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WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.5 News, Colleges and Schools Love WordPressMU, Viddler Meets WordPress, Theme Buyers Beware, Columns in Blog Posts, Feeds Without Plugins

WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.5 News, Colleges and Schools Love WordPressMU, Viddler Meets WordPress, Theme Buyers Beware, Columns in Blog Posts, Feeds Without Plugins

WordPress 2.5 in final stages of preparation for release. WordPress Themes, free or paid, might need buyer beware stickers. Want to know what’s going on with WordPress.com blogs? Blog authors now featured in WordPress.com blogs. There’s a WordPress gathering in Austin, Texas, and Dallas is getting ready for WordCamp right afterwards. Colleges and Schools are choosing WordPressMU for their students, newspapers, teachers, and school blogs. Did you know you can now put columns in your WordPress posts and Pages with a Plugin? Or put feeds on your blog without Plugins? You can learn this and much more in this week’s WordPress Wednesday News.

WordPress News

WordPress 2.5 Development: From the WordPress Development Updates Prologue “chat” site, some exciting tidbits of news on the development process of WordPress 2.5 include a redesign of the Manage Users panel with the ability to query users by role, redesign of the Theme Editor, continued work on the new Media Library replacement for the image uploader, and final work on the new manage tags interface.

Are You Ready for WordPress 2.5? I recently published Are You Ready for WordPress 2.5? on the listing some of the new features and changes in WordPress that bloggers and WordPress Plugin and Theme authors need to be aware of so they are ready for the upcoming release of WordPress, one of the most anticipated versions in a long time.

WordPress 2.5 Frozen: Ryan Boren updated WordPress fans on the new 2.5 Roadmap which mentions that WordPress 2.5 is now in “feature freeze” with no new features added. Features too late for this version are being pushed to the next version of WordPress. Beta testing has started and a bug fix is on to fix things up and clean up the new Administration Panels look and design. The new release date is now March 10.

WordPress Updates: Painful or Necessary? Wayne Liew asks “WordPress Upgrades – Fuss or Must?” and answers the question by saying that it’s better to have your blog safe and secure than suffer the consequences. WordPress doesn’t push out upgrades just because there are new features every couple of weeks. They release mandatory security upgrades because your blog’s security is more important than the nuisance of upgrading. With this in mind, they are working on automatic upgrades for the next version of WordPress, making it even easier to keep your blog secure.

Colleges and Schools Choosing WordPressMU: Sean Blanda oversaw the decision and transition from College Publisher to for his college newspaper, Temple News and wrote about the transition in “The new Temple-News.com: from College Publisher to WordPress” and “5 reasons we chose WordPress MU to run our college newspaper” to help other college and educational institutions brave new technology and make the switch themselves. Sean summed it up:

One of the main reasons was the lack of independence. Because you are essentially getting a free CMS, you lose a bit of your autonomy. You are limited in the placement of your own ads, and even if your paper specifically needs a certain feature, it usually has to be rolled out through the whole system for it to be implemented.

WordPress Podcast – Two Recent Shows: The WordPress Podcast has released Episode 34: WordPress 2.3.3 released, more security problems and Prologue and Episode 35: WordPress 2.5 begins testing, Interview with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, covering a ton of WordPress news, tips, and information, along with new host, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today.

Podcasting About WordPress: Jeffro2pt0 has started a WordPress weekly podcast with news and interviews on WordPress and WordPress community topics.

Viddler Meets WordPress: In a three part series, Maria of Maria’s Guides offers a tutorial on integrating Viddler’s video service with your WordPress blog. It looks like the technique will work for WordPress.com blogs, too.

Fast WordPress Move: Joost de Valk’s SEO Blog has come up with a ten step easy plan for moving your WordPress blog from one host to another.

Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Last week’s WordPress Wednesday News report covered WordPress 2.5 Live Reports, WWW or Not to WWW, 16,000 Post Migration, MT Does WP, WP Does Kazakhstan, and Gets Mugged, if you would like to catch up with the news on WordPress.

WordPress Security News

WordPress SecurityMandatory Security Upgrade: WordPress 2.3.3 is a mandatory security upgrade covering a vulnerability in xmlrpc.php and includes a few bug fixes. A mandatory security upgrade is not option. It is a required upgrade for the security and safety of your blog.

WordPressMU Mandatory Upgrade: In accordance with the mandatory security upgrade for WordPress 2.3.3, Donncha O’Caoimh has announce the release of WordPressMU 1.3.3 based upon that security release.

Secure WordPress: Noupe wrote “WordPress Security Tips and Hacks” recently with a good round-up of tips on improving your WordPress blog security with sensible tips, techniques, and WordPress Plugins. Remember, the first step in blog security is a strong password.

The most recent news on general WordPress security issues includes:

WordPress Plugin Security News: The following is a list of recent announcements about security issues found in WordPress Plugins.

WordPress on Your Calendar

WordPress Events CalendarWordCamp Dallas: The WordPress Podcast has a podcast announcement about Dallas WordCamp in Texas on March 29-30, 2008. Get the news out and get registered now! If you are a WordPress fan living in Texas, they are looking for volunteers to help spread the world that WordPress is coming to Texas with an exciting line-up of speakers talking blogging and WordPress.

WordPress Meetup in Austin, Texas: Andy Skelton and WordPress friends in Austin, Texas, are putting together a WordPress fun meetup May 20, 2008.

WordPress and SEO in Pittsburg: Refresh Pittsburgh Meetup on Feb 26, 2008 for bloggers will feature Cynthia Closy from Big Big Design talking about WordPress and SEO.

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 Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabasePaying For Themes – Buyer Beware: Just as I don’t want to need to remind you, popular WordPress Theme designer, Small Potato, warns us again that you can’t trust every source of WordPress Themes, even paid, you find.

Put Columns in Your Blog Posts: Post Columns WordPress Plugin allows you to insert CSS styled columns into your blog posts. It doesn’t change the WordPress Theme structure. It just adds columns to the individual posts and Pages for a newspaper style layout of your post content. Supposedly, it requires no HTML/CSS or coding experience.

Status Notifier: The Status Notifier WordPress Plugin takes advantage of the new Post Status feature on the Write Post panel to alert blog administrators of posts pending for review. It also will notify the contributors when their blog post is accepted or rejected, an interesting “post moderation” technique for multiple blogger WordPress blogs.

Building a Magazine Theme: Ptah Dunbar is starting a series on designing a Magazine and News style WordPress Theme, following the path from conception and research and analysis to coding and construction. The first in the series explores the elements the major news sites have in common, creating the first building blocks to the Theme.

WordPress Code Snippets: Planet Ozh offers “WordPress Snippets”, new category of posts featuring bits of WordPress code the author finds in and around the WordPress development and hacking mailing lists and forums. The first example, Complete List of Posts, is a simple set of code that lists a chronological site map of all your blog posts.

WordPress Hooks Extraordinarie: Adam Brown has put together WordPress Hooks Database, an amazing page of resources on the various WordPress hooks across all the different versions. He includes a listing of all hooks in WP 2.3.3, new hooks in WP 2.3.3, and deprecated (deleted) hooks in WP 2.3.3, an invaluable resource for WordPress Plugin and Theme authors.

Learn to Write a WordPress Plugin: 10xCode – One Man’s Portal offers “How to create a WordPress Plugin? – a step by step tutorial”, a very simple guide to help you to learn to write your own WordPress Plugin.

Tracking WordPress Compatibility: It’s often difficult to track what Plugin and Theme is compatible with which WordPress version. In the are two “master” pages that list all the various compatibilities: WordPress Theme Compatibilities and WordPress Plugin Compatibilities. No matter which version you are using, and in preparation for the next version of WordPress, add these to your WordPress resource list to check before you upgrade.

Interesting WordPress Plugins: I’m constantly amazed at how many creative and useful WordPress Plugins are released each week. Aren’t you?

Plugin Authors: Use WordPress Plugin Repository: Weblog Tools Collection reports on the WordPress Plugin Repository working in combination with Plugins on the WordPress Plugin Directory, which gives Plugin authors the ability to post and assign bug tickets to their Plugin and have an easier way of reporting and monitoring bug reports.

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

Feeds on Your Blog Without Plugins: WordPress Garage offers a summary post of code examples for publishing feeds on your WordPress blog without a Plugin. They include references from Darren Hoyt and Scot Hacker using the fetch_rss WordPress function.

See Also
Google search

Here are some featured articles and videos from around the WordPress Community 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 and Writing and Publishing Code In Your WordPress Blog Posts.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoMore WordPress.com Server Stats Lust: For geek lovers, the recent post by Barry Abrahamson on the Amazon AWS Outage gave up some fascinating server stats for WordPress.com. He reported that WordPress.com servers deliver about 1500 image requests per second. Nice!

WordPress.com Highlights Blog Authors: TimeThief explains the “WordPress.com Authors’ Widget”, a new sidebar Widget that allows WordPress.com bloggers to display their blog’s authors in the sidebar. It’s customizable, allowing you to customize the title of the Author’s list and whether or not to display all authors with or without posts and the number of posts for each author. For those with multiple bloggers and contributors on their WordPress.com blog, this has been long awaited.

How to Add Bloggers to Your WordPress.com Blog: WordPress.com blogs can have multiple bloggers and contributors. They are limited to 35 by default but more can be added for a small fee. TimeThief gives a good overview on adding multiple authors to your blog, including two WordPress.com FAQ pages to help you understand how this works: What are the different roles? and How do I add more authors and users to my blog?

A New Use of WordPress.com Blogs: I recently wrote about how Darren Rowse of Problogger has started a competition for guest bloggers to blog while he’s traveling, and he’s using a free WordPress.com blog to accept post submissions. Check out this interesting way to use a WordPress.com blog with your full version blog.

Is Your Blog Type Permitted? WordPress.com lists the types of blogs permitted on WordPress.com in accordance with its Terms of Service. Before getting a WordPress.com blog, check these out thoroughly to make sure your blog complies and you don’t risk deletion.

What’s Going On With WordPress.com? If you want to find out more about what’s happening on WordPress.com blogs, check out the front page of the site and the popular WordPress.com Blogs of the Day listing where you can find thousands of blogs in dozens of languages blogging on a wide range of topics.

New To WordPress.com: If you are new to blogging on WordPress.com, check out this basic guide on What Do I Do With My New WordPress.com Blog?.

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicBuy Mugs or Hoodies from WordPress: You can now buy hoodies or mugs with the WordPress logo on them in the WordPress Shop.

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.

Vote 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Even More WordPress News?

Past WordPress Wednesday News Reports

WordPress News Sources


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

View Comments (5)
  • Thanks for the link. The Viddler piece you mentioned will actually have more parts than the three online so far. I just need to hunker down and write them. I think the link love will help motivate me to do that, so stay tuned! Thanks again!

  • I’m a faithful BlogHerald reader and I’m delighted that you thought both of my articles (authors’ widget and adding authors to a multiple authors’ blog) were worth a shout out. The introduction of the author’s widget means a lot to those who have been using a work-around. And, bloggers with multiple author blogs often need to consider “roles” and step-by-step walk-throughs so, they can compare alternatives and make the best choice for their blogs.

    Thanks for the link love. You are in my heart and on my mind as my 2nd anniversary of wordpress.com blogging approaches. I’m busy blogging on my self-hosted domain as well as at wp.com and I sometimes feel I’m out of the loop so, your dedication to keeping me up-to-date on the wordpress news is much appreciated.

    Namaste

  • Hi Lorelle – thanks so much for linking to my post on WordPress Garage! That was very nice of you, especially considering my blog’s domain name…

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