Around the WordPress Community: Plugin Tips, Weather Reports, Google Maps, and Google Code
By Lorelle VanFossen, posted Jan 20 2010 at 6:36 pm | 1 Comment »
This week brings a lot of innovative news, tips, and tutorials from around the WordPress Community:
- Digging Into WordPress – Google Maps Shortcode: Offers tips and code for inserting Google Maps into posts and Pages with shortcodes.
- WPShout – Customising the “Subscribe to Comments” Plugin: A guest post Indrek Saarnak explains how to change the layout and styles of the Subscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin on WPShout, formerly known as NomeTech.
- WordPress.com News: New Theme: monochrome: The Monochrome WordPress Theme is a new addition to the WordPress.com Theme choices, featuring interesting design details with the date, meta data, page menu animation, and other unique styles.
- Scribu – How to load JavaScript like a WordPress Master: One of the WordPress core development team, Scribu shares how to make JavaScript and jQuery work for you in your WordPress Plugins, efficiently and easily.
- WP Dude – How To Display Weather On A WordPress Blog: Most blogs do not need a weather report on them, though many bloggers actually check the weather reports on their own blogs, but if your blog is a travel or geo-sensitive blog, then having a local weather report is a fun addition and WP Dude tells you how.
- WP-Engineer – Disable HTML Editor In WordPress: Tips on how to disable the HTML Editor in the WordPress Post view, if the user does not need the option.
- WP-Engineer – WordPress 3.0 Multisite Settings: First peeks at the WordPress 3.0 Multi-site Administration Panel Settings, part of the merge of WordPress and WordPressMU.
- WP-Shout – 4 Contact Form Solutions For WordPress: WPShout offers some options for contact forms for your WordPress blog, including free and paid options.
- Cats Who Code – 10 Interesting Projects From Google Code: Jean-Baptiste Jung highlighted some interesting projects from the popular Google Code project, open source projects sponsored by Google. WordPress has been involved since nearly the start of Google’s Summer of Code, so it’s not surprising to see Jung’s list include Google Code projects that work with WordPress, including the popular Thematic WordPress Theme.
- Cats Who Code – 10 WordPress Dashboard Hacks: Jean-Baptiste Jung offers some great simple hacks you can do to the WordPress Admnistration Panels from within your WordPress Theme’s
functions.phpfile, allowing the Theme to control the design of the administration area of the WordPress blog. - Cats Who Code – How to Speed Up Your Blog Loading Time: If you are serious about server details on your site, this article has a lot of tips on controling external requests, cache, minify, offsite content storage, and other tips for speeding up your WordPress blog.
- Plugins Podcast – Sociable WordPress Plugin: The Plugins, a podcast dedicated to WordPress Plugins, tackles the Sociable WordPress Plugin to add social networking links to a WordPress blog post.
- WP-Beginner – How to Display an Author List with Avatars in WordPress Contributors Page: Tips on how to customize your WordPress Theme for displaying authors in your sidebar with Avatars or Gravatars.

The WPShout tweak for the Subscribe to Comments Plugin didn’t work for me. Probably need to take a closer look at it again. I would love to have this UI improved in an easy and simply way.