Archive for December, 2008

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Mark Jaquith: What would you pay for a book on “Advanced WordPress” ?

This post is for people who work with WordPress: themers, WordPress coders and consultants, and anyone who wants to do things more advanced than installing plugins with WordPress. If you’re not in this market, be on your way, this poll doesn’t apply to you!

If you’re still here… I’ve been considering writing a book on “Advanced WordPress.” The market in mind is all of the themers, coders, consultants, and intrepid blog tweakers who may know a bit of PHP (or a lot), and want to go beyond the basics with WordPress. There are a lot of books that cover WordPress basics, but not a lot aimed at more advanced uses of WordPress. A sample of the topics covered would be:

  • Plugins
  • Hooks
  • Advanced WordPress administration and automation
  • Themes
  • Advanced theme tricks

It would be part reference, part walkthrough.

If this book were available, and you are in the market described above, how much (if anything) would you be willing to pay for such a book?

View Poll

Thanks for your participation!

      

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

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WordPress Podcast: Episode 49: WordPress 2.7 released, Oxite, Blog World Expo and New Media Expo to merge, Pownce closes

One of our former co-hosts, David Peralty, joins us as a special guest for this episode as we discuss:

WordPress 2.7 was released
Microsoft enters the Open Source blogware world with Oxite
New Media Expo merges with Blog World Expo
WordPress Theme Repository purged of hundreds of themes
Six Apart shuts down Pownce
Dates announced for WordCamp San Francisco 2009, WordCamp [...]

Published at: The WordPress Community

Episode 49: WordPress 2.7 released, Oxite, Blog World Expo and New Media Expo to merge, Pownce closes

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

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Lorelle on WP: WordPress.com Bloggers Get New Support and Help Site

WordPress.com News bloggers now have a new resource for help: the WordPress Help Pages.

Heather of the WordPress.com Support Team announced the new WordPress.com support. It features a knowledge-based style with overviews features and tasks.

I’ve covered a lot of tips and techniques for using WordPress.com, and here are some highlights, including a lot of features and things you can do with your WordPress.com blog not included in the new help pages:

For more WordPress News, see the latest edition of my : WordPress News: WordPress 2.7 Awesome, WordPress.com 5 Million, Plugins Updated, and WordCamp News.

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

Posted in WordPress News, Wordpressdotcom      

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

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Lorelle on WP: WordPress Themes: Start With a Solid Framework

WordPress ThemesWhy I Created a WordPress Theme Framework by Justin Tadlock is a good look at the reasons why WordPress Theme designers and developers should work with a framework when designing a WordPress Theme. A strong Theme framework creates a solid canvas upon which to build your WordPress Themes.

If you are or considering building WordPress Themes for public use, this is a good article to consider.

For more information on building WordPress Themes, see:

Related Articles

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

Posted in WordPress News, WordPress Themes      

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

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Lorelle on WP: Weekly WordPress Plugins Featured on Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress News has restarted its Plugin Review with an invitation to all WordPress Plugin authors and lovers to submit their WordPress Plugins to be reviewed over the next year. Starting January 4, 2009, they will be reviewing one Plugin a week as their Featured Plugin.

I’d like to take this opportunity to remind WordPress Theme Plugin authors how much I adore their work, and recommend that they do better when it comes to promoting their WordPress Plugins. Two years ago, I spent a month reviewing and writing about hundreds of WordPress Plugins and wrote a love letter to WordPress Plugin authors asking them to help us help them by providing more keyword specific introductions and descriptions about their WordPress Plugins.

If you are submitting your Plugin to the Weblog Tools Collection for review, follow their guidelines and my strong recommendations to make the process painless for everyone, especially the readers and those who want your WordPress Plugin.

I’m a big fan of and their weekly WordPress Plugins and Themes reports, so I’m eager for this year of non-stop weekly WordPress Plugins.

For more WordPress News, see the latest edition of my : WordPress News: WordPress 2.7 Awesome, WordPress.com 5 Million, Plugins Updated, and WordCamp News.

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

Posted in WordPress News      

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

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Lorelle on WP: WordPress 2.8 Survey: What Do You Want in the Next Version of WordPress?

WordPress NewsHave you given much thought to WordPress 2.8? Well, the WordPress development team is and they need your help and input.

With WordPress 2.7 released, work is ongoing for WordPress 2.8 and WordPress wants your feedback. In “Prioritizing Features for WordPress 2.8,” Jane Wells invites people to take a poll on what are the top priorities WordPress developers should be putting their energy into.

Currently, they are focused on WordPress Widget management, automatic Theme updates and installs, and performance improvements. The poll features the most popular features requests from the Ideas forum and more that the WordPress developers want to work on. Vote by noon on December 31 to have your say in what you want to see in WordPress 2.8.

For more WordPress News, see the latest edition of my : WordPress News: WordPress 2.7 Awesome, WordPress.com 5 Million, Plugins Updated, and WordCamp News.

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

Posted in WordPress News      

Friday, December 26th, 2008

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Prioritizing Features for WordPress 2.8

Everyone knows by now that WordPress 2.7 is packed with new features. Now that it’s available (almost 600,000 downloads as I write this!), it’s time to start working on 2.8. There were dozens of things that got tabled during 2.7 due to time constraints, and there are a lot of high-rated features in the Ideas [...]

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

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Matt: Killing Silicon Valley

Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley, an editorial from the Wall Street Journal. The main thing the article misses is that while the economics of startups are currently distorted doing a startup is still one of the best ways to change the world, for your work to have an impact far beyond the walls of a single company. I’ve seen some killer startups recently, my only hope is that they have enough runway to make it to the execution of their idea. Entrepreneurship.gov says “Freedom is just another word for entrepreneurship.”

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

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Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 12/21

New Plugins

Blog Copyright

Blog Copyright injects a copyright notice into the blog footer.

Art Direction Plugin

This plugin allows you to have global archive and single page per-post styles.

Admin Menu Editor

Manually edit the Dashboard menu. You can reorder the menus, show/hide specific items, change access rights, and more.

Vimeo Quicktags

Enable administrator to embed vimeo video into blog. Options available are the same as provided by vimeo.

Picapp

The plugin makes it easier to insert free, quality photos into a blog post by integrating all these into your WordPress interface.

Updated Plugins

Author Avatars

This plugin provides a widget and a shortcode which allow you to show avatars of blog users.

Open Picture Window

Opens a new browser window containing the image specified using JavaScript. You have the option to choose the features as well as choose if you want it to be centered.

Add to Feed

A simple feed enhancement plugin that allows you to add custom text or HTML to posts in your WordPress blog feed. You can add text before the content and/or after the content as well as a copyright message. Now, include a link to the current post as well.

External Links

The external links plugin for WordPress lets you process outgoing links differently from internal links.

Auto-Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Automatically close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks on your posts. You can choose to keep comments / pingbacks / trackbacks open on certain posts. You can now delete post revisions as well.

Serial Posts

This plugin allows you to assign a Serial name, using custom fields, to your posts and then automatically displays a list of other posts which have the same Serial name when viewing this post. You can create as many Serials as you need, therefore allowing you to create multiple groupings of posts.

Excerpt Re-reloaded

Create an excerpt choosing number of words, link text for the rest of the post, filter for allowed tags with autoclose. It works with WP 2.6+

Old Post Promoter

The main feature is the ability to promote an old post to either the 1st or 2nd position.

pMetrics

The pMetrics WordPress Plugin allows you to check blog stats directly from your WordPress Dashboard

WordPress 2.7 Comments API

This isn’t a plugin, but a PHP5 Class for use new WordPress 2.7 Comments API. Page in Spanish.

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

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Matt: Friendster Switches

Friendster Relaunches Blogs, Switches to WordPress MU. Basically Friendster has switched millions of blogs from Typepad to WordPress, presumably at least partly because Six Apart abandoned their Typepad platform for third parties starting in late 2006 with Le Monde.

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

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