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Censoring WordPress.com, New Comment Spam Fighter, More Blog Security News, WordCamp Melbourne, BlogWorld Expo, and More WordPress News

Censoring WordPress.com, New Comment Spam Fighter, More Blog Security News, WordCamp Melbourne, BlogWorld Expo, and More WordPress News

WordPress.com is still being censored in China, Turkey, and elsewhere. There’s a new comment spam fighter in town. Blog Security updates their Hardening WordPress guide. WordCamp Melbourne is in just a few days! BlogWorld Expo had lots of WordPress talk. Super Cache WordPress Plugin is gaining attention, and WPhone WordPress Plugin wins the competition!

WordPress News

More on the Censorship of WordPress.com: The San Francisco Weekly’s The Snitch column writes “WordPress Stands for Open Source, Morals, Democracy” covering the censorship by the Chinese government of WordPress.com blogs, and what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress.com is doing about it. The article doesn’t cover the continuing ban by Turkey and other countries censoring and preventing access to WordPress.com blogs.

An New Comment Spam Fighter Arises: Announced on the Akismet blog, and elsewhere, Defensio WordPress Plugin is getting a lot of attention as a new comment spam fighter with some powerful features. Like Akismet, it also works on a community-supportive basis and has an adaptive, personalized filtering algorithm, and works on more than just blogs. According to the site, it also features easy spam management, feeds of comments and spam, and statistics. With a new flock of nasty blog spammers coming into play, WordPress users can all win from the competition between comment spam fighters.

Blog Security Updates Hardening WordPress: Blog Security has updated it’s Hardening WordPress with htaccess with more tips and information to help you keep your WordPress blog secure.

WordCamp Melbourne: Australia, is the next international spot for WordCamp Melbourne for November 17, a little over a week away. There is now an Upcoming Events page which list WordCamp Melbourne will be at the Watermark Bar.

International WordCamps: Is there a WordCamp coming to your area? Volunteers are needed to help coordinate WordCamp conferences around the world. Below are some of the first, and they need your help to be a success, so pitch in and spread the news.

WordPress on Your Calendar: 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):

If you are having a WordPress-related event that isn’t on the calendar, post them below or via email.

WordPress 2.3.1 Released: The latest version of WordPress is out and contains security fixes, which makes this a mandatory upgrade. It also includes tagging support for Windows Live Writer, faster taxonomy database queries, and fixes to the login and link importer.

For a list of all the changes between the last two versions, see the Trac, and . For more information, see Peter Westwood’s description of the changes in WordPress 2.3.1. Also see PlanetOzh’s WordPress Upgrade Script for those with shell access to their web server, making upgrading WordPress “a matter of painless seconds”.

WordPress Podcast: WordPress Podcast: Episode 31: Automattic acquires Gravatar, Automattic being acquired? is the latest podcast for the WordPress Community and covers those topics and more including the new native tag feature in WordPress, hot Plugins, Themes, and news.

WordPressMU 1.3: The latest version of WordPress MU 1.3 is now out and includes improved sign-up control, protection from search engine indexing of the signup form, ability to set your primary blog via the Profile panel, ability to assign imported posts to other uses on the blog, an optional taxonomy sync script, UTF-8 database tables, and many fixes and improvements.

Need Help With WordPressMU? Work is ongoing to improve the WordPressMU documentation on the WordPress Codex. If you need help and information on WordPressMU, start there.

Why Choose WordPress? Krispyblogs offers “Ten Reasons to Choose WordPress”, an interesting and easy-to-understand review of why you should pick WordPress over other other blogging services.

WordPress at Blog World Expo: Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith made a presentation on WordPress at Blog World Expo and they share their slides. Eight Black Blog includes video on Matt Mullenweg at in an interview with Ed Sussman from Fast Company, and there’s another video interview by WebProNews at Blogworld Expo this past week, discussing the past and future of WordPress.

WordPress for Dummies: WordPress for Dummies is officially released Monday, October 29 by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Ryan Boren Reports on WordPress 2.4 Performance: In WordPress 2.4 Performance Profiling, developer Ryan Boren discusses how the development team is speeding up the next version of WordPress’s performance with fixes, streamlined code, and improved caching. He also reports that a new Advanced Caching WordPress Plugin is being developed to improve the caching even more.

WordPress 2.4 Digest: WordPress Weekly Digest 5th November to 11th November 2007 covers more improvements and changes in WordPress 2.4 development dealing with image uploading and handling, hook filters and actions, performance improvements, and more.

Vote for WordPress Ideas: Did you know you could have your say in how WordPress works? You can add your idea and vote on any of the ideas to push them to the top in getting them added or removed from WordPress future versions. The section on WordPress is an open forum for you to have your say. Why not take advantage of it and add your voice to the vote.

Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Last week’s WordPress Wednesday News report covered WordPress Wins and Loses, WordCamp Argentina Success, WordPressMU, and WordPress Themes on WordPress.com Debated., if you would like to catch up with the news on WordPress.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoNew 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.com Marketplace: In the works for a long time is the idea of a marketplace for products and services for WordPress.com bloggers. Recently, Matt Mullenweg expressed his ideas and thoughts about a WordPress.com Marketplace on his blog and at the WordCamp Argentina conference. He also offered a follow up with more explanation, but many are offering their suggestions and ideas and awaiting more information on the proposals, which include selling access to “premium” WordPress Themes to WordPress.com bloggers. If you have an opinion on the subject, get your voice heard.

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

The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabaseWordPress Super Cache Running in Windows IIs or Apache: The NeoSmart Files released “Getting WordPress Super Cache to Run on a Windows (IIS or Apache) Server” with tips and techniques for those wanting to run WordPress Super Cache Plugin on those server systems.

Role Manager Updated: The popular WordPress Role Manager Plugin has been updated and now permits even more control over your blog’s users, contributors, authors, editors, and even administrators.

WPhone Plugin Wins! The WPhone has won WordPress iPhone Plugin Competition hosted by Matt Mullenweg and is quickly becoming one of the most popularly downloaded WordPress Plugins. It works with iPhones and other mobile phones to allow you to blog easily from your cell phone.

See Also
Apple Silicon Processor

Speeding Up Comment Replies: Absolute Comments WordPress Plugin is the new “Comment Manager with Instant Reply” by Ozh, another brilliant attempt to add AJAX to the Comments panel and speed up the comment response time on WordPress blogs. We need to get such features put into the WordPress core as comments are so critical to the social aspect of blogging.

WordPress Comment Moderation Notification: A new WordPress Plugin, WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier is getting a lot of attention. It notifies the blog administrator of any comments in the moderation queue right from their desktop using the WordPress XML-RPC API. A version for Mac users has also been developed.

Interesting WordPress Plugins: Some interesting WordPress Plugins I’ve stumbled across recently include:

  • AJAX’d WordPress Plugin, formerly known as INAP, adds AJAX to your WordPress blog with inline paginated posts, inline comments, threaded comments, the ability to submit comments with AJAX, pagination of your homepage, live comment preview and much more, with customization of which features you want to add to your blog – or not.
  • Random Terms with Random Posts WordPress Plugin searches for a random terms and displays a list of random posts with that term. Can be customized and configured to display specific types of posts, fields, and values.
  • Typeset WordPress Plugin replaces plain text symbols with HTML character entities, fixing a common problem of many characters and symbols not converting when the post is saved.
  • WP-Tags to Technorati WordPress Plugin changes your site tags to Technorati links with the built-in tag feature in WordPress 2.3. Why you would want to send your visitors off your blog still confounds me, but if you do, here is a Plugin for you.

Finding WordPress Plugins: For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, which now lists 1,204 plugins and 2,177,105 downloads, the WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection of WordPress Plugins released daily.

Plugins from the WordPress Plugins Directory: The widget tag is the second most popular tag on the WordPress Plugin Directory, and I thought I’d list a few of the 107 Plugins in that tag.

Most Popular WordPress Themes: The WordPress Theme Viewer features more than 10 million downloads now and lists the most popular WordPress Themes as:

WordPress Techniques and Tips

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.

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicLooking 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, the WordPress Jobs listings, and the WP-Pro mailing list.

WordPress Jobs: WordPress Jobs is a new “service” announced by Weblog Tools Collection. It features jobs for WordPress experts and WordPress experts looking for work. Currently, the service is free as it is still in beta testing. Give it try.

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.

Using WordPress in Your Blog’s Name: Just a reminder. WordPress is a trademark and you are not allowed to use WordPress in your blog’s 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).

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 (8)
  • Wow, this is a loaded post. Thanks for the awesome info! Defensio isn’t the only new spam fighter in town…you should check out WP-SpamFree. I’ve been using it on a couple of my blogs and stops comment spam cold. Doesn’t even have to go through Akismet because it’s cut off at the source.

  • Akismet is useful thing! I used it and some spam list with different adult and drug words. It works, the amount of spam is reducing!

  • I’ve been using Akismet for a rather long period of time. Besides, I use a spam filter to cut messages at the moment of publishing. But I’m not sure it is the best solution, i’ll try some other plugin. But still the problem of spam is more and more actual!

  • I use Akismet, but at this age and I would love more than anything for it to detect spam intelligently. But from experience, Automattic’s plugins are the most recommended.

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