I haven’t been inside the feed reader too much this week because of the redesign of this blog. But this week, we have a wide variety of news topics to cover, including the release of WordPress 2.3.3. Sony gives back to the community with two custom coded WordPress plugins, one for image rotation and the other for replying to comments. WP Candy explains how to separate trackbacks and comments to make the commenting section of your blog cleaner and easier to navigate. Ronald ignites a fire by asking if Trackback messages are still useful. Although we always seem to get into an argument over the subject of WordPress being a CMS, I figured I would cover a piece of news which highlights plugins that would give your WordPress installation some CMS oomph. All this and more on WordPress Weekly Episode 5. Hope to see you there!
Panel Members:
Ronald Huereca: Contributing editor for WeblogToolsCollection.com and raproject.com. Author of the WordPress Ajax Edit Comments plugin.
Catch his personal musings at Ronalfy.com
Andrew Rickmann: Long time user of WordPress who has molded themes, plugins and hacks within the WordPress code. Fun with WordPress is Andrew’s solution to putting all those thoughts in one place, and giving something back to the community.
Catch his work at FunWithWordPress
Kaspars Dambis – Author of the WordPress themes Morning Racer, Agneka Simple, Sans-serif Racer and Times Racer. Kaspars is also a WordPress plugin developer.
View his work at Konstrucktors
Rob White – Host of the weekly Talkcast on talkshoe called Podcast Training And Chat via Twobeams. Also a big fan of WordPress.
Check out all of the valuable podcasting information at Twobeams.com
Stories Discussed:
Turning WordPress Into A CMS Via Plugins – Josh Byers posted an article that highlighted various plugins that would give your WordPress installation the oomph that is provided by CMS solutions out of the box. Plugins such as Search Everything, One Click Installer, Clutter Free and Custom Admin Menu.
Content Theft And How Report It– Lorelle Van Fossen has written a detailed article that explains how you can report content theft on your WordPress.com or WordPress.org blog. This article contains a slew of great information and I’ll be looking forward to seeing what Jonathan Bailey has to add in his speech about this subject at WordCamp Dallas.
Rocky Mountain Voices Conducts Video Interview Of Matt Mullenweg – The folks of Rocky Mountain voices had a chance to interview Matt when he was in Utah. He covers the various revenue streams that WordPress has, the recent funding and what it means for Automattic, community involvement, and much more.
Trackbacks: Still Useful? – Ronald Huereca of WeblogToolsCollectionl.com asked a perplexing question to the community. Are trackbacks still useful? There has been quite a response from the community ranging from trackbacks are another form of spam to, trackbacks help keep track of a conversation as it spreads across the web. Don’t worry, this is one I think all of us can chip in on.
TrialSoftWarez Releases Post Randomizer – For those of you looking for a plugin that displays a random set of posts each time a page is loaded, you’re in luck. Post Randomizer displays a random set of posts per page visit. The plugin author recommends placing the plugin in the footer so the content is unobtrusive but that doesn’t mean you have to abide by that suggestion.
WordPress.org now in Kazakhstan – The free blog publishing software WordPress, which can be translated into any language in order to increase its accessibility, has been translated into Kazakh by Kazakh bloggers. The number of people blogging in Kazakh has grown significantly because there is a group on Google that explains how it works
WordPress 2.3.3 Released – Earlier this week, WordPress 2.3.3 was released as a security upgrade. This new releases fixes an XML-RPC implementation flaw that would enable a specially crafted request to enable a user to edit posts of other users on a blog. If you haven’t upgraded yet, don’t complain about your site if it ends up being attacked.
Separate Comments And Trackbacks – More and more blog readers/commenters are becoming annoyed with wading through the trackback/pingbacks that seem to clog up the commenting section of so many blogs, this one included. Chris Thomson has written a good article which describes what you need to do in order to separate the two without the need of a plugin. Thanks Chris!
WordPress 2.5 Progress – Westi provides us his weekly update as to what is going on with WordPress 2.5. Things that caught my eye:
- Removal of any old compatibility functions for PHP 4.2 and 4.3 (#5415).
- I18N updates for the new widgets interface (#5583).
- Changes to increase the memory limit for PHP (#3141).
- Comment feed fixes to ensure that we have got a post before we querying for the comments (#5185).
- Addition of the TinyMCE Fullscreen plugin (#5735).
- Fixes to future post publishing over xmlrpc (#5721).
- Update TinyMCE to v3.0 final (#5674).
- Changes to allow for multiple database connections (#2722).
- Introduction of a new template tag is_front() which is only true on the front page of a WordPress install (#3682).
Sony Releases Two WordPress Plugins – Sony published an article that not only showed their love for WordPress, but also highlighted two plugins that they have developed on their own to fill a need that a previous plugin couldn’t fill. The two plugins are as follows:
Comment Replies
Think of it as a threaded response-lite. We wanted our authors to be able to respond directly to comments, but not create a completely threaded conversation. That’s the purpose of Comment Replies. You also have the option to style the responses in a number of different ways. Full details/download.
Image Rotator
On the front page of this blog we have a graphic banner that rotates (at the top) to feature different items with a corresponding link. Initially, we created a simple manager on the backend, but we quickly ported it over to a WordPress plugin. Just like the Comment Replies plugin, you can customize how the plugins works. Full details/download.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Jeffro2pt0 – My tip this week featured the WordPress Codex. The Codex is a repository of information for WordPress.org. Inside the codex, you’ll find documentation for functions that are built into WordPress, instructions for how to perform certain tasks, and overall general tips on how to make your WordPress installation secure. An awesome source of info that should be looked into at the first sign of trouble.
Ronald Huereca – Ronald’s tip deals with theme authors. Include a template file for separating comments from trackbacks and allow an option in the admin panel to switch between the regular comments view or to have a separated view.
I for one support this tip and would greatly encourage theme authors to adopt this functionality into new themes.
Kaspars Dambis – A newcomer to WordPress Weekly, Kaspars gives us the lowdown on a new plugin he has been working on.
I wanted to let you know that I have created a new plugin which allows user to use other plugins which don’t provide widgets but only function hooks.
So with CFW it is possible to use, for example, the ‘Popularity Contest’ plugin without ever touching the theme files. Just drag a new ‘custom function’ widget into the sidebar, enter the name of the function as well as any arguments it may require and there’s the widget.
It is important that this plugin doesn’t use php eval function and users don’t have to write php code. They supply only the name of the function and the arguments.
There are a few other options worth mentioning and I have detailed them in this blog post:
http://konstruktors.com/blog/wordpress/101-wordpress-plugin-custom-function-widgets/
Rob White – Rob, also a new comer to the show suggested that everyone read Jeffro2pt0.com and to listen to the podcast. Hey, I think this may be the best WordPress Tip Of The Week that has ever been suggested. Rob, you’re ok in my book!
Andrew Rickmann – Andrew suggested that WordPress developers look into something called Aptana which is an open source code editor. As was discussed on a post made by Matt Mullenweg recently, Dreamweaver CS3 is not all it’s cracked up to be. Yes, that rhymes!
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