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As you can probably tell from the title, this episode features quite a bit of discussion surrounding WordPress 2.7. Not to worry though as there are plenty of other things that Keith and I discuss such as our favorite feature in WordPress 2.7 Beta 1, the WordPress showcase, whether or not Drupal can beat WordPress, and near the end of the show, Anthony Cole called in and gave us the 411 on WordCamp Australia which is taking place on November 29th and November 30th.

Ad Copy:

WordPress Weekly is brought to you by the fine advertisers on WeblogToolsCollection.com. Without their continued support, this show would not be possible. Those of you who continue to download the show and share it with friends, your continued support is appreciated. If you are interested in advertising on WordPress Weekly, please contact Mark Ghosh via this contact form.

Stories Discussed:

Your Favorite Feature In 2.7 Beta 1

Comment Remix Vulnerability

Good Enough To Be ShowCased?

Can Drupal Beat WordPress

WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 Released

Feedback:

We encourage you to leave a comment whether it be feedback, questions, rants, or corrections then tune in and see if your comment made it on the air!

Plugin Of The Week:

Jeff - Custom Permalinks – Custom Permalinks is a Wordpress plugin that gives you ultimate control over your site structure. Lay out your site the way you want it. Set the URL of any post, tag or category to anything you want. Old permalinks will redirect properly to the new address.

Keith - Feed Entry Header - FeedEntryHeader provides you the ability to protect your content online. Many of us have had the experience of seeing our content posted mysteriously on someone else’s website word-for-word. It usually happens by having someone grab content from your RSS feed and slap it into their blog. (Bloody splogs!) This plugin provides you the ability to customize a header to be placed at the start of each article in your feed to help ensure that sploggers are pointed out, and links back to your original post are included in the splog’s repost.

WordPress Job Of The Week:

Job was posted on October 30th, 2008 by Mark Ghosh. The job description is as follows:

We are looking for a web and graphics designer for a popular blog. Ideal candidates include artists and designers with experience in working on WordPress, who have a fair amount of experience in designing graphics with a flair for modern colors and styles and the ability to conceptualize and produce web experiences from the ground up. Experience with SEO, web usability, semantics and

ethical and effective marketing also required. PHP programming experience not as important. If you want to work with us, you need to wow us with your portfolio. Individuals and design houses welcome. Our promise is to give you the ability to flex your design muscles, provide outlets for your creativity and a lot of exposure for your work. If we like your work, we will get back with you and talk about costs and timelines under NDA.

If interested please contact mark at wltc dot net

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Friday November 14th, 2008 8P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 57 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode28.mp3

Listen To Episode #28:

hotdog

lion king

…and infinitely more fun: webmasters and their pets incognito! Happy Halloween, everyone! If you see any costumes that would pass the SafeSearch filter :), feel like sharing a gripe or telling a good story, please join the chat!

Take care, and don’t forget to brush your teeth.
 Yours scarily,
  The Webmaster Central Team

Our glasses-wearing, no vampire-teeth vampire (Ryan), zoombie Mur, Holiday Fail (Tiffany Lane), Colbert Hipster (Dan Vanderkam), Rick Astley Cutts, Homeboy Ben D’Angelo, Me — pinker & poofier, Investment Bank CEO Shyam Jayaraman (though you can’t see the golden parachute in his backpack)

Chark as Juno, Wysz as Beah Burger (our co-worker), Adi and Matt Dougherty as yellow ninja, red ninja!

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes…

Powdered toast man, Mike Leotta

Adam Lasnik as, let me see if I get this right, a “secret service agent masquerading as a backstage tech”

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

New Plugins

Slayer’s Custom Widget

This plugin will make your widgetized sidebars so flexible that you will almost think that your running a more advanced CMS system and not WordPress.

Updated Plugins

Tublelog

A tumblelog engine / theme for self-hosted WordPress with some bits of microformats love.

Comment Reply Notification

When a reply is made to a comment the user has left on the blog, an e-mail shall be sent to the user to notify him of the reply. This will allow the users to follow up the comment and expand the conversation if desired.

Virtual Multiblog

Virtual Multiblog allows you to run more than one blog off a single install of WordPress. Each blog is managed as a complete separate install — separate admin sections, separate users, etc. They will happily co-exist with different themes and plugins activated. The biggest advantage is that you will only have to keep one set of program files up-to-date, and this method should be expandable to as many different blogs as you like.

Theme Switch

With this plugin you can switch to a totally different blog template when you are logged in to your WordPress dashboard. Includes a widget.

cformsII

cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

MiniMeta Widget

“Mini” Version of the WordPress Meta Widget with different logon types (Form,Link) and additional Admin Links and Blog Links.

A Year Before

Show a list of articles, which were written a certain time ago.

Attachment Manager

This will allow you to better manage how your attachments are handled. Attachments can be easily listed after posts, complete with icons.

[EDIT] Sorry about the title of the post.

Many sites across the blogosphere are reporting a fake website that is distributing a backdoored version of WordPress. Though these are few and far between, it behooves all users to be careful when downloading any kind of code to run on their blog. The Register report contains an update from Peter Westwood (a WordPress lead dev) about the code being distributed and his suggestions on how to avoid being duped. Though the fake site is down now and If you believe that you might have been the victim of this site, please download a fresh copy of WordPress from WordPress.org and upgrade your blog to be safe.

I personally follow a few simple rules to make sure that I never fall for a social engineering or covert code trap on my blogs.

• Always download core WordPress code from http://WordPress.org. Type the link into your browser address bar rather than following a link from another blog or site. This includes updates and security fixes. If your web host offers one click installs or upgrades through their control panel, they are probably safe (they are safe if they are on a current version). I still suggest either installing a fresh copy from WordPress.org or using WordPress.com, but I do understand that one click installs are convenient.
• Try to download plugins and themes only from the official WordPress Extend. There are way too many themes and plugins (though much less plugins) that contain convert code and new WordPress theme download sites seem to be popping up everyday. We have covered shady themes many times on this blog.
• Never download “hacks” or “patches” to WordPress from anywhere. If you are unfamiliar with PHP, I would suggest that you ask people in the WordPress forums for help or contact us through our form on this blog for help. Always download official patches, updates and installs from the WordPress.org site.
• If you find a cool new trick, theme, plugin or hack for WordPress via a Google search, please be careful. I know the following is a cliche’, but if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Do you have any suggestions for our other readers? Have you found strange code on your blog or theme?

New Plugins

WP-CommentNavi

Have nicer/advanced pagination for your comments in WordPress 2.7

Lolcats Widget Plugin

This simple plugin retreives the latest lolcat and displays it on a widget. It caches it for two hours so it won’t slow up the process of loading each time.

Popupper

Allows a blogger to insert links that when the reader mouses over the links it shows a popup.

WP-NoSpamUser

“WP-NoSpamUser” is all about blocking potential spammers from registering on your blog.

EasySMS

EasySMS is a great way for WordPress administrators to txt message their registered users and broadcast a new post to user’s cell phones.

Auto Post Images (API)

This plugin will automatically put images into each post. The images are automatically added to posts and not to pages. Good for sites that host recipes.

Alphabetical List

Order your posts alphabetically for each selected categories.

Comment Approved Notifier

The plugin sends an e-mail to your commenters when you approve their comments.

Updated Plugins

PhotoQ

Turns your blog into a photoblog. If you have a lot of pictures to post, PhotoQ is your ideal companion. PhotoQ allows batch uploading and editing photos and has support for EXIF and watermarking.

Dynamic Content Gallery

This plugin creates a dynamic gallery of images for latest and/or featured posts. Using JonDesign’s excellent SmoothGallery script, this plugin makes the gallery truly dynamic so that it automatically creates the gallery from your latest and/or featured posts.

What Would Seth Godin Do

Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

Zina

Zina is a graphical interface to your MP3 collection, a personal jukebox, an MP3 streamer.

WordPress Announcement

Display an announcement to visitors on your blog.

Have you released a plugin and want to see it listed in our daily releases? Then head over and make a detailed post in our News forum.

While the U.S. Presidential election has come and gone, there are still plenty of things to vote for such as WordPress Ideas. WordPress Ideas is used as a central location where users of WordPress from all across the world share their ideas on how to improve the software, plugins to integrate, etc. At this time, the idea of Easy Updating Of WordPress leads the pack with 910 votes and a rating of five stars. As it turns out, this will be one of the features in WordPress 2.7 known as Core Upgrade. Next on the list is Open ID Integration. Although there are plenty of plugins that easily provide this functionality, considering the amount of steam the idea has, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a future version of WordPress.

In order to participate in the WordPress idea center, you must have a WordPress.org user account. This will enable you to create ideas, rate ideas and comment on ideas that have already been submitted.

Examples of ideas that have been implemented into the core of WordPress:

• Create a better plugin-database
• Remove Sponsored Themes from WordPress.org
• Thumbnail and image resizing
• Default searching of both posts and pages
• Tags!
• Improved Draft System
• Plugin Update Notification

So while many within the WordPress community may think that they have no voice concerning the direction in which WordPress is heading, that thought couldn’t be farther from the truth. The fact of the matter is, you do have a voice. Ultimately, the decision is up to the team on whether or not to include an idea into the core of WordPress, but with a grassroots effort, you can easily make your idea known.

Garden

Garden consists of a fluid three column outfit with widgetized bars and columns, featuring an custom fields enabled news slider jQuery powered, built in are recent comments with gravatars, related posts, social bookmarking enabled.
The frontpage shows the latest posts followed by footer action. Flickr, Delicio is enabled in the themes options panel.

iEleg

iEleg is a 2 column widget ready wordpress theme. Theme uses 2 small images for faster download. Feel free to get back if you face any problem. I would be very happy to help.

Simple Brown

Two column, widget ready and search engine optimized with a different style for the latest article.

SpotOnSEO

Two Column, fixed width, widget ready, SEO Friendly, AJAX tabbed theme

Making your theme’s comments compatible with WordPress 2.7 and earlier versions.: If you are a theme designer or author, you need to know that your legacy theme’s comments page will not be compatible with WordPress 2.7 Justin Tadlock has written up a simple (and clean) procedure to make the comments page compatible with WordPress 2.7 and still be backwards compatible with slightly older version of WordPress.

While we are on the subject of comments and WordPress 2.7, Otto has also written a detailed post on the new comment enhancements in WordPress 2.7. Judging from the comments and reading through the article, it is a very well written peice and should answer most questions on the new features.

[EDIT] As astutely pointed out in the comments, all themes should continue to work fine with original functionality. However to use the newly introduced commenting features of WordPress 2.7, older themes will have to be modified.

New Plugins

Custom Permalinks

Custom Permalinks is a WordPress plugin that gives you ultimate control over your site structure.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, has a widget build in and shortcode support.

Random Tags Cloud

Random Tags Cloud displays your tags by selecting randomly. You can customize other tag cloud’s settings. It allows you to display your site’s tags on your sidebar. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but you can customize it. If you set, it gets your tags by selecting randomly.

Comment Approved Notifier

The plugin sends an e-mail to your commenters when you approve their comments.

Results Count Remix

Adds both the number of displayed posts as well as the total number of returned posts to search and archive pages.

Rails Integration API

The Rails Integration_API plugin enables single sign-on between a Rails application and any number of WordPress installations.

Updated Plugins

Xxternal-RSS

Include external RSS-Feed into your posts and pages.

MailPress

This plugin allows you to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates.

WordPress Link Directory

A link directory plugin for WordPress which allows other webmasters to add their link to your site. It can check for reciprocal links and even check the Pagerank of the other site and accept or refuse the link based on criteria you specify.

WP to Twitter

Posts a Twitter status update when you update your blog, using the Cli.gs URL shortening service.

HyperDB

HyperDB is an advanced database class that supports partitioning, replication, failover, and federation.

EmailThis

EmailThis provides an easy way for visitors of your site to send your posts via email.

WordPress 2.7 Keyboard Shortcuts in the WordPress Codex is a nice page to figure out the neat little tricks to make your job of administering a blog easier and more user friendly. WordPress 2.7 adds the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to browse and moderate comments. These keyboard shortcuts are designed to save time by allowing you to rapidly navigate and perform actions on comments. If your blog receives a lot of comments for moderation and/or spam, these shortcuts might come handy.

Speaking of new features added to WordPress 2.7, Demetris has written a post on the Ten New Features in WordPress 2.7 that strikes him as the most useful. I really like his illustrated style of writing. It is worthy of note that some of the features he mentions are dependant on compatibility with your theme.