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• WordPress.tv: Frederick Townes: Working Backwards
  
  
  
• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 3.0.1 Released

  WordPress 3.0.1 has been officially released. This release fixes 55 minor issues, including a frequently reported export error and an incompatibility with PHP 5.0.5.

  The upgrade should be available for most of you from your Dashboard. If you don’t see the announcement, go to Dashboard/Updates. If you encounter any trouble with the automated updater, try deactivating your plugins before reinitiating the update. As is accustomed with Murphy and his fabled law, a manual upgrade many be required, but it shouldn’t take too long.

  If you need help, please submit your request to the WordPress Support Forums.

• Dev Blog: WordPress 3.0.1

  After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, we’re releasing WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:

  Three dot oh dot one
  Bug fixes to make you smile
  Update your WordPress

  This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.

  Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

  Note: If you downloaded 3.0.1 in the first 20 minutes of release (before 2200 UTC), you’ll want to reinstall it, which you can do right from your Updates screen. Our bad.

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/29

  New plugins

  FourSquare Integration for WordPress allows you to view your last checkins either as a list or on Google Maps on Pages and Posts.

  DynamicWP Featured Post is a free WordPress jQuery plugin that will list your featured post based on the post tag and displayed as a widget. The post will cycled automatically.

  DukaPress can be used to build online shops quickly and easily. It is built to be both simple and elegant yet powerful and scalable.

  Add image_src Meta Tag ensures your content has a relevant thumbnail when shared on social sites, by adding an image_src meta tag to your header which contains your post thumbnail image.

  Updated plugins

  The AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

  The AddToAny: Subscribe Button helps people subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all other RSS readers.

  Fast and Secure Contact Form for WordPress lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics.

  Viper’s Video Quicktags allows you to simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed and much more.

  
  
  Should we include “install” links via the new plugin installer tool in future plugin digests?online surveys
  

• Matt: New Kindle

  There’s a new Kindle out, which I just ordered. I love the Kindle — even more than the iPhone 4. On my iPhone I do the same stuff I do on my computer, just mobile. The Kindle helps me to read and my life has been more enhanced by books than any other medium I’ve experienced. I’ve bought probably 10 since they came out for me, friends, and family, and sold 100+ to other people. (Before the Kindle came out I randomly got a demo of it from Jeff Bezos at the EG Conference, and it was love at first sight.)

• Matt: Centered Twitter Backgrounds

  I don’t usually make public feature requests and I know our friends at Twitter are dealing with crazy scaling issues but I would like to register one simple request: the option for centered backgrounds. Background: Twitter lets you upload a background image, but it’s always left-aligned which means unless its tiling interacts awkwardly with the main centered window. But with a single line of CSS, background-position: center, you could use the width of Twitter’s content window (763px) to create something beautiful and exciting that dovetailed perfectly with the main content area. If you’re feeling crazy afterward, allow a different background to be specified for single-tweet permalink pages, which would also make Blackbird Pies even tastier. If your name is Ev Williams, Biz Stone, Dick Costello, Ryan King, Kevin Cheng, Mark Trammell, Doug Bowman… pass this on to someone. (And help me verify the WordPress account.) I think a whole new Twitter design community could flourish. And I could forgive you for using a table for layout. Update: This is getting some nice pick-up.

• WordPress.tv: Jane Wells: What’s Next for WordPress
  
  
  
• Weblog Tools Collection: A New Way to Install Plugins

  There are two ways to install plugins in WordPress 3.0. You can either search for and install plugins via Plugins/Add New in your admin panel, or search for and download plugins from the plugin directory, then upload them to /wp-content/plugins/. Now, thanks to Mark Jaquith, there’s a new way to install plugins.

  The new plugin installer tool allows users to easily install plugins via a web-based interface outside of WordPress, with no FTP knowledge or tedious admin panel searching required. The new tool will be officially rolled into the plugin directory during WordPress’ impending site-wide redesign. For now, plugin developers can create a link directing users to the plugin installer tool and their plugin, and the rest of us can use the bookmarklet to install plugins from the directory.

• Mark Jaquith: Bookmarklet to install a WordPress Plugin

  As a followup to my previous post, I’ve created a bookmarklet that you can use to install a WordPress plugin. While viewing a plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory, click this bookmarklet, and you’ll be guided in installing that plugin on your site.

  Here’s a screencast showing it in action!

  
  
  
• Matt: Mena Suvari Mystery

  Yesterday in front of my building in Montreal I ran into (almost quite literally) Mena Suvari. There’s been a large filming crew hanging out the past few days and they relabeled the building from 400 Sherbrooke to Nottingham Hotel. None of the movies under production on her IMDB page seemed likely candidates and in the news she’s mentioned arriving in Montreal but for unknown reasons. I finally talked to a member of the crew and it turns out they’re filming a made-for-TV movie called No Surrender, but I was unable to confirm this or find any more info online. I’d like to see it when it comes out since I might be in one of the shots.

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 07/27

  

  The ClearCut WordPress Theme is a highly configurable WP theme for artful or portfolio sites with an unusual and unique layout, featuring a two column fluid theme layout, enabled with custom cufon fonts, options panel, css3, page navigation, and related posts.

  

  Cold Water is a cool and clean looking blog theme that has a large content slider on the front page. The theme has 3 columns for your widgets and it also supports the WordPress 3.0 menu management feature.

  

  Sketchpad is a WordPress 3.0 theme that will help fuel your socially oriented site with built in media subscription icons, a themesheep “related articles” feature, and a “latest tweet” area in the header.

  

  The Bibs Yellow Dream WordPress 3.0 Theme is based on the new WordPress 3.0 default Theme with a few modifications, frames, and little shadow effects. The right Sidebar is optimized for Adsense 300px. The Theme comes with 9 Widget Areas in total.

  

  Goodness is a two-column layout WordPress theme, with a righthand sidebar, a horizontal dropdown jQuery custom menu, a replaceable logo area, custom header, and paged and threaded comments.

  

  Oceanic is calm as the pacific ocean with tweets, ads, social links and featured posts.

  

  The TypoThemeZero WordPress 3.0 Theme comes with 5 sidebars: two Sidebars on the right with 300px width Adsense format, one sidebar on top of the postings, one under the postings, and one in the footer which can hold several text widgets.

• WordPress.tv: Panel Discussion: Blogging for Your Business
  
  
  
• WordPress.tv: Lisa Sabin-Wilson: BuddyPress 101
  
  
  
• WordPress.tv: Adicionar Fundos Personalizados no WordPress 3.0
  
  
  
• Joseph: A New Focus

  In the three plus years I’ve been working at Automattic the company has grown quite a bit. The number of services has increased and there are over four times as many people. And the growth of WordPress.com has been amazing.

  During that time I’ve worked in several areas; bug fixing, stats, themes, comments, rssCloud, PubSubHubbub, webhooks, the list goes on. Today starts a new focus for me at Automattic: Akismet. Most of my previous responsibilities are being transitioned to other people and teams.

  So what will this change of focus mean? For now my responsibilities on Akismet will focus on public facing projects, like the Akismet WordPress plugin for instance.

  I’ve been a happy user of Akismet for many years, now being able to work on such a critical product is very exciting.

  Related posts:

  1. WordPress & libxml2 Episode IV: A New Plugin
  2. WordPress Plugin Update: LibXML2 Fix
  3. Twitter Style Group Blog With P2

• Matt: Why Intelligent People Fail

  1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.

  Read Why Intelligent People Fail from Michael Anissimov for the other 19. Hat tip: Paul Kim.

• Weblog Tools Collection: Thesis Adopts a Split GPL License

  Thesis has officially adopted a split GPL license, putting an end to the explosive debate between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Thesis developer Chris Pearson which launched a community-wide discussion on the GPL and WordPress themes.

  To clarify the split GPL license, Chris Pearson adds, “the PHP is GPLv2 and the CSS, JS, and images are proprietary.” Specifically, this means that Thesis no longer violates the GPL of WordPress and the several plugins that Thesis was based on. Matt Mullenweg was thrilled to hear the news, replying with, “Now, back to work. This has taken a lot of my time over the past few days and was going to consume more if it went forward.”

  It is unknown if this will have any affect on Mr. Pearson’s business.  While the split GPL license now allows the core of Thesis be redistributed by a third-party either free or for a fee, the rest of Thesis is still protected and would therefore require extensive work to redistribute anything like it.  In addition to the proprietary portions of Thesis, Mr. Mullenweg mentioned in the original debate that Thesis is “more than just a code and a theme; it is the forums, the support, the community, and all the things around it that make it valuable. That is not something that someone in another country selling it for half-price is going to be able to duplicate because they don’t have you.”

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/25

  New plugins

  Foursquare map

  Foursquare is rising in popularity, and will continue to grow. This plugin makes it easy to share your last check-in location without needing to worry about giving away personal info, and you don’t need to be an expert in mapping APIs!

  Vanityvid

  Vanityvid is a service that turns avatars into videos. This plugin integrates the service into WordPress.

  Delicious Bookmark Button

  A cool delicious bookmarking button/badge with total bookmark count. It adds a delicious badge or button to your post or page which allows you to bookmark the post. It also reflect a real-time count of how many times your page has been bookmarked in delicious, just like tweetmeme button does for twitter. Both standard and compact version of the badge to choose from.

  Simple Sitemap

  This plugin provides an easy way to display a HTML sitemap of posts and pages on your site. This gives your visitors an efficient way to view all of your available content (posts/pages) in one place. It is also good for SEO purposes and makes it easier for spiders to index your content. The sitemap generates two ordered lists, one for posts, and one for pages. Each list can be sorted individually via a drop down list of options.

  Convert Post Types

  This is a utility for converting lots of posts or pages to a custom post type (or vice versa). You can limit the conversion to posts in a single category or children of specific page. You can also assign new taxonomy terms, which will be added to the posts’ existing terms

  WordPress Multiple Author Ad management

  When the add-on is enabled, users will have full control over the advertisements displayed on their own posts. Using a space pre-allocated by the blog administrator, authors will be able to display various forms of advertisements in addition to accepting Paypal donations

  Exports and Reports

  Define custom exports / reports for users by creating each export / report and defining the fields as well as custom MySQL queries to run.

  Crony Cronjob Manager

  Create and Manage Cronjobs in WP by running Scripts, Functions, and/or PHP code. This plugin utilizes the wp_cron API.

  Syntax Highlighter ComPress

  Syntax Highlighter ComPress is a simple WordPress plugin, that is based on the latest Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter Script. Code and source text of different mark-up or programming languages can be highlighted.

  Updated plugins

  Twitter Goodies

  This plugin will show your twitter tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages. Tweets will refresh automatically. Also it has reply option inside widget on mouse over action.

  WP Google Buzz

  All in one Google Buzz integration with WordPress.

  Query Multiple Taxonomies

  Allows you to provide faceted search on your site, using multiple custom taxonomies.

  All in One Webmaster

  This plugin has option to add Google, Bing, Alexa, Blog Catalog, Yahoo’s Webmaster and Analytics code (meat tags).

  Post Address Shortening

  With this Plugin you optimize your workflow as it enables you to auto-generate a shortened URL to your blog posts and stores it in the database.

  URL Shortener

  URL Shortener allows you to generate shortlinks for post/pages using URL Shorteners (e.g. Bit.ly, Su.pr, ping.fm, Digg and many others).

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Bids Farewell to PHP 4 and MySQL 4

  After five years of dedicated support, WordPress will be leaving PHP 4 and MySQL 4 behind for the far more current and secure PHP 5 and MySQL 5. WordPress 3.2, planned to launch during the first half of 2011, will be the first release to require PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher.

  The change really comes as no surprise. Both PHP 5 and MySQL 5 are far more secure than their predecessors and they are actively developed. How long has it been since an update was made to PHP 4 and MySQL 4? The final version of PHP 4 was released during August of 2008, followed by the final version of MySQL 4 on December of 2008. Both PHP 4 and MySQL 4 have been discontinued for almost two years.

  The WordPress team is confident that the change in requirements will be relatively inconsequential. According to Mark Jaquith, “Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2 [and] fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4.” Mr. Jaquith adds that most users running a PHP version less than 5.2 belong to hosting providers which actually support PHP 5.2 or higher. These users may have the ability to enabled PHP 5 via their hosting provider’s control panel or request to be moved to a server with PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher.

  Arguably, some hosting providers still swear by PHP 4 and MySQL 4, but considering that both Drupal and Joomla will sport similar requirements later this year, many will be forced to finally offer PHP 5 and MySQL 5. If your hosting provider insists on forcing you to use a PHP and MYSQL version that has been discontinued for almost two years, consider the cliché “there are many fish in the sea” and find a new hosting provider.

  Hot on the heels of this announcement is the new Health Check plugin which will immediately confirm your server’s WordPress 3.2 compliance upon activation. The plugin will be receiving several additional features in the near future, but for now it should provide peace of mind for most of you regarding the impending change in WordPress’ requirements.

• Peter Westwood: “Patches Welcome”

  Occasionally you may have seen or heard myself or one of the other members of the core WordPress team saying “Patches Welcome” and wondered what this was all about.

  Basically we are just trying to emphasise that in an open source project like WordPress, where direction is driven by the community with responsibility gained through the mechanisms of meritocracy, the best way to improve things is to write a patch.  This doesn’t have to be a patch for the PHP code it could also be a patch for the CSS or an update to the documentation on the codex or helping out people on the support forums.

  On the way back from WordCamp UK last weekend I had the idea for a new site where we could collect together information around how to get involved and so I have set up a new site called “Patches Welcome” and have started writing over there too.  The aim for the site is to collect together tutorials, a question and answer list, contributor interviews and other things as the site develops.

  I posted the first of the contributor interviews yesterday and have already got some questions coming in and ideas for tutorials for the coming weeks.

  Please let me know if you have any ideas or questions using the contact form on the site.

  
  
• Mark Jaquith: Plugin installer tool

  Remember when you had to install WordPress plugins by uploading them manually via FTP? I do. Heck, I remember when there weren’t plugins, and you had to copy and paste PHP code! We’ve come a long way, but I realized the other day that there is one more way that we could improve ease of installation.

  Say you’re a plugin author, and you have this great plugin. How do you get people to install it? Well, you could link to its page in the plugin directory, where they’d be prompted to download a zip file. Or you could offer the zip file yourself. But why are we offering plugins the same way we were in 2004? We have a built-in plugin installer. Let’s use that! So how would you do that? I guess you’d just tell people “Hey, go to your wp-admin and search for ‘My Awesome Plugin.’” That introduces a lot of chances for failure. They might even end up with the wrong plugin!

  I made a better way, and will be working on integrating this into WordPress.org this summer.

  To see it in action, click here. All you have to do is type in the URL of your WordPress blog.

  

  The tool auto-detects the WordPress installation by looking at the X-Pingback header. You’ll be presented with the plugin installation form for your blog. Click “Install Now” and the plugin will be installed. Much easier, and you know they’re getting the correct plugin.

  

  Plugin authors can go here for more info. I’ll make sure these URLs forward to WordPress.org once we get it set up there, so you can start using this now.

  Update: It has a bookmarklet now. If you click that bookmarklet from a WordPress Plugin Directory page, it’ll prompt you to install the plugin you were viewing.

  Here’s a screencast showing it in action!