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WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2007, Nominated for TechCrunch Crunchies, More WordPress Blogs Hacked, WordPress Events in 2008, WordPress.com Blogger Wins, and Snow
The Blog Herald
The Blog Herald

WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2007, Nominated for TechCrunch Crunchies, More WordPress Blogs Hacked, WordPress Events in 2008, WordPress.com Blogger Wins, and Snow

by
December 26, 2007

A WordPress review – what happened this year? Excitement builds for WordPress 2.4 coming in January. WordPress.com nominated for the TechCrunch Crunchies. Popular WordPress blogger hacked – brings you the tips and techniques learned the hard way. Lots of WordPress events for your 2008 calendar. WordPress.com blogger wins top honors. And WordPress.com gets snow.

WordPress News

What Happened to WordPress in 2007: Weblog Tools Collections offers a WordPress Review for 2007, creating a timeline for progress on WordPress.

It also includes a list of what’s coming up for WordPress 2.4 which includes the new Administration Panel redesign with a Widget-based Dashboard Panel, undo for comment editing, search of both posts and Pages, and even more.

Vote for WordPress: TechCrunch Crunchies Awards list WordPress among the “Most Likely to Succeed” nominees with an eclectic bunch including Zivity, Slide, Mint, and Kayak, totally unrelated sites. Very odd combination to choose from and no clarification that the vote is for WordPress.com not WordPress overall, but your vote for WordPress is always welcome by the WordPress Community. Automattic CEO, Toni Schneider is nominated for Best start-up CEO, so cast a vote there, too. Can someone tell me why WordPress.com isn’t listed in the Best overall category?

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.

More WordPress Cache: Perishable Press has published “How to Enable the Default WordPress Object Cache”, an indepth look at site performancing issues related to how WordPress handles cache, as well as exploring caching WordPress Plugins, to control and fine tune the traffic load on the site.

WordPress on Your Calendar: 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. The first Manchester WordPress User Group in England has formed and their first meeting is in January. Maybe it’s time you started a WordPress group in your area?

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: This week, Westi reported that the holiday slacking is not in evidence with WordPress developers as they race the clock for the January release of WordPress 2.4. Improvements and chances included introduction of a pluggable function to the set password function and addition of the password strength meter to the user profile page, changes to the is_page() tag to allow for an array of pages, faster rewrite rules for permalinks, fixes to TinyMCE and the tag entry field, addition of the title sanitation routine to permit a 0 (zero) to be a valid title, improvements in relative links in Atom comment feeds, addition of a link to the post on the Comment Panel, ensuring PNG transparency and alpha channels are preserved during creation of thumbnails, and improvements to the installation process for checks of valid database connection info.

The week before, WordPress developers added support for Atom Threading Extensions, documentation for deprecated functions and the taxonomy API, more improvements in usability and layout of the Comment Moderation Panel, auto-saving now includes tags, more improvements to the importer and exporter, fixes to allow multiple sidebars to be registered correctly, a new filter added called the_content_export for exporting post content, supression of database error messages by default, introduction of a pluggable function for random password generation, and more.

WordPress Security News: Another popular blogger was hacked this week, adding to the growing number of famous, not-so-famous, and anyone bloggers who have been hacked because they failed to upgrade WordPress and monitor security risks.

The most recent news on WordPress security includes:

To check your blog’s security, try WPIDS – WordPress Intruder Detection System and WP Scanner WordPress Plugin.

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.

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

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 Akismet Day, Two Million Bloggers, Plugin Security Warnings, And WordPress is the Best CMS, if you would like to catch up with the news on WordPress.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoSnow for the WordPress.com Holidays: WordPress.com brought snow to you for the holidays by adding a snow effect over the WordPress.com pages. If you would like to add your own falling snow effect, go to your WordPress Administration Panels > Presentation > Extras and check the box that ways “Snow falling on my blog” and it will last until January 2nd.

Avatars on Administration Panels: WordPress.com added avatars to the Administration Panels so you can see a tiny thumbnail of the blogger in the Dashboard’s post lists and Comments Panel comments, and elsewhere. The images are very tiny, which makes faces and a lot of graphics really hard to see, but the younger folks love those avatars and gravatars, mini-visual representatives of them and their blog. Those with Gravatars tied into their email account, even those not signed up with WordPress.com, will have their Gravatars shown on their blog comments.

If you haven’t uploaded your avatar yet, go to Users > Your Profile and add your image. The image should be no bigger than 128 pixels, though 80 pixels square is the standard. The image must withstand “shrinkage” down to 16 pixels, the size that appears on the Administration Panels Dashboard.

WordPress.com Food Blog Wins: The 2007 Food Blog Award Winners have been announced and Bittersweet Blog was selected for the Best Food Blog for Writing. Congrats!

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.

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.

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

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 DatabaseLoving the WordPress Extend Plugins Directory: Ronald Huereca on Weblog Tools Collection wrote “WordPress Extend Plugins: I Love Thee“, a review of the recently created “official” WordPress Plugin Directory called WordPress Extend Plugins. I agree with most of his points that it’s better, but there is still a long way to go in improving this service to make it more usable and user-friendly.

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

Role Manager WordPress Plugin Updated: Role Manager WordPress Plugin has been updated and includes new security improvements. It now features four panels for controlling the roles, capabilities, and general information, as well as a help page. Names for roles and capabilities are restricted to a maximum length of 30 signs, existing roles can be easily copied, and many other new features and improvements have been added.

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.

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:

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 and Writing and Publishing Code In Your WordPress Blog Posts.

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, and 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.

View Comments (7)

  • Wow, this is one hell of a post that you do every Wed. Keep up the good work. I’m currently almost finished with the WordPress for dummies book and I’ll be writing a small review of it for WeblogToolsCollection.com :)

  • @Jeffro2pt0:

    I look forward to your view. It’s hard to say much negative about a Dummies book as they are very much similar and follow a standard format in many ways. This is what makes them so successful as a series! And thanks for the kind words.

  • Hi there, I’m the author of the tdo-tag-fixes plugin… I’m just curious what you mean by:

    …but there are many ways this Plugin can be developed.

    Do you think there is more I can do with this plugin?

    Thanks
    Mark

  • I haven’t put this Plugin though its paces yet, but in theory, beyond the intersections, you can build upon comparisons and relationships, creating an improved Related Posts and Tags listing. Intersections of tags is so new, I see a lot that can be done with this in connecting the tags together, creating intersection and related tag feeds, and so on.

    I’m excited to see where people will take this. And thanks for asking.

  • The WordPress forums are so poor and there are so many Plugins and Widgets, it’s hard to know which are good and which are not. I can see I will be making good use of these to improve the theme on my blog.

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