Those of you who listened to episode 111 of WordPress Weekly or who have been reading this site for a long time realize that I’m on a quest to find a plugin that provides the right interface for making widgets flexible when it comes to configuring when and where they show up. To fulfill this…
The writing is on the wall. It’s only a matter of time before automatic upgrades for WordPress core, plugins, and themes make it into WordPress. This is a step beyond the one click upgrades that are currently in WordPress. As dumb as it might seem, Otto is right in that users simply don’t upgrade. However,…
Joost de Valk who is pretty popular these days, especially after the release of his Yoast SEO Plugin tells us the story of how one of his sites was hacked because a theme containing the TimThumb vulnerability was not updated. If that were not interesting enough, Joost shares a statistic that doesn’t surprise me one…
Mark Jaquith recently performed a scan on a local copy of the WordPress plugin respository and was able to generate a list of basic quoted string shortcodes within the plugins. The list looks like it could go to the moon and back with some funky looking shortcodes that are not very descriptive. Mark notes that…
WordPress blog owners can install the free WordPress plugin WP-Smush.it that uses Yahoo’s Smush.it service to reduce the size of images. The plugin works automatically in the background: It sends all uploaded images to Yahoo’s image compression service and uploads that optimized version to the server, instead of the unoptimized original version. via Reduce Page…
If you’re worried about paying for Akismet in the future or are curious as to what some of the alternatives are, check out this plugin roundup via Themergency where Bradvin takes a look at six alternatives.
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen an upgrade notice for Gravity Forms but alas, 1.5 is here. This new version incorporates a ton of new features and enhancements. Among the new features are: Multi-Page Forms – Using the new Page Break field you now have the ability split longer forms into multiple pages or steps.…
Over the past few days, I’ve had a couple of people ask me what plugins I use to accomplish my commenting system here on WPTavern.com. I’m not a fan of using a third party system so in no particular order, here are the plugins I use. Akismet – I’ve had no problems with Akismet taking…
When WordPress 3.1 was released, it introduced a new feature which made it easy to link posts published in the past. I’ve found that feature to be too limiting. For starters, the linking is limited to posts on your site. Secondly, you need to use the Visual editor in order to use the linking feature.…
Earlier today, I received an email asking me what plugin I was using that allowed for the quicktags to be displayed within the comment form of the site. I love these quick tags as they provide similar functionality as you’ll find within the post writing panel within WordPress. Unfortunately, the original creator of the plugin…
WordPress 3.0.5 was released the other day to address a couple of issues dealing with security and untrusted user accounts. While those issues were addressed, it was soon discovered that one of the security fixes for 3.0.5 created another problem of stripping HTML on display from people with the unfiltered_html capability. Instead of fixing that…
This post is an FYI to plugin developers. According to Scribu who posted on the WordPress development update blog, If you were using register_activation_hook() to also handle updates from older versions of your plugins, you will not be able to do so any more in WP 3.1: [16012]The activation hook is now fired only when…
Dion Hulse also known as DD32 recently celebrated his birthday (happy belated birthday!) and in a recent blog post announced that he is looking for additional contributors to his plugins. According to Dion, his plugins are about to reach the 110,000 download mark in total and is concerned that if a security issue comes up…
As the first official “WordPress Crash Test Dummy,” Lorelle has long worshiped the ground WordPress Plugin authors walk over. Join her as she explores the world of WordPress Plugins that are pushing the barriers that many feel limit WordPress, changing site navigation, connecting with the social web, expanding WordPress Theme capabilities, unique solutions to tasks…
I don’t know about you, but I have a widescreen monitor and I’ve enjoyed having the WordPress administration menus collapsed versus extended. The extra real estate is nice to have with less for me to look at. However, this collapsed menu comes at a price whereas, this menu option does not allow me to see…