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WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.5.1 Released, WordPress 2008 in August, Plugins Contest, 3 Million, WordPress.com Responds to Brazil Court Ban, and More

WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.5.1 Released, WordPress 2008 in August, Plugins Contest, 3 Million, WordPress.com Responds to Brazil Court Ban, and More

WordPress 2.5.1 is a mandatory upgrade. Get it now! WordPress 2008 in San Francisco announced. WordPress Plugins contest begins in May. Three Million WordPress.com blogs. WordPress.com responds to Brazil courts for banning WordPress.com blogs. New WordCamp official site. And a lot more WordPress news.

WordPress News

WordPress 2.5.1 Mandatory Security Release: WordPress 2.5.1 was released earlier this week and is a mandatory security release. It includes bug fixes, performance enhancements, along with the security fix. The corrected files are wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php and wp-admin/media.php, if you want to just replace the changed files. Theme Lab offers a simple upgrade guide for this upgrade. Included in the upgrade are fixes to Internet Explorer issues with the new Media Library.

WordPress 2.5 Secret Key: WordPress 2.5 now makes cookies more secure and protected from attacks with a new user-definable constant called SECRET_KEY. Ryan Boren talks more about this issue in depth, and you can get your unique secret key for your WordPress 2.5x blog to improve your blog’s security.

WordPress Plugin Competition: Weblog Tools Collection has announced a new WordPress Plugin Competition specifically for WordPress 2.5. It will begin May 10 and end July 10, giving us 30 days of non-stop fabulous Plugins!

WordPress Development: Work continues towards WordPress 2.6 and the releases in between and include the ability to hold the Shift key and select multiple checkboxes by clicking the end checkbox, adding a post word count to the Write Post panel (available on WordPress.com blogs currently), improvement of the Press-It feature to include video and audio embedding, the preparation and release of WordPress 2.5.1, improvements and fixes to the new shortcodes feature, and the fix of an unpredictable bug that redirected the user to the post preview after the first save instead of to the Write Post Panel. See the WordPress Development Updates to monitor the activities.

WordPress Shortcodes Improved: Among the improvements in WordPress 2.5.1, the new shortcodes feature was updated. These are codes written in brackets like used for the new Media Library Gallery feature. Mark Jaquith covers the new improvements and why they were made.

WordPress.com Banned in Brazil: Matt Mullenweg has responded to the issue of WordPress.com banned in Brazil, as discussed previously, with a court injunction that describes what WordPress.com is, how it works, freedom of speech responsibilities, and how to block a WordPress.com blog without harming everyone’s access. This is exciting news and an interesting step in the right direction, protecting free speech rights while working with the courts to help them learn more about how the Internet works. We’ll be watching.

WordPress Community Discounts: An Event Apart Discount for their events is now available for WordPress users, resulting in a discount up to USD $200 for any Event Apart events.

Get Your WordPress Mug: I love my new WordPress mug and shared my love with a lot of people recently. Go get yours at the WordPress Shop.

WordPress Podcast: WordPress Podcast Episode 40 with Charles Stricklin and Jonathan Bailey covers WordPress and Technorati issues, WordCamp Dallas, Woopra, Weblog Tools Collection Videos, Apple bundling WordPress into iPhone, and more WordPress Themes and news about WordPress.

WP Weekly Podcast: WordPress Weekly Episode 14 Live interview show featured NathanRice last week talking about WordPress Themes, premium Themes, the Theme marketplace and more about designing, developing and selling WordPress Themes.

WordPress Meets Woopra: Weblog Tools Collection has an interesting review of using WordPress with , the new web analtyics and statistics program still in beta testing, announced recently at WordCamp Dallas and was then picked up by major tech blogs as word quickly spread. Invites are still available for the beta test version for any website platform, except WordPressMU and similar sites like which do not permit javascript usage. There is a Woopra WordPress Plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Do You Want to Help with WordPress Development and Community? If you would like to help with the , the official online user manual for WordPress users, we need you. If you would like to contribute to WordPress as a volunteer in the WordPress Support Forums, testing, coding, and more, see Contributing to WordPress. If you would like to help improve WordPress by reporting bugs, please report them via the WordPress Bug Report form. Your help is needed to ensure WordPress works.

Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Can’t get enough WordPress news and tips? There is so much news coming out about the latest version, so you can catch up with the past news in last week’s WordPress Wednesday News: WordCamps Everywhere, Webware 100 Again, Plugins to Fix WordPress 2.5, Change Admin Colors, and More.

WordPress on Your Calendar

WordPress Events CalendarWordCamp San Francisco August 16: August 16, 2008 is the next WordCamp San Francisco, considered by many to be the premier WordCamp event. This year, it appears it will be only one day instead of two, but details are still coming. It will be at the Mission Bay Conference Center this year.

New WordCamp Site for WordCamps: The new official site for tracking WordCamps is WordCamp Central. Check it out for a WordCamp near you.

WordPress Meetup or WordCamp Near You? If you are putting together a WordPress event, please email me so I can publicize it here. If there is a WordCamp near you, go. If you are interested in setting up a WordCamp, stay tuned for news and information on to bring a WordCamp event near you.

Here are some WordPress-related dates and events to put on your calendar as found on the WordPress Roadmap and the WordPress Meetup Group Listings (subject to change):

WordPress Security News

WordPress SecurityBlog Security reported on the WordPress 2.5 security issues recently, including the ones that led to the quick release of WordPress 2.5.1.

Is WordPress Safe? With a lot of rumors, over-reactions, and scares going around about security issues and WordPress, I addressed some of this in WordPress Security Prevention, Reactions, and Scares. The best recommendation to protect your blog from hackers? Update.

How Do I Know if My WordPress Blog is Vulnerable and Has Been Attacked? Your WordPress blog is vulnerable if it is not versions 2.5, 2.3.3, 2.1.3, or 2.0.11. Upgrade now. See the WordPress Release Archive for past versions. For more information, see a past issue of the WordPress Wednesday News.

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabaseLet the Reader Decide: Mark Jaquith explains why he let’s the reader decide in his new version of Subscribe to Comments by leaving the subscribe to comments checkbox unchecked by default. This brought a round of cheers by many frustrated with finding themselves subscribed to comments on a blog that they did not intend to do so. By giving the control back to the reader and commenter, those who want to subscribe are there by choice, a much more powerful stance. Great work, Mark! Let’s hope it sets a standard for all similar WordPress Plugins.

Where is PodPress? Weblog Tools Collection and others have been asking what happened to The popular PodPress WordPress Plugin since there was a glitch with the site and not much news lately. Well, it seems that a new version of PodPress is almost ready for release and includes a lot more customization features and will be branching out to include Joomla and Drupal as well as WordPress. Stay tuned for more news.

New Cron Plugin and Article Series: Timed with the release of the WP-Crontrol WordPress Plugin, Scompt has started a article series about using the Plugin with the Cron feature of WordPress. The first in the series deals with creating a WordPress backup schedule to work in the background of your blog automatically.

Competition for the Native WordPress Plugin Updater: Plugin Central WordPress Plugin works with WordPress 2.5 and is meant to be a replacement to the native WordPress Plugin Updater. It allows installation of multiple Plugins by name from the WordPress repository, updating all Plugins at once, sorting the Plugins list, easy moving WordPress Plugins from one blog to another, Dashboard Plugin status and updates, and more.

An Alternative to the Built-in Gallery: Cleaner WordPress Gallery Plugin acts as a replacement with the default gallery feature of WordPress 2.5, and solves a lot of problems users are reporting. It has the same features as the new gallery but adds valid XHTML, style rules injection for the middle of a post display, and works with Lightbox, Slimbox, and Thickbox support.

Comment Ninja and Auntie Akismet Updated: WordPress Comment Ninja and Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress Greasemonkey Scripts for FireFox by Engtech of Internet Duct Tape have been updated to work with WordPress 2.5.

Interesting WordPress Plugins: The following are some interesting WordPress Plugins I’ve uncovered over the past few weeks:

Finding WordPress Plugins: For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, the WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection Plugin and Theme announcements.

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Not Just Another SEO WordPress Blog Title Tip: Mark Jaquith tackles the issue of the order in the title tag on WordPress blogs with a few new tricks using new parameters in the WordPress title template tag.

See Also
Apple Silicon Processor

Here are some more interesting WordPress tips I’ve uncovered:

Want to Write a WordPress Tip and See It Here? If you would like your WordPress tip and technique included in this list, see Tips For Writing Good WordPress Tips and Writing and Publishing Code In Your WordPress Blog Posts. When its ready, contact me at lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoWordPress.com Reaches 3 Million Blogs: If it hasn’t already, is about to turn over 3 million fee hosted blogs. While the team works overtime on cleaning out splogs, WordPress.com Terms of Service violators, and other junk, the estimate is that about a million of these blogs get human access on a regular basis. That’s a ton of blogs. Congrats and keep rocking, WordPress.com!

WordPress.com Gets Sphere Possibly Related Links: Some thought these were neat. Many don’t like them. They are Possibly Related Posts, a new feature announced this week by WordPress.com in conjunction with Sphere, though launched before the announcement, catching many off guard as strange links started showing up in their blog posts, many linking to unwanted and unrelated blogs. The goal of the feature is to bring in more links to your blog and connect the diverse blog community together on WordPress.com. WordPress.com promises an increase of 5-10% increase in traffic from this new feature, but many have turned it off as they want more control over their outgoing links. The feature can be turned on or off through the Design > Extras panel. Matt Mullenweg promises that soon you will have more control over which blogs these links will link to, though we’re still waiting to see what that means. Check out the WordPress.com Forums for more discussions on this issue and to have your say.

New Photoblog WordPress Theme on WordPress.com: WordPress.com has as new WordPress Theme designed especially for photoblogs called Monotone, announced Matt Mullenweg at Web 2.0 Expo. It is unique as each post gathers information about the first image displayed and changes the colors to complement the photograph. This is a great example of the potential of what a WordPress Theme can do. It’s an unusual and unique way of displaying your pictures within blog posts, though it does have a few bugs. Many of the design styles are changed, including links, by the color shifts, and the links are often the same color as the text or not distinctive enough from the text for the reader to know there is a link there. Hopefully, the accessibility issues will be addressed soon, but it is a great breakthrough Theme.

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicVote for WordPress Ideas: There is still time to get your vote in for ideas on upcoming versions of WordPress in the The section. Why not take advantage of it and add your voice to the vote.

Do You Need Help with WordPress? I’m finding a lot of people still asking for help with their WordPress and WordPress.com blog by blogging their request. This is really dumb, folks. You don’t know who is reading or how qualified they may be to help you. Or you might never get the help you need. Please, go to the for help with the full version of WordPress and the WordPress.com Forums for help with WordPress.com blogs. Get the help you need directly from those who can help you.

Looking for a WordPress Expert? If you are looking for a WordPress expert, try the WordPress Consultants list the WordPress Jobs listings, and the WP-Pro mailing list.

WordPress Installed For Free: Installing WordPress for Free (aka Install4Free WordPress) is a free, volunteer-driven service is limited to personal blogs only, and they help only with installations, not upgrades.

Using WordPress in Your Blog’s Name: It’s about respect. Please use WordPress names right because WordPress is a trademark and you are not allowed to use WordPress in your blog’s domain name or URL unless you have permission of and . Also, remember, it’s spelled “WordPress” not “WordPress”. Oh, and Plugin is Plugin, not plug-in (what you put into a wall electrical socket).

Found a Bug in WordPress? If you find a bug in WordPress, report it by following the instructions in Reporting Bugs on the , the online manual for WordPress Users.

Shop WordPress: You can now buy t-shirts, hoodies or mugs with the WordPress logo on them in the WordPress Shop.

Even More WordPress News?

Past WordPress Wednesday News Reports

WordPress News Sources

If You Are Reading This: If you are reading this blog post NOT on the or from within your feed reader, it is being used against the copyright policy of the copyright owners. Please report it immediately so action may be taken to break some heads and feed scraping blogs.


Each Wednesday on is WordPress Wednesday, featuring the news around the WordPress Community. If you have a WordPress news item or tip to suggest, please contact me at this special email address: lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com

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