vBulletin Tagging

As announced on the wordpress.com blog, 2.7 is coming to wordpress.com tomorrow.  Actually, 2.7 has been running on wordpress.com for awhile, just not the exciting new admin UI.  Here’s a peek at what the admin will look like on wordpress.com.

The final release of 2.7 won’t be here until next week. There is still a lot of coordination and management type stuff to do before we’re ready to release.

We are pleased to announce Invision Power Board 3.0.3 has been released.

This is a maintenance release for IP.Board 3 and addresses various bugs and adds in some enhancements to existing features. Also, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, and IP.Downloads have received a maintenance update.

Major Changes Since 3.0.2

Among many dozens of smaller bugs fixed, the following large changes and fixes have been made in the 3.0.3 release:

New option for dealing with members marked as spam: Unapprove posts, clear profile data and ban user
Ability to mark members as spammers from the Manage Validating Queue in the ACP
Added ability to edit status and about…

New Plugins

Appointment Scheduler – Appointy Plugin

Appointment Scheduler – Appointy plugin allows you to accept appointments from your clients 24×7×365 directly on your wordpress powered websites. It has a powerful yet simple Ajax interface which allows one click booking. With just one click your clients can see your availability in the entire month.

Formatted post

This plugin is for the users who need to post with fixed format regularly

BNS Corner Logo

Widget to display a logo; or, used as a plugin displays image fixed in one of the four corners.

Delete Duplicate Posts

Easy way to delete duplicate posts on your WordPress blog.

Updated Plugins

YouTube…

I love WordPress’ sidebar widgets. I also despise coding them.

I love how they let me offload menial management tasks directly to clients, avoiding all the “Change this word to another word!” e-mails. But every time I code them, it seems to involve 15 minutes of Googling, copy-pasting from a previous widget, and looking at documentation.

So I created this TextMate “snippet” to make it easier:

class ${1:PREFIX_Name}_Widget extends WP_Widget {
function $1_Widget() {
\$widget_ops = array( ‘classname’ => ‘${2:CSS class name}’, ‘description’ => ‘${3:Description}’ );
\$this->WP_Widget( ‘$2′, ‘${4:Title}’, \$widget_ops );
}

function widget( \$args, \$instance ) {
extract( \$args, EXTR_SKIP );
echo…

OpenID Security Update for IP.Board 3.0.2

We are investigating issues related to OpenID not completely authenticating data which can result in the security of your community being compromised. This issue can only impact your community if you have enabled OpenID logins as the OpenID is disabled when IPS ships IP.Board releases.

Protecting Your IP.Board

There are two methods to protect your community.

Method 1: Disable OpenID

The easiest fix is to simply disable OpenID logins. These login systems are disabled by default in IP.Board so unless you have specifically turned on OpenID you are already protected. This screen shot shows you what to…

OpenID Security Update for IP.Board 3.0.2

We are investigating issues related to OpenID not completely authenticating data which can result in the security of your community being compromised. This issue can only impact your community if you have enabled OpenID logins as the OpenID is disabled when IPS ships IP.Board releases.

Protecting Your IP.Board

There are two methods to protect your community.

Method 1: Disable OpenID

The easiest fix is to simply disable OpenID logins. These login systems are disabled by default in IP.Board so unless you have specifically turned on OpenID you are already protected. This screen shot shows you what to…

21 Great Plugins to Manage Multi-Author Blogs Efficiently: This is an interesting collection of plugins to manage multi-author blogs and add extra visibility to your co-authors. Weblog Tools Collection is a multi-author blog that is put together by highly dedicated and talented authors in various parts of the planet. We collect and put together news, information and articles throughout a 24 hour period and are probably watching over the blog and the comments in one way or another. We rarely ever meet face to face and tend to communicate via IM, email and a very rare phone call from time…

New Plugins

Super Cat Lister

SuperCatLister greatly extends the abilities of Wordpress as a content management system. It does this by giving site designers the ability to insert links or content from posts in specified categories into other posts.

Testimonials Manager

Testimonials Manager is a WordPress plugin that allows you to manage and display testimonials for your blog, product or service. It can be used to build your portfolio or to encourage readers to subscribe / buy your products.

Search API

This plugin creates a basis for a new search engine to replace the simple input box search currently employed. The plugin creates an API…

I’ve managed to scrape up some defines/constants for use in vBulletin’s config file (config.php)

This forces all userinfo queries to include avatar information.
define(’AVATAR_ON_NAVBAR’, 1);

This bypasses the file checks, e.g that install.php one you get after installation. This is potential security risk, shouldn’t be enabled in production.
define(’BYPASS_FILE_CHECK’, 1);

This defines whether vBulletin is in demo mode or not.
define(’DEMO_MODE’, 1);

Our famous saviour for when modifications go bad…. thank you hooks
define(’DISABLE_HOOKS’, 1);

This forces all the hooks to be used, however, the above overrides this.
define(’FORCE_HOOKS’, 1);

This disables mail being sent out from your server.
define(’DISABLE_MAIL’, 1);

Sends pasword as raw…

Remember Gravatar? That service Automattic acquired back on October 18th, 2007. It’s nearing two years since the acquisition and I don’t know about you but, I don’t feel as though Gravatar has gone mainstream. Just as a refresher course, the idea behind Gravatar is to host a globally-recognized avatar that is tied to an email address. This means that using your Gravatar is as simple as using the same email address to sign up to supported services/software that you used on Gravatar.com.

Same Idea Exists Today From 2004

Doing a bit of history, Gravatar has been around since at least 2004. At…

Community Content System 1.0.0 Released

Many clients have expressed interest in tools that would allow them to extend IP.Board’s traditional forum community functionality by providing methods of creating new pages within the IP.Board framework. Uses for such a system span from a simple custom portal all the way through to a complete website built utilizing IP.Board’s powerful backend codebase. When your community and site systems are truly integrated, single sign on and a matching website/forum theme become much easier.

Page Templates
If you are creating many pages for your website you will find that they generally follow a similar structure each time.…

We are pleased to announce Invision Power Board 3.0.2 has been released.

This is the second maintenance release for IP.Board 3 and addresses various bugs and adds in some enhancements to existing features. Also, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, and IP.Downloads have received a maintenance update.

Major Changes Since 3.0.1

Among many dozens of smaller bugs fixed, the following large changes and fixes have been made in the 3.0.2 release:

Improved search and member list performanceDate filter options for Active Content pageMany improvements for Sphinx searching (i.e. ability to filter by forum, ability to search titles only, ability to group posts as topics, plugin functionality…

All the entries into the WordPress Plugin competition have been tallied and have been passed on to the judges. There are 43 entries in total that we have received. They are all listed below with an announcement about each plugin. You can also download a zip file with all the plugins in it, use them at your leisure and then rate them on the plugin competition blog. (If the plugin is not listed on the plugin competition blog, the authors have not followed the rules and they will not benefit from the user ratings) These plugins are listed in no…

Dashed

Single column, gravatar ready theme with a gravatar based author avatar image

XHTML Am

Widget ready, two column blue, white and grey theme

Brownie

Three-column WordPress theme in soft brown colors and two widget ready sidebars. Has Google adsense support and 125×125 ad management.

Daring Inspiration

Two column, left sidebar WordPress theme

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to us to get it listed in our release posts.

Now that you have learnt how to setup your blog and secured it from spammers by activating Akismet, I would like to give you a tour around the admin dashboard, this tour will help you get accustomed to managing WordPress more effectively.

You may also come across several questions, however to keep you assured all your questions will be answered in the WordPress for Beginners series.

Touring the Main Admin Dashboard

WordPress provides users with a really nice dashboard that will allow you to manage and perform several actions, however the first thing that you see when you login to WordPress is…