The Blog Herald

WordPress Wednesday News: Akismet Day, Two Million Bloggers, Plugin Security Warnings, And WordPress is the Best CMS

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December 19, 2007

Akismet Day results in lessons learned and possible improvements for Akismet, in time for a new version of Akismet to be released. WordPress.com has two million bloggers. WordPress Plugins found with security vulnerabilities and warnings. WordPress.com gets new features for feeds and stats. And ZDNet says WordPress is a better CMS than most CMS programs out there.

WordPress News

Akismet Day Lessons Learned: When Jesper Rønn-Jensen announced he was turning off Akismet for the day, many thought it was an outrageous thing to do, but now the results are in and Jepser shares the lessons learned about being Akismet free and then cleaning up comment spam manually and with Akismet. I agree with many of his points, and hopefully, the lessons learned from the experiment will be included in future versions.

Akismet Updated: Akismet has been updated to version 2.1.2 and has several new features including filtering by comment type and the addition of Plugin hooks.

WordPress a Good CMS?: ZDNet writes “WordPress vs. an army of clunky content management systems”, an interesting perspective on WordPress as a CMS and the lack of good CMS programs out there. As a side note, Rimm Kaufman offers tips on using WordPress as a web content management system (CMS).

WordPress Security News: WordPress developers work overtime on security vulnerabilities, releasing updates as fast as they can in response to a threat. Still, you need to keep up with the news on security issues and risks and update WordPress when a new mandatory release comes out.

The most recent news on WordPress security includes:

Blog Security offers the WPIDS – WordPress Intruder Detection System which is designed to detect attacks on your blog, wpdberrors WordPress Plugin which helps hide error alerts, and WP Scanner WordPress Plugin which checks for vulnerabilities in your blog, Theme and elsewhere.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress? I recently wrote an easy step-by-step tutorial on moving from Blogger to WordPress or WordPress.com.

WordPress on Your Calendar: The first Manchester WordPress User Group in England has formed and their first meeting is in January. Are you involved with a WordPress group or club in your area? Make sure you announce meetings on the WordPress Meetup list and let me know so I can help promote your group’s activities.

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 2.4 Digest: Westi’s Weekly Digest this week lists a ton of improvements and fixes for WordPress 2.4 including removal of unused variables, allowing Plugins to handle Administration Panel access failures, improvements to wp-mail.php, private posts, next and previous post link template tags, AJAX fade colors, and more.

WordPress Podcast: A new episode of the WordPress Podcast is out. Episode 32: Automattic Rumors, Lorelle Provides WordPress.com News includes an interview with Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today and the Blog Herald discussing copyright issues and content theft, rumors of Automattic’s financial ventures, the WordPress.com Premium Theme Marketplace, and Lorelle joining as a reporter for news on WordPress.com.

Looking for WordPress Books? WPThemesPlugin offers a summary of the WordPress books published over the past couple years. The list includes my book, Blogging Tips (which is about blogging not WordPress specifically), WordPress 2 Visual QuickStart Guide, WordPress Complete, and the new WordPress For Dummies, among others.

Vote for WordPress Ideas: Want your say in the next version of WordPress? 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 Theme Viewer Waits, New Social Network, Security Issues, Austin Grows, Gravatars Enabled, WordPress Books, Matt Cutts, and More, if you would like to catch up with the news on WordPress.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoWordPress.com Now 2 Million Strong: WordPress.com counted two million blogs signed up Tuesday. Congrats all!

Improved Stats Charts: WordPress.com announced improvements in the blog statistics charts which allow you to load new charts “instantly”, as well as adding a few style improvements, like telling you which day was your best day of traffic.

How Often Does WordPress.com Update WordPress.com? In the announcement about improvements to the stats charts, Matt Mullenweg admitted that they haven’t done such a good job announcing updates and improvements to WordPress.com in a timely fashion. “We deploy changes to the site anywhere from 5 to 20 times a day!” Wow! Are you seeing the improvements? Many times, these are hidden, like improvements to the code which speeds up the processing and loading, but still, it would be nice to be better informed.

WordPress.com Users Get Better Feed Widgets: WordPress.com announces Enhanced Feeds, Feed Widgets which add feed links to your blog posts covering comment counts, categories, tags, del.icio.us, Digg It, and Stumble It. Some of these aren’t feed links as much as they are site submission links, also called social networking links, but the first three appear to be feeds from comments and post-specific categories and tags.

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

The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:

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 Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabaseFix The P Plugins: There is a new addition to the “Fix the P” collection of WordPress Plugins. Planet Mike has come up with Fix the P WordPress Plugin, which automatically changes WordPress to WordPress. The first Plugin to do this W-P by Guff Szub aka Kaf Oseo. Recently, Planet Ozh entered Plugin To Correctly Spell WordPress Not word press in the Weblog Tools Collecton WordPress Plugin Competition. Hmm, two planets with “fix the P” Plugins. I think that’s saying something, don’t you?

Update Subscribe to Comments Plugin: Donncha reports that a bug was found in the popular Subscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin by Mark Jaquith. Please update this Plugin immediately.

Create WordPress Theme Locally on a Mac: Graphic Design Blog offers a few tips for designing a WordPress Theme locally on your Mac using MAMP, which installs Apache, PHP and MySQL, everything you need to run WordPress.

Code To Replace WordPress Plugins: Perishable Press offers “pure code alternatives” to replace some common WordPress Plugins which they declare are “unnecessary”. The first fis involves an issue that doesn’t impact most
WordPress Themes designed within the past two years, but is worth checking.

See Also
Google search
Google Search: Enhancing User Experience After Reddit Blackouts

Fast Updating: Worried about updating WordPress? The InstantUpgrade WordPress Plugin makes the process simple and easy.

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

  • Safe Include WordPress Plugin allows programmers to add functionality, bits of dynamic code, to WordPress Themes without interacting with the template files.
  • LastPostsImage WordPress Plugin offers a customizable image showing the last posts on your blog, which cn be used as a signature. Customizable from the Manage Panel.
  • TextMe WordPress Plugin is for mobloggers to keep copies of all emails sent from your blog redirected to your cell phone via SMS.
  • Blog Voyeur WordPress Plugin, by Donncha O’Caoimh of WordPressMU and fame, gives you new insights into your blog statistics including what pages regular readers visit. Usually you get numbers, but this puts the numbers into perspective.

Finding WordPress Plugins: For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, the WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection of WordPress Plugins released daily.

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 graphicBuy WordPress Stuff: The WordPress Shop has t-shirts and hoodies for sale in the WordPress Shop.

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.

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: 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).

Looking for a WordPress Expert? WordPress Consultants on is a list of experts you can hire to help you with WordPress Themes, WordPress development, WordPress Plugins, or other WordPress-related expertise. Also see the WordPress Jobs listings, the WP-Pro mailing list.

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

The author of Lorelle on WordPress and the fast-selling book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging, as well as several other blogs, Lorelle VanFossen has been blogging for over 15 years, covering blogging, WordPress, travel, nature and travel photography, web design, web theory and development extensively as web technologies developed.

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