Here’s a quick one: If you had access to a desktop application that could connect to your WordPress site and allow you to manage it, like the web-based control panel currently allows, would you use it?

Would You Use a WordPress Desktop Application?(answers)

If you choose “depends”, let me know why in the comments. Also, feel free to put in your opinions no matter what you choose. What would such an application need to be able to do? Everything the web-based app can do? Just a subset of the features? What do you think?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

ExtizeMe

A WordPress theme written mostly in JavaScript. Layout, behavior and look&feel are made with Ext Js Library

ThrillingTheme

Two column theme with three widget ready areas and available in three color schemes.

Color3

Colorful clean and stylish theme with two columns, right sidebar dropdown menu and widget-ready.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get these listed in our release posts.

How cool would it be to take a look at a Google map to see if there are any WordPress fans near your location? Thanks to a new site called WPWorldmap.net, now you can. The site is made up of a Google map with a draggable window that contains the options to sign up or to apply filters such as fans, core developers, users/bloggers, etc. The other neat thing about this site is that it shows upcoming WordCamp events across the world. Signing up was a breeze and if you use Twitter, you can use your account to sign up while also following anyone who has registered to the site already.

I'm that guy in Northern Ohio

Of course, WPWorldMap is only as helpful as the amount of people who decide to signup and appropriately apply their approximate location so if interested, sign up and leave your mark. You might be surprised by the number of WordPress fans in your neighborhood!

I’ve finally found the time to write up some documentation for developers who want to work with WP Super Cache.

It’s a work in progress but should help other plugin developers who want to interact with the cache.

Suggestions and comments welcome.

Related Posts

• WP Super Cache 0.8.4, the garbage collector
• WP Super Cache 0.8.7
• WP Super Cache 0.9.5

New Plugins

Fortune Kookie

This WordPress plugin adds a sidebar widget to display a random fortune cookie fortune. The database hosted on FortuneKookie.com has over 1500 unique fortunes and each fortune includes the front message, the back word(s), and the lucky numbers.

Custom Login Page

Wordpress Custom Login Page allows you to customize your login page beyond any plugin previously available. Your background image, logo image, and form div background are all customizable.

Category Checklist Tree

Prevents checked categories from going to the top of the checklist on the post editing screen.

WP Content Slideshow

WP Content Slideshow is the perfect Slideshow for Wordpress. It displays up to 5 Posts with Tile, Description and Image for every Post.

JR_Quotes

This plugin allows you to display geek quotes, pop quotes, general quotes, religious quotes and sci-fi quotes, all with a simple widget.

Updated Plugins

Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for all of your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images.

RSS Cloud

Adds RSSCloud capabilities to your RSS feed.

New User Email Set up

The function of the plugin is to provide a basic interface so that admins can define a custom email that is sent to users when they first register. Subject, Text Body, From Address, Admin Subject and Admin Text Body can all be defined, to allow for a more personalised feel to your blog, that doesn’t have such a generic ‘welcome’ email.

Clicky Tracking

Helps you integrate Clicky in your website. Clicky Web Analytics helps you monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site’s traffic in real time.

Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox is an online media viewing application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

Store Locator

The Store Locator plugin empowers web developers & web site owners to easily manage and display any set of important stores, products, or other locations on their website in an easily searchable manner. Uses Google Maps.

jQuery Lightbox for Native Galleries

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.

As we near completion of the 2.9 milestone, it’s that time of dev cycle again, when we ask all you community developers who’ve been putting off contributing to core to dust off your dev environments and help us get closer to being release-ready. How? Bug hunts! Yes, that time-honored tradition (in the time of WordPress, anyway) of everyone pitching in to test patches and report the results, working on solutions to major bugs, and helping to clear out Trac has come around again, and we’re scheduling not one, but two bug hunts over the next couple of weeks to ensure that everyone has enough time to prepare and participate.

#1 – The first bug hunt of 2.9 will be Thursday through Saturday, November 5-7, 2009. This should give people a few days to plan for it, upgrade their dev environments if they haven’t been following trunk, and figure out how to allot their time. We’re stretching over both weekdays and weekend to try and accommodate everyone’s schedule.

#2 - The second bug hunt will be a week later, Saturday through Monday, November 14-16, 2009. This should make it possible for anyone who needs more than a week to set some time aside to participate. This bug hunt will coincide with WordCamp NYC, where a special Hacker Room will be set aside for people to go and work on 2.9 bug tickets alongside regular core contributors including Mark Jaquith and Matt Martz (sivel from IRC).

The Goals

Test, test, test existing patches! You can see all tickets with patches that need testing by checking this report. When you’ve tested a patch, report your results in the ticket comments, so core committers can see how the patch is faring.

Fix known bugs! You can see the bugs that need patches by checking this report. Look for the ones that seem that they’ll affect the most people or have the biggest impact by being fixed. Edge case bugs should be lower priority.

Report new bugs! As you’re testing out the development version, if you come across a bug, search trac to see if someone has reported it yet. If so, add a comment with your experience to the ticket so we’ll know it’s affecting more than one person. If no ticket exists yet, create one.

Core committers will be around (in the #wordpress-dev channel at irc.freenode.com) both weekends to review patches that have been thoroughly tested, answer questions as needed, and give feedback on patches that need more work before being commit-worthy.

If you’ve never participated in a WordPress bug hunt before, but you’d like to get involved, we’d love to have you join us! To prepare, you’ll want to set up a test environment, start using the current development version/maybe install the beta testing plugin, join us in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel, and read up on automated testing.

WordPress MU 2.8.5.1 has just been released and may be downloaded immediately.

This is a security and bugfix release and a recommended upgrade for every WordPress MU site. What happened to 2.8.5? I had it tagged and ready for release when Luke reported a little problem. It wasn’t possible to edit blogs! It was an easy bug to fix but code had been tagged and zip/tarball archives created so I had to create new ones. Thanks Luke! Saved the day.

Thanks to everyone else who contributed and helped in any way during the making of this release. Your help is invaluable.

This release also fixes a problem with slashes in blog and site options. You’ll be prompted to run the site upgrader. Please run it on all your blogs. For a more comprehensive look at what has changed recently, take a look at the Trac Timeline.

Related Posts

• WordPress MU 2.7
• WordPress MU 2.6.1
• WordPress MU 2.8.1