WPWeekly Episode 8 – Interview With Brandon Rosage of MVN.com

wordpressweekly1 In episode 8, I interview Brandon Rosage. Brandon is the webmaster of MVN.com, a WordPress powered site that covers sporting events from A-Z. We cover the news of the week such as Matt’s speech at the Future Of Webapps Conference, Should You follow or NoFollow, Sniplets plugin security woes, an article highlighting how WordPress has reached it’s current point of success, the revolving topic of WordPress themes and more. This week, we’ll close out the show with our WordPress tips of the week.

Panel Members:

Brad of Strangwork.com

Ronald Huereca of ReadersAppreciationProject.com

Andrew Rickmann of WP-FUN.co.uk

Jacob Santos of Santosj.name

Stories Discussed:

WordPress is a finalist in the Webware 100. Make sure you cast your vote.

Multiple Vulnerabilities within the Sniplets Plugin some of which are already being exploited.

Xconomy has written a nice article that describes how WordPress went from Point A to Point B

The WordPress Publishers Blog gives WordPress Weekly some link love

Lack of creativity or lack of inspiration? I share my thoughts on this question and provide my overview as to the state of WordPress themes as I challenge theme authors to keep it simple yet raise the bar at the same time.

Reformat your WordPress install We will discuss the guide I created to give your WordPress blog a fresh face.

Matt was at the Future Of Web Apps conference and gave us some nifty tidbits of information to talk about.

The negatives of DoFollow For a period of time, bloggers were used to using NoFollow. But because of how great Akismet and other anti spam measures work, people have resorted to disabling the NoFollow attribute. We discuss the various issues surrounding Do-NoFollow.

WordPress Tips Of The Week:

Brad – Brad discussed using the OpenID plugin for WordPress. OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your blog URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. This plugin allows verified OpenIDs to be linked to existing user accounts for use as an alternative means of authentication. Additionally, commenters may use their OpenID to assure their identity as the author of the comment and provide a framework for future OpenID-based services (reputation and trust, for example).

Ronald – Ronald discussed his comment sorter plugin. His comment sorter plugin allows you to

Prevent Trackbacks/Pingbacks from showing.
Sort comments by Date Ascending.
Sort comments by Date Descending.
Sort comments by Name Ascending.
Sort comments by Name Descending.
The ability to remember options.

Check it out if you have a chance.

Andrew Rickmann – My tip of the week was for plugin authors who have a plugin that adds a DBX box to the advanced section of the post page.

There is a new function to create these boxes – add_meta_box

This is a function, not a hook, so you need to call the function from within the admin_head hook.

Also note that as of the current SVN version the old hook is still there, so you not only need to add the new method, but make sure the old version will not run if the add_meta_box function exists.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Migrating_Plugins_and_Themes

I’d also like to throw in an article about no-follow that I mentioned in the show and a poll on my site for people to comment on what I have done with comment links.

http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/comment-policy/
http://ocaoimh.ie/2008/02/27/how-to-successfully-spam-blogs-and-how-to-fight-back/

Jacob Santos – In the dashboard, click on the Edit link in the “WordPress Development” Feed. The link is to a RSS feed, and therefore supports any site which has an RSS feed. It could even be Jeffro2pt0 site or another planet.

For myself, since I’m using SVN, it is more useful for me to get SVN commits than plain releases I’m not doing to download anyway.

You can also change the title, which is below the link text box to change the feed title. The Primary and Secondary feed widgets are the only ones you can change the title for.