• Tips on Site Navigation for Mom – Devlounge – When it is all boiled down, can your mom – or grandmother or even great grandmother – use your site? Devlounge takes a look at how to improve your site's design navigation keeping everyone in mind, from beginner to experienced web user.
• How to display custom post types on your WordPress blog homepage – WP Recipes – Custom Post Types could be the rage for WordPress Theme designers and developers. WP Recipes shows you the code on how to showcase those custom post types on your WordPress front page.
• The Comprehensive List of Thesis Hooks and Thesis Filters – If you are a fan of the Thesis WordPress Theme, this will be invaluable. A collection of hooks and filters for the Thesis Theme. Bookmark this now.
• Display Separate Counts for Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – Digging into WordPress – We used to fuss over how to separate comments, pings, and trackbacks, and now, this post looks at how to showcase the numbers, the counts, for comments, pingbacks and trackbacks.
• Custom Comments HTML Output – Digging into WordPress – Comments are often ignored in WordPress Themes, the last to be styled. This post digs into how to style and customize the output of WordPress blog comments.
• 11 Common Web Design Mistakes (Blunders) – Hongkiat – While exploring the new features of CSS and HTML, we need to remember that no matter how fancy the code gets, some basic design mistakes can make or break your site. Hongkait's 11 common design mistakes for the web are a good start – and reminder.
• Common Mistakes In Themes – scribu – We all make mistakes when it comes to developing our WordPress Themes and web designs. Scribu looks at a couple of common mistakes made in WordPress Themes that tend to plague us, as well as those checking and monitoring submissions to the WordPress Theme Directory.

Related Articles on WordCast:

• Around the WordPress Community: Plugin Tips, Weather Reports, Google Maps, and Google Code
• Around the WordPress Community: WPMU Merger, Widgets, Custom Fields, Shortcodes
• Around the WordPress Community: Post Thumbnails, Videos, Permalinks, Multiple Bloggers Blog, and Designing for iPad

February 1 – 5, 2010

WordPress Hack Cloakes Itself to All But Search Engines

Automattic Hires Theme Developer Ian Stewart, Forms “Theme Team”

Donate to Your Favorite WordPress Project: Support a WordPress Developer Day

Learn to Write WordPress Plugins in 20 Minutes (video)

Around the WordPress Community: Dynamic Copyrights, Moving WordPress, Microformats, and Twitter to Blog

WordCast Conversations 7: WordPress and Blogging for Musicians and Bands

Our newest show, Plugin Picks premiered this week with Plugin Picks 1: Audio Player and Plugin Picks 2: Google Analyticator

Got comments, questions, ideas or suggestions? We live off your feedback. Call us up at 1-888-525-BLOG or send an email over to mail@wordcastnet.com. You can also chime in on our Twitter, @WordCast, or in the WordCast Forums.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

Related Articles on WordCast:

• WordCast Recap: 2/15/10
• Plugin Picks 3: WP Google Buzz
• Plugin Picks 1: Audio Player

This extensibility doesn’t come easily, though. Thousands of developers work day in and day out to create these themes and plugins for you to use on your blog, the vast majority of which are given away for free. Their work is paid for simply in the knowledge that they helped another WordPress user make their site even better. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. These plugins and themes are fantastic, and their creators deserve themselves some good moolah!

If you’ve been thinking about donating to a WordPress development project like a plugin or a theme, or even if you haven’t, today is definitely a great time to do so. Scott Ellis has designated March 1st as “Support a WordPress Developer Day!”

The idea is simple: Donate at least $5 to your favorite WordPress development project. Then, if you’re one of the millions on Twitter, tell the world about it like so: “I just donated to insert plugin name: insert plugin link” #wppdd

That #wpdd hash tag allows the world to track how Support a WordPress Developer Day is going. When searched for, it will yield all the tweets users have posted about their donations. We’ll all be participating, how about you?

Related Articles on WordCast:

• Automattic Hires Theme Developer Ian Stewart, Forms “Theme Team”
• Reasons Why Some WordPress Plugins are Removed from the Official Directory
• Monitoring the Code News that Helps Run WordPress

Wandering through the wild fields of the WordPress Community, I turned up these colorful finds to help you improve your WordPress blog.

• Speed Up WordPress With Better Permalink Rewrite Code – ghacks – While the basic functionality of the WordPress Permalinks works fine, if you are a serious webmaster who wants to control your pretty permalink structure, this would be of interest to you.
• The Ultimative Guide For the_post_thumbnail In WordPress 2.9 – WP Engineer – In case you missed it, this is a great guide which was updated not long ago on how to handle the new post thumbnail feature in WordPress 2.9.
• Useful WordPress Tricks – StylizedWeb.com – Published in 2008, this interesting collection of WordPress Theme tips and tricks still works, featuring a variety of simple but effective code snippets WordPress Theme developers should bookmark for their collection.
• WordPress.tv – WordCamp NYC Video Recap: WordPress as CMS, 5-Minute Talks, and More – A huge roundup of videos from WordCamp NYC have hit WordPress.tv and there is some good stuff – so don't miss a minute.
• An Automated Way to Take Screenshots of any Website – Free – Binary Moon – Ben Gillbanks uncovers a neat trick on the WordPress network to showcase website and theme images without making your own screenshots. He created a Plugin to automate the process even more.
• nvie.com – Git branching model for software/web app/anything releases – If you are working on a WordPress Theme, WordPress Plugin, web app, network, blog, or any online production, this Git branching model is a great structure for structuring your work and project flow.
• Jean-Baptiste Jung – Managing and Enhancing Multi-Author Blogs with WordPress (Part 1) – Jean-Baptiste Jung, author of "WordPress 2.7 Cookbook," shares tips on how to customize your WordPress Theme for multiple bloggers in two parts on PacktPub's site promoting his book. While most of these tips apply to WordPress 2.7, they should work for current versions.
• Greasemetal – a Greasemonkey Extension for Google Chrome Users – While Firefox still wins hands down for the bloggers, Chrome is growing up. Greasemonkey scripts offer a ton of power blogging tools for Firefox, and now you can add them with Greasemetal. Not all will work, but many will.
• How to easily monitor your web server using PHP – Cats Who Code – Jean-Baptiste Jung shares a php script you can add to your WordPress blog to help you monitor your server's status.
• Genesis is Not Thesis, and Thesis is Not Genesis – Brian Gardner – The developer behind some of the most popular WordPress Themes takes time out to explain why Thesis is not the Genesis WordPress Theme and what the difference is.
  

  Think of a Honda Odyssey. Now think of a Ford Mustang. Both are vehicles, and that’s just about the extent of their similarities. Yes, they both have 4 wheels, a steering wheel and a few doors, but other than that they serve two very different purposes – and therefore cannot be compared to one another.

• Designing Websites for the iPad – Devlounge – It used to be enough to design a WordPress Theme to handle Internet Explorer with some mobile stylesheets throw in, if you thought about it. Now, mobile stylesheets are a requirement, and Devlounge offers tips on designing for the iPad – expanding the devices a designer must cover. Are you ready?
• Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? – New York Magazine – There is a lot of rumbling under the web about the next social wave. New York Magazine tested out Chatroulette! and reviews what some are calling the next social interactive network. Competition for BuddyPress? Somehow, that puts more fear than faith into my heart.
• World’s Most Influential Designers – BusinessWeek – BusinessWeek profiles the most influential designers from around the world, and some design for the web using WordPress. It's nice to see the faces behind the designs that rule our world – and changed it.

Related Articles on WordCast:

• Around the WordPress Community: The Perfect Sidebar, SQL Queries, Videos, and WordPress CMS Style
• Around the WordPress Community: Dynamic Copyrights, Moving WordPress, Microformats, and Twitter to Blog
• Around the WordPress Community: Design, Thesis Hooks and Filters, Comments, and Design Mistakes

As important as it is to update WordPress, especially when there is a mandatory update to a security issue, updating your WordPress Theme and Plugins is just as critical.

WordPress Plugins are especially vulnerable as many are not written by experts or enthusiastically supported by their authors. There is no centralized documentation for writing a “secure” WordPress Plugin, updated with each new lesson learned from a security exploit or vulnerability in WordPress, PHP, MySQL, jQuery, AJAX, or JavaScript, making it a challenge to keep Plugins easily updated as well as safe.

The WordPress Plugin Directory and WordPress development team is working to improve documentation, education, and security which is why the new Plugin Upgrade feature is so important, keeping you informed of Plugins that require updates.

However, it does have limits. Only WordPress Plugins listed in the WordPress Plugin Directory are included in the Plugin Upgrade for easy upgrading. If you are using a Plugin downloaded and installed from another resource, WordPress cannot verify that Plugin’s history unless the Plugin includes the proper code to hook into the Plugin Upgrade feature. Check with the Plugin author to see if they have updated the Plugin accordingly.

Related Articles on WordCast:

• How Many WordPress Plugins Do You Use? Really.
• Reasons Why Some WordPress Plugins are Removed from the Official Directory
• Blogs With Flash at Risk: Update Adobe Flash Player

The majority of those who responded said they used less than 10 WordPress Plugins. About 2% said they used more than 50.

According to Matt Mullenweg, statistics on the WordPress Plugin Directory report an average of 4.9 WordPress Plugins per WordPress blog. He also talks about a blogger with over 400 Plugins, agreeing that this is a bit much, but it shows the power of WordPress Plugins and the ability of WordPress to handle them all.

WordPress uses the stats accumulated by the WordPress Plugin Directory to evaluate the customization features users want and need, incorporating some of these needs into future versions under development when possible.

WordPress is also working on improving documentation and tracking of WordPress Plugins as mentioned in the WordCast report on WordPress 3.0 development, and WordPress 2.9 has made it easier to update WordPress Plugins individualy or all at once, bringing better Plugin management to the WordPress user.

Related Articles on WordCast:

• Reasons Why Some WordPress Plugins are Removed from the Official Directory
• Canonical “Core” Plugins Coming Soon to WordPress
• How to Check the Update Status of Your WordPress Plugins

Reilly is most known for his “kitchen sink” WordPress Plugin, Customizable Comment Listings (CPL), so big he’s released it as a whole Plugin and as modular Plugins so you only use what you need. The Plugin displays recent posts, recently commented posts, recently modified posts, random posts, and so many ways to display content around your entire site, Reilly claims it’s the “1001 Things to Do With Content on Your Blog Plugin.” His Plugins are found on many WordPress blogs around the world, and many, like me, could not run their blogs without them.

Reilly has a way of finding solutions that are helpful to the majority of users, but also meets obscure and eclectic needs, especially for serious webmasters such as STMP email support, Plugins to help Plugin and Theme developers, multiple blogger support, restrict users, post formating, code filtering and cleaning, category images, post linking from within the post, future post features, and more.

Here are highlights of his recent batch of updated WordPress Plugins for WordPress 2.9, with more on the way.

• Disable Search disables the search capabilities of a WordPress blog so you can replace it with other options.
• Safe Function Call allows the user to safely call in functions that may not be available from within a template or otherwise, such as calling in a function provided by a deactivated Plugin.
• Extra Sentence Space forces browsers to display two spaces between sentences for that extra visible whitespace.
• Linkify Tags turns a string, list, or array of tag IDs and/or slugs into a list of links to those tags.
• Linkify Categories turns a string, list, or array of category IDs and/or slugs into a list of links to those categories.
• Linkify Authors turns a string, list, or array of author IDs and/or slugs into a list of links to those authors, a great Plugin for multiple author blogs.
• Hide Broken Shortcodes prevents broken shortcodes from appearing in posts and pages.
• Admin Post Navigation adds links to the next and previous posts when editing a post in the WordPress Administration Panels.
• wpuntexturize goes against Matt Mullenweg’s goal of curley quotes and prevents WordPress from displaying single and double quotation marks as their curly alternatives.
• Custom Post Limits controls the number of posts that appear on the front page, search results, and author, category, tag, and date archives, independent of each other, including specific archives, a must have Plugin for magazine-style Themes and those who want more control over their content presentation.
• List More Custom Field Names breaks the viewable limit of custom field names by expanding the dropdown selection field in the Post Edit panel.
• Configure SMTP configures SMTP mailing in WordPress, including support for sending e-mail via SSL/TLS (such as GMail), essential for some installations.
• No Update Nag removes the WordPress update nag from the top of the Administration Panels to alert the user of a new version of WordPress, a nice addition to those servicing client blogs.
• Allow Multiple Accounts allows multiple user accounts to be created from the same email address for webmasters.

Reilly is in the process of moving over all his WordPress Plugins to the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can find them there under his name, Scott Reilly, and we’ve included a list here to help you explore more Plugins from this talented Plugin author.

Admin Commenters Comments Count •   Admin Expert Mode •   Admin Per Page Limits •   Admin Post Navigation •   Admin Trim Interface •   Allow Multiple Accounts •   array_partition •   Author Image(s) •   Auto-hyperlink URLs •   Blog Time •   Category Image(s) •   Commenter Emails •   Configure SMTP •   Custom Admin Post Listing •   Custom Fields For Anything •   Custom Post Limits •   Customizable Comment Listings •   Customizable Post Listings •   Disable Directory Listings •   Disable Search •   Dynamic Text Replace •   Easy Post-to-Post Links •   Expandable Dashboard Recent Comments •   Extra Sentence Space •   Get Custom Field Values •   Get Upcoming or Past Posts •   Get User Custom Field Values •   Hide Broken Shortcodes •   Hide/Cut Post Text •   HTML Special Characters Helper •   If File Exists •   Inject Query Posts •   Last Logins •   Linkify Authors •   Linkify Categories •   Linkify Post IDs •   Linkify Tags •   List More Custom Field Names •   Loop Post Navigation Links •   Never Moderate Registered Users •   No Update Nag •   Obfuscate E-mail •   Omit Passworded Posts From Search •   One Click Close Comments •   Parentless Categories •   Peer Categories •   Preserve Code Formatting •   Random File •   Restrict Usernames •   Reveal Template •   Safe Function Call •   Show Pending Comments Count •   Silent Publish •   Single Category Permalink •   Stealth Publish •   Stealth Update •   Text Hover •   Text Replace •   wpuntexturize

Know a prolific WordPress Plugin author you’d like to see us interview or feature? Let us know!

Related Articles on WordCast:

• Delete Your Uncategorized Category in WordPress (Default Categories)
• Reasons Why Some WordPress Plugins are Removed from the Official Directory
• WordPress.tv: Home of the Visual WordPress Tip

Plugins have improved the system so much, in fact, that many regular WordPressers have a list of essential plugins that add features that are, in their mind, essential. However, while these features might be absolute staples for many blogs around the web, the vast majority of these plugins are unlikely to be “rolled into the core”, having the code powering their features integrated directly into WordPress itself. However, an idea being tossed around is aiming to get the second best option.

Back in December, a post was published on the WordPress development blog about the concept of “canonical” plugins These are plugins developed by the community, just like the plugins we know today (though the WordPress Foundation is encouraging collaboration between developers), executing the most popular features requested to be in the WordPress core in the “best” way. As Jane Wells in the development blog post puts it, “These plugins would be GPL and live in the WordPress.org repo, and would be developed in close connection with WordPress core.” In a way, they will be labeled “official”, and be advertised in the WordPress admin interface with some sort of verification or guarantee.

The results of the poll attached to the post dubbed these plugins “Core” Plugins, and the developing team behind WordPress is hoping to get cracking on them soon. Many users seem excited about the concept, as it could make many features feel streamlined and directly integrated with WordPress, and it might cut down on the fear of plugins not working when upgrading a WordPress install. However, some bloggers are quite concerned about the potential implications.

Jeff Chandler raises some possible points of dissent among users in his post on Weblog Tools Collection, such as the fact that labeling these plugins as “official” implies that they are the best, even if an “unofficial” plugin might actually be better. Jeff also points out that the “free market” atmosphere around WordPress plugins would be disrupted, as users could feel a need to use the “guaranteed” plugins over others, for reasons of safety, security, or reliability, and, in effect, innovation with “standard” plugins could slow.

There are good arguments on both sides. What are your thoughts? If you use WordPress, or even if you don’t, we would love to hear your thoughts about Core Plugins. Post a comment below, or join the debate in the WordCast Forums.

Related Articles on WordCast:

• Reasons Why Some WordPress Plugins are Removed from the Official Directory
• How Many WordPress Plugins Do You Use? Really.
• Official bbPress WordPress Plugin Surfaces, Speculation Abounds

Topics and links from this week’s show:

• The official Twitter WordPress account
• Twitter Badges
• Twitterfeed
• Twitter Updater Plugin – Advanced updating features
• Twitter Tools Plugin – All in one tool with fewer updating features
• Twitter in Plain English

Download this week’s podcast

Related Articles on WordCast:

• WordCast 48: Leave Twitter alone!
• President Obama Confesses, “I Have Never Used Twitter”, Publishes First Tweet
• WordCast 50: Our Semi-centennial!

Topics and links from this week’s show:

• CSS Naked Day!
• No Update Nag Plugin
• WordPress.com gets 2.5 admin panel
• 14 Days of WordPress plugins
• Plugin of the Week: What Would Seth Godin Do? – New visitor messages based on cookies
• Probama WordPress Theme

Download this week’s podcast

Related Articles on WordCast:

• Wordcast 1: Wordpress Weirdos
• WordCast 50: Our Semi-centennial!
• WordCast 3: Beth has problems