two years without any move towards a solution such as the one Andrew suggested, perhaps we will always be at the mercy as to where plugin authors place their configuration links.

  Plugin authors can bring up the fact that they provide directions within their readme files that indicate where to find the configuration page. While they may help in the short term, that doesn’t solve the root of the overall problem. Andrew’s idea is something that can be implemented by plugin authors right now. In terms of something like this being added to the core, according to Andrew, the process is so simple, it probably doesn’t need to be added.

  Where do you stand on this issue? Would you like to see more plugin authors implement Andrew’s idea into their own plugin or is there a better alternative?

• Matt: Berlin WordPress / Web 2.0 Expo Drinkup

  I’m in Germany for the first time and I’d love to meet some of the WordPress community here. With the help of Yamile Yemoonyah we have a venue and such for a get-together this Thursday. Since there’s an upcoming Web 2.0 Expo right here in Berlin we’re co-hosting with those folks to make the event extra-fun. Here are the deets:

  Thursday, Oct 9th at 7 p.m.
  “Dachkammer”
  Simon-Dach-Str. 39
  10245 Berlin
  030 2961673

  If you have a German blog or Twitter please help spread the word! Hope to see you there.

  Update: Got a discount code from the conference, if you register here and enter the code webeu08gr99 you’ll get a 35% discount.

• Alex King: WordCamp Utah Recap

  (I had intended to get this posted early last week, but pushing all of the meetings, etc. from the week prior to WordCamp Utah to last week torpedoed that pretty effectively.)

  WordCamp Utah was a great event - well organized by Joseph Scott (thanks Joseph!), well attended and with some very good speakers.

  I gave a presentation about WordPress plugins. This was a challenging talk because of the vastness of the topic combined with the variety of the interest and technical background of the audience. Here are the slides.

  WordPress Plugins (WordCamp Utah)

  View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: carrington plugins)

  Some folks seemed upset that I didn’t give a technical demo of how to build a plugin. However, I chose to keep the talk at a high level based on the make-up of the audience.

  Instead of getting into the code, I talked about techniques and approaches, and different kinds of plugins. My intent was to give people an idea of what they can do with plugins; and a little start on how to approach writing one. We may change this at WordCamp Denver and have some technical presentations.

  I also announced a couple of goodies at the end of the talk. We pulled an all-nighter on Friday getting everything ready for release. My presentation might have suffered a bit as a result.

  We’ve released some development tools for other WordPress developers to use. These are things we’ve had to build over the years, and thought others could make good use of.

  • WordPress Install (SVN Checkout) Script - a shell script will walk you through a checkout of multiple versions of WordPress from SVN and set up the requisite config file and database structure. This makes it easy to create a series of installs for testing purposes.
  • WordPress Compatibility Plugin - sets some constants and some other little things that provide backward compatibility for older versions of WordPress.
  • Quality Assurance (QA) Checklists - checklists to help guide plugin and theme testing. Includes considerations such as WordPress version, theme compatibility, browser type, WordPress settings, etc.

  The biggest announcement - and the one I’m most excited about - was the Carrington theme, but I’ll have a follow-up post about that as there is just too much to cover here.

  Thanks again to everyone who made WordCamp Utah a success.

  UPDATE: Oh yeah, the presentation was recorded. (Thanks Jeremy)

  Live video by Ustream

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