Archive For November, 2009

Journey

Journey is a classic, three column theme with flexible width (800-1200px). With v1.1, Pings/Trackbacks are displayed separately and option pages.

iTech

iTech is high quality, low graphics, Lightweight, fast-rendering professional WordPress Theme, especially good for technology blogs. A tabbed block is added to sidebar for displaying Recent Posts, Popular Posts and Recent Comments. Built in control panel, you can set customized RSS feed, email subscription, twitter subscription and header logo.

Blank

Blank has no layout but every template is full of html comments to explain the php stuff if you know a bit of css and html

Amazing Grace Crimson

A simple,…

Bojan Zdrnja has published a post on the SANS Internet Storm Center blog today highlighting a distributed WordPress admin account cracking script. The script was discovered by one of the sites readers on a virtual private server (VPS). The acquired script is written in PHP and performs brute force cracking attempts to WordPress admin accounts.

While this particular version is relatively simple, the power behind the script and the MySQL database allows the attacker to distribute the attacks not only by sites, but also by passwords tried as well.

The article goes into detail explaining how the script works and suggests…

Thanksgiving was last week, and I thought about doing a post to thank the people who contribute to WordPress core, since this is a group of people I’m thankful for on a daily basis. I started a draft, and then realized that with 2.9 in beta, we’ll have a release announcement sometime in the next few weeks (barring unforeseen complications, etc), and all the core contributors will be thanked then. Though I think it’s worth giving thanks every day for the people who make WordPress possible, I don’t like to clutter up anyone’s feed readers with repetitive posts, so I…

The latest BuddyPress 1.1 point release is now available for download.

This release fixes a number of remaining issues with the 1.1 release of BuddyPress. Although this is not a critical upgrade, it is still highly recommended to ensure the stability of your installation.

Please consult the release history for a complete list of changes in this version.

More WordCamp NYC videos and a great tutorial from the community round out the videos published this past week on WordPress.tv. Here’s what you missed:

First, there’s John Hawkins’ talk from WordCamp NYC on how to build your very first WordPress plugin. He’s given this talk at a handful of WordCamps this year, but it’s always packed with great information and serves as a great introduction to building a very basic plugin.

Next, Automattician José Fontainhas gives an overview of how to properly provide for internationalization in your WordPress projects, including a brief look at the new GlotPress system. If you’re building…

As a webmaster we are all concerned about the number of links that are coming into the blog and all the other stats that usually concern the traffic to the blog. However, another important thing we all miss to see is the number of outbound clicks from our blog to other websites.

Though this may not sound interesting to many people, it definitely holds some importance when you want to track links to sites other than your own site. One of the reasons I want to track this on my blog, is to understand and know what kind of software or…

Preface

The act of adopting an abandoned plugin reminds me of adopting an orphaned child. On the one hand, the new parents are taking on someone who they didn’t help raise thus far, which forces them to “learn” the ways of the new child to communicate well with them. On the other hand, the new parent is left with the fear that there will come a day that the old parent will come to claim their rights on the child.

The analogy I brought can go some way in building an intuition about the problem of orphaned plugins, but if we…

If you are a Dreamhost or MediaTemple customer and I know that many WordPress users are, it’s probably been a rough week for you. Just before Thanksgiving, an exploit was used on a subset of MediaTemple grid servers to redirect websites to a 3rd-party advertising website. Also, some customers passwords were compromised as they were stored in the database via clear text. MediaTemple has since switched to an encryption method of storing passwords in databases.

Over the holidays, Dreamhost encountered a fairly large network failure. This happened just before they conducted their largest data center move to date. The network failure…

I don’t think “mega-blogging” is actually a thing, I just made it up to make the title sound more dramatic. But if mega-blogging were a thing, you would do it with WordPress. Micro-blogging is a thing, ash a lot of people do it with Twitter.

TechCrunch drops in this fray with an article comparing the comScore numbers of WordPress.com and Twitter.com, which show an accelerating growth for WP.com and flattening for Twitter. I’ll talk about the data itself later, but first wanted to point out a point many overlook when trying to create a battle between the mediums.

New forms of social…

If you’re a developer and need to know some of the geekier bits coming down the pipe in WordPress 2.9, Joost De Valks article should fit the bill. In it, he lists a number of things that developers should pay attention to such as enhancements to wp_query, upgraded TinyMCE editor, performance updates to the options table and much more.

WordPress 2.9 is currently at beta 1 stage. If you are one of the beta testers for 2.9, let me know how it’s gone for you so far.

New Plugins

Lock Pages

This plugin lets administrators “lock” any or all pages. “Locking” here basically means preventing non-admins from Editing the page’s slug, Changing the page’s parent, Deleting the page.

YOURLS: Short URL Widget

Creates a fully configurable widget that outputs the short URL to the current post or page. Requires the YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter plugin.

List Pages at Depth

This plugin creates a more powerful version of the wp_list_pages() function which allows you to specify a start depth.

Updated Plugins

Smooth Slider

Assign a post as featured posts on a blog and then create a slideshow with them to show at any location on…

**** UPDATE****

Starting right now all…

Connections Reloaded v3

Connections Reloaded is a two column, fixed width theme derived from the Connections theme by Patricia Müller. The theme is gravatar ready, widget ready (with custom widgets) with support for custom header images and SEO titles and a options page for easy customization.

BlueBubble

Two column, widget ready theme with a ready made jQuery/PHP based contact form and an options page for easy customization

BlogStarter

BlogStarter is an emptied out WordPress theme that can be used as a starting point for custom themes. Version 2.0 has some great improvements, including compatibility up to WordPress 2.8.6, a cleaned up CSS…