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WordPress Wednesday News: WordCamp 2007 This Weekend, WordPress Theme News, WordPress Podcast Meetup, and Sunburned, Traveling Andy Skelton

WordPress Wednesday News: WordCamp 2007 This Weekend, WordPress Theme News, WordPress Podcast Meetup, and Sunburned, Traveling Andy Skelton

Too much exciting news for WordPress Themes. The world descends upon San Francisco and WordCamp 2007. Competitions are heating up and drawing to a close. Windows Live Writer offers WordPress extensions and blogging joy. A WordPress Community Podcast Meetup scheduled for Friday before WordCamp. Don’t forget to upgrade Plugins as well as WordPress. And Andy Skelton near to completing his cross-country motorcycle ride to San Francisco!

WordPress News

WordPress Community Podcast Meetup: A WordPress Podcast Meetup will be Friday, July 20 at 1PM at the Crossroads Cafe, 699 Delancey Street (close to the Embarcadero and Pier 38) for WordPress and WordPress Community Podcast fans in anticipation of WordCamp 2007.

WordCamp 2007 – July 21-22: is July 21-22 in San Fransisco, California. The WordCamp Schedule now features descriptions of the speaker’s topics. The speakers include I'm Attending WordCamp 2007 badge Dan Kuykendall, author of PodPress, John Dvorak and Om Malik, , Jeremy Wright, Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith, Robert Hoekman, Jr., Matt Cutts, Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg, Rashmi Sinha, Andy Skelton, Dave Winer, Liz Danzico, Michael Adams, and Ryan Boren.

There should be plenty of live blogging as well as photos, video, and who knows what else going on during the weekend so you can enjoy the fun from afar.

WordPress 2.2.1 Upgrade: The WordPress 2.2.1 release is mandatory. Mark Jaquith has the upgrade files with the list of the changed files and a zip file containing all of them to speed your upgrade process.

Mandatory Upgrades Justified: Blog Security reported recently of a WordPress blog hacked due to a long reported vulnerability and a failure to upgrade. Upgrade now to protect your blog.

Upgrade WordPress Plugins: Several WordPress Plugins have been found recently to have some vulnerabilities and potential risks which may be exploited on your blog. Make it a part of your monthly blog maintenance and check for upgrades and updates of the WordPress Plugins your blog depends upon. Besides protecting your blog, the upgrade may make the Plugin work faster and more efficiently, and bring improvements to your blog.

WordPress Theme Viewer 3.0: WordPress Theme Viewer Version 3.0 has been announced for the official WordPress Theme Viewer and your input is desired, as well as some time and coding experience volunteered. The announcement includes many of the flaws and fixes needed for the Viewer and the improvements desired. Let your voice be heard and pitch in to help this invaluable WordPress tool.

WordPress Competitions: The Weblog Tools Collection called “WordPress Competition 2.0” continues through July 31 with thousands of dollars in great prizes for inspired WordPress Plugin development and creation. Okay, about $1,000 but it’s increasing all the time. In a recent update, the competition has 15 WordPress Plugins. See the Plugin Competition Blog and the announcement for more information.

The Sandbox Designs Competition is also continuing with some great Themes based upon the Sandbox WordPress Theme. Engtech of Internet Duct Tape offers some tips on designing with the Sandbox WordPress Theme, and adds tips on creating 3D buttons and Alister Cameron offers pure CSS Asides tips for the Sandbox Theme, showing you the versatility of the Theme and the power of CSS.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Clazh offers “Move From Blogger To WordPress and Maintain Permalinks And Traffic”, an interesting article that will help you make the transition to a WordPress blog a bit easier and with more confidence that you aren’t going to lose your PageRank in the process.

Let Your WordPress Voice Be Heard: The section on WordPress is an open forum for you to have your say on the features you would like to see added or removed from WordPress. Have your say by rating the idea by clicking on the stars on the idea post and comment on the idea with your support, recommendation, or nay on the idea.

Here are some interesting ones to consider, vote, and have your say:

PHP 4 To Stop Development – What Does This Mean for WordPress? Matt Mullenweg writes about PHP stopping all support for PHP 4 by the end of the year, focusing solely on PHP 5, which many are unhappy with. What does this mean for WordPress? You’ll have to read the post, but so far, not much.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoRefresh Your WordPress.com Stats: WordPress.com announces “Click a Day Stats Refresh”, when you now click on the stats graph on the Blog Stats panel, it takes you to a “page that shows the stats just for the day you clicked on so you can see your top referrers, posts, clicks, everything you see on the normal page, just expanded.” This allows you to see a summary of the stats for that day.

Live Writer for WordPress.com: WordPress.com also announces “Windows Live Writer FTW”, and introduces WordPress.com bloggers to XML-RPC, a “communications” programming function that permits other programs to “talk” to WordPress. Windows Live Writer is a “desktop blogging client”, one of several programs that allow you to blog to your WordPress or WordPress.com blog from your “desktop” rather than through your browser. WordPress.com now has a Page about the benefits and usefulness of blogging with Windows Live Writer, including their support of extensions for WordPress that allows you to edit pages and quickly access your stats. Why not download Windows Live Writer and give it a try.

Moving To or From WordPress.com: Moving from one blogging system to WordPress.com is easy. So is moving from the free WordPress.com hosted service to your own full version of WordPress. For more information on moving your blog, see Importing Content, Improved WordPress to WordPress Importer, and Can I move my blog from here to another blog somewhere else … from the WordPress.com FAQ.

Blogger.com Integrates With FeedBurner: FeedBurner is now integrated as an option with Blogger.com blogs, a natural since they are owned by the same company, but it makes me wonder if this much requested option may soon be available for WordPress.com blogs? Hmmm?

Greasemonkey Script for Social Bookmarks: Target Life offers a Greasemonkey script for WordPress.com users to add social bookmarks to your blog.

Honoring the Languages of WordPress.com Blogs and Bloggers: Last week I announced that I was going to honor the international nature of WordPress.com bloggers and will be featuring the top ten blog posts from a specific language group on WordPress.com.

This week, it’s Dansk (Danish from Denmark). To translate these into another language, you can use Google’s Translate Tools by copying and pasting in the link into the “translate web page” option.

  1. Fantastiske Thøger
  2. Video: Fox News om islamisme i Danmark
  3. Meget mere netmusik!
  4. Indvandrerne koster Sverige op imod 300 mia om aaret
  5. House MD
  6. Partyyyyyyyy
  7. Skilsmisse stiger blandt muslimske kvinder
  8. Særdeles kortfattet anmeldelse af Hvedekorn 2/2007
  9. Hvorfor borger.dk ikke får brugeranmeldelser
  10. TANSTAAFL
  11. Drama i parkeringskælderen

What’s Hot on WordPress.com? The hottest blogs on WordPress.com were:

  1. I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
  2. Web Worker Daily
  3. Scobleizer
  4. GigaOM
  5. disinter
  6. VaTaN
  7. Copa America 2007 Venezuela
  8. CNN Political Ticker
  9. SUSAN LOONE’s blog
  10. strange maps

The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:

  1. 15 Productive Uses for a Wiki
  2. Bleak future ahead
  3. CAN I PLZ HAS
  4. File Managers: Alternatives to Nautilus and Konqueror *Updated*
  5. Arsene And Stupid Stories
  6. Celebration Europe Opening Ceremonies
  7. My Facebook secret is out…
  8. Warhawk rumor explosion
  9. 148 – Oh, Inverted World

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabaseControl Who Sees What Ads When: Planet Ozh has developed the Who Sees Ads WordPress Plugin and it is all the rage around WordPress. It allows you to control who sees your ads, registered users, new visitors, arrivals from search engines, and more. Some commentaries and reviews include WordPress Plugin Competition Blog – Who Sees Adds, Introducing the Ultimate Ad Management Plugin, and Who Sees Ads 1.0 WordPress Plugin Released.

Smaller WordPress Plugin Tips: Reduce the Size of Your WordPress Plugin Footprint, by Ronald Huereca for Weblog Tools Collection, explains how to shrink down your WordPress Plugin so it won’t add to the bandwidth and server load on a blog, and hopefully reduce some of the hits to the database, a recent nuisance for many WordPress bloggers on shared hosts who are either loading up more clients per server or limiting the number of database hits per client.

No Sponsored WordPress Themes: With his own position solid, and after listening to a lot of feedback, combined with a powerful stand by Mark Ghosh on Weblog Tools Collection declaring that he would no longer feature sponsored WordPress Themes, Matt Mullenweg has made the WordPress policy on sponsored WordPress Themes official:

Before WordCamp all sponsored themes should be removed from http://themes.wordpress.net.

Interesting WordPress Plugins: I’m hunting for reviews of WordPress Plugins and will post them here. If you have used and reviewed a WordPress Plugin, please let me know so I can add them here. Until then, here are a few new and interesting WordPress Plugins – try them to see if they will work for you and your blog.

WordPress Plugin Directory: The new WordPress Plugin Directory is has a ton of new WordPress Plugins. Some interesting new additions and updates include:

More WordPress Plugins can be found on the WordPress Plugins Database.

See Also
Google search

Most Popular WordPress Themes: The WordPress Theme Viewer features 3,949 Themes and 5,689,882 Themes downloads. The list of the top ten most downloaded WordPress Themes are:

  1. Travel2 1.0
  2. Blue Graphite
  3. Africa theme 1
  4. MiTreStyle 1.1
  5. Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1
  6. Pirates WordPress Theme
  7. Designer Theme – Version 2
  8. Pink Web 2.0 1.0
  9. Silver-surf
  10. Sodelicious Black 1.0

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Here are some featured articles and videos from around the WordPress and the , the online manual for WordPress Users, the source to turn to first for your WordPress help.

NOTE: If you would like your WordPress tip and technique included in this list, see Tips For Writing Good WordPress Tips.

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicWordPress Community Podcast: Episode 27: WordPress 2.2.1 and WordCamp Schedule is out with some interesting topics on WordCamp and WordPress 2.2.1, as well as some reviews and announcements of some interesting WordPress Plugins.

Andy Skelton’s Cross Country Motorcycle Trip to WordCamp: As of July 14, Andy Skelton reports he is almost or to Colorado Springs, Colorado, pushing hard as he travels from Texas to the East Coast of the United States and then cross country to San Francisco, visiting friends and family and other WordPressers along the way. He reports that while tired, and occasionally a bit hung over, he has a sunburned face and “raccoon eyes” from the sunburn and protection of his sunglasses, and “Today I also reaffirmed my desire to stay away from Arby’s, Waffle House, and bridges maintained by the Illinois DOT.”

WordPress Installed For Free: If you have problems installing the full version of WordPress, visit Installing WordPress for Free (aka Install4Free WordPress). This free, volunteer-driven service is limited to personal blogs only, and they help only with installations, not upgrades.

Looking for a WordPress Expert? Do you want a custom WordPress blog? Want to convert your website into a WordPress blog or use WordPress as a CMS? If you are looking for an expert in WordPress Themes, WordPress development, WordPress Plugins, or other WordPress-related expertise, check out the list of WordPress Consultants on , the parent company of WordPress, and the WP-Pro mailing list.

WordPress Events

The following are upcoming WordPress group meetings and meetups, and a few special blogging events you may want to attend. If you know of any I’ve missed, please post them or contact me on my WordPress Events Page or via email.

For a WordPress Meetup near you and other blogging events, check out the WordPress Meetup Group List.

Extra Tip of the Week

Meet a WordPresser: On his way to WordCamp, Andy Skelton stayed with Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection. In all the years spent working with and reporting on WordPress, Mark had never met another WordPresser. Have you?

Make a plan to attend a WordPress Meetup near you, or next year’s WordPress WordCamp. Or start your own WordPress group. Search your area for WordPress fans and have a little get together. It doesn’t have to be a monthly thing. Meet every three months or twice a year. Or just get together and have dinner together and talk WordPress.

Make a WordPress connection today.

Even More WordPress News?

For more news on WordPress, see:


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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