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WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress Theme Viewer Waits, New Social Network, Security Issues, Austin Grows, Gravatars Enabled, WordPress Books, Matt Cutts, and More
The Blog Herald
The Blog Herald

WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress Theme Viewer Waits, New Social Network, Security Issues, Austin Grows, Gravatars Enabled, WordPress Books, Matt Cutts, and More

by
December 12, 2007

WordPress Theme Viewer still “under construction”. WordPress as a foundation for a social network? More WordPress security issues. The Austin WordPress group gets bigger. Gravatars for WordPress.com users. New WordPress Podcast released. WordPress books. Matt Cutts speaks well of WordPress. And even more WordPress news, rumors, assumptions, and expectations.

WordPress News

Nathan Rice reminded us that the WordPress Theme Viewer is still closed to access by Theme designers, and Matt Mullenweg offered updated news on the status and their attempts to create a new Subversion-backed database for Themes and improves to filtering Themes for user security.

Building a Social Network with WordPress: Gigaom announces “The Next Social Network” being put together by Chris Messina called DiSo on the WordPress platform.

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.

Buy WordPress Stuff: Too late for international shipping in time for the holidays, but there may still be time to give the gift of WordPress in the United States and Canada. There are t-shirts and hoodies for sale in the WordPress Shop. They warn that if you want your WordPress goodies to arrive in time for the holidays you need to order them now, and list the shipment arrival dates for countries around the world. I’m still waiting for the coffee mugs.

WordPress on Your Calendar: So far this December, ten new members have joined the Austin WordPress group that meets every month in Austin, Texas. The group has grown to more than 45 members and continues to expand. With the upcoming WordCamp Dallas, expect this group to grow even more. 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.

WordPress Open Source Competition: It’s official. Movable Type is now Open Source and users can now play all they want with this popular blogging platform with Movable Type Open Source.

Perishable Press recently moved their WordPress blog and offers a wide range of tips and information on finding a new web host for a WordPress blog, with great tips for dealing with the “WordPress-white-screen-of-death troubleshooting strategy.”

Matt Cutts on WordPress: In an interview with Reachd TV, Matt Cutts talks about WordPress and it’s SEO benefits and features about 48 minutes into the program. It’s worth the wait.

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 Themes Hacked, WordPress Schwag for Sale, Life Without Akismet, Flickr Edits, and New WordPress Baby, if you would like to catch up with the news on WordPress.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoGravatars for WordPress.com: Gravatars support has been enabled for all WordPress.com users which Matt claims will “help build a sense of community around your readers, and keep people coming back to the comments.” Not sure about that, but at least they will have something to look at next to your comment. :D

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

WordPress Admin Bar WordPress Plugin Updated: One of my favorite WordPress Plugins, WordPress Admin Bar WordPress Plugin has been totally updated by Viper007bond. It creates a simple to use drop down menu for the WordPress Administration Panels, speeding up your navigation through the backend of WordPress.

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Sidebar Modules: The Sidebar Modules WordPress Plugin, aka SBM, is similar to the WordPress Widgets Plugin which allows easy addition of Widgets to WordPress blogs. Many are creating modules to work especially with SBM. Recently examples include Latest Post Category WordPress Plugin to display the most recent posts per blog post category and Pipholic Latest Edited Widget Plugin shows off the latest posts edited on your blog. I’m looking for a list of SBM-specific Plugins or Modules – should these be called Modules or Plugins since they are dependent upon the Sidebar Modules WordPress Plugin?

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.

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicNeed 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.

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.

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).

If You Are Reading This: If you are reading this blog post NOT on the Blog Herald 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)

  • Thanks Lorelle for mentioning my WARP plugin. Your note a few paragraphs later about always spelling WordPress with an uppercase P inspired another new plugin, Fix the P. I looked through my blog, and saw that I used a lowercase p several times while discussing WordPress. Fix The P simply replaces most cases of WordPress with WordPress. It can be found at http://www.planetmike.com/journal/plugins/fixthep/ .

  • @Michael Clark:

    I’ve featured several “fix the P” Plugins, which began with W-P by Guff Szub aka Kaf Oseo several years ago. Unfortunately, those of us on WordPress.com can’t take advantage of auto help on spelling WordPress properly, so the nag never ends. :D

    And great idea for the Plugin, Mike. Is it totally customizable? Can additional events be added through the Administration Panels? I didn’t see a mention of that in the description.

    And keep doing the great work you do for WordPress. It is much appreciated.

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