Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/11
108 Views Published 3 months ago in Wordpress
Orange consists of a fluid three column outfit, with widgetized sidebars and footer columns, built in are recent comments with gravatars, related posts, social bookmarking enabled and Flickr is enabled in the themes options panel.
Emphasis is the newest WordPress theme release from Jasonetics. It is a very simple theme, with subtle colors. The posts are bordered with a very light grey, and the links are green and hover orange. This theme is called emphasis because almost all of the focus is on the content and posts.
Three column, widget ready, gravatar ready theme with ability to post images to index page automatically
Tags: comments, options, release, template, templates, Wordpress, wp
In this highly optimized episode of WordPress Weekly, I interviewed Michael Torbert who is more commonly known as hallsofmontezuma throughout the WordPress community. He is now the developer of the most popular plugin in the plugin repository, theAll In One SEO pack. We discuss what it’s like to maintain an insanely popular plugin, how difficult it has been to work with the WordPress code, thoughts on SEO in general, and the question of the night went to David Peralty for asking if SEO could be damaged by mis configuring the plugin. You’ll have to listen to the show to get the answer. On top of that, I give my plugin pick of the week, the WordPress job of the week and much more on episode 24 of WordPress weekly.
Ad Copy:
WordPress Weekly is brought to you buy the fine advertisers on WeblogToolsCollection.com. Without their continued support, this show would not be possible. I would also like to personally thank each and every one of you who download and listen to this show. Your continued support is greatly appreciated. If you are interested in advertising on WordPress Weekly, please contact Mark Ghosh via this contact form.
News:
WordPress 2.7 is nearing feature freeze. Once that happens, we should start to see announcements in the dashboard regarding beta releases. Based on everything I have read, 2.7 is on schedule to be released on November 10th. If something major is discovered during the beta trials, the date of release will obviously be changed.
Didn’t get the chance to mention this on the show but I wanted to pass along a happy birthday to HackWordPress.com as they have turned 1 year old.
Feedback:
I cover feedback related to last weeks episode. We encourage any feedback you may have with regards to the show. You can either email me via jeffro at jeffro2pt0.com or you can simply leave us a comment on the blog.
Plugin Of The Week:
Jeff - Exclude Pages – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus). Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.) You could do this just as easily by adding exclusion arguments to the WP_LIST_PAGES function but this plugin takes those steps out of the process.
WordPress Job Of The Week:
This job was published on October 10th on the WeblogToolsCollection.com Job board. Sure Foods Living is looking for someone who can upgrade WordPress 2.1 to the current version. The individual at one point had someone to help them customize their site but that person is no longer available. Also, because of the upgrade, this person needs to change templates since the current one is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress. The potential client is asking for people who are qualified and for quotes on how much this project would cost. If you are interested in this job, please contact alison at surefoodsliving.com
Announcements:
Jane Wells who works for Automattic in the user experience/usability department will be our special one hour guest on Halloween night. That is Friday, October 31st, 2008. So if you’re interested in talking usability in WordPress, definitely mark this date on your calendar.
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Friday October 17th, 2008 8P.M. EST
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Length Of Episode: 58 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode24.mp3
Listen To Episode #24:
While not broadly advertised, I happened to catch Brian Gardner for about an hour to discuss his announcement regarding going open source. During the interview, we discuss topics such as the grey area of the GPL, his new business model, his new approach to themes, how similar his business model is to the WordPress.com model, the state of themes in WordPress and much more.
Listen To The Brian Gardner Interview:
Tags: plugin, release, seo, skin, template, templates, test, Wordpress, wpWow it’s really been 1 year since Gravatar joined the Automattic family. Time sure flies when you’re having fun!
Gravatar has come a long way from the service that it was back in October 2007. My wife likes to laugh at me because I’ll pick something up in one room, like a remote control, and move around the house fidgeting with it. Then I’ll absentmindedly leave it in some random place like the bathroom, or the freezer. One year ago we picked up a small struggling avatar service with a great name and an awesome fan base. Now, in an attempt not to leave it in a random location, we’re looking back on the last year (and letting you look with us.)
The service was running version 2.0, and set up on two rented (or collocated, I don’t honestly know) servers. The servers were running at loads of around 20, and could spike to well over 100 (that’s a lot.) It was obvious that we needed both some stop-gap fixes and a plan. The first thing we did was throw some caching servers in front of the service — a couple of varnish servers as I recall. This dropped the workload of the two boxes considerably, and allowed us to look at Gravatar without bringing the service down. Next we replicated the setup 1 for 1 to two of our own (more powerful) servers. This gave us a bit more breathing room. And we began to plan.
It was obvious, from the very beginning that the service was going to have to handle a constant torrent of requests from the internet. Most of those requests would be for email addresses with no Gravatar and come from URLs that could be crafted in an unlimited number of ways. On top of that we knew that we wanted to make all the paid features free, and expand the size a Gravatar could be from 80 pixels to 512 pixels. So basically instead of our goals being to make the undertaking less daunting we we’re actively making it a more intense challenge than it could have been. But that was OK with us, because our goals for Gravatar weren’t to make it easier but to make it better. We wanted to make Gravatar the kind of free service that we could use, would want to use, and would be proud to share with the world. I know that last bit sounds like marketing crap, but that’s really what we wanted to do and is really how we look at Gravatar.
Pretty much the next thing we did was port Gravatars code from RoR (Ruby on Rails) to PHP. As I mentioned when we announced this change the reason for this wasn’t about Ruby or Rails. Simply put we’re a PHP shop, and once rewritten in PHP we have many more great minds that we can easily throw at it than if it were still in RoR. Since we ported it *pretty much* directly from rails there are some left-over rails-isms in Gravatars code that you wont find in, say, WordPress. Shh…. Don’t tell Matt 
In the rewriting we tried to tackle the largest scalability problems with the design of the service. You can imagine that for an avatar serving service… storing, searching, and serving avatars is paramount. Gravatar 2.0 (pre PHP) suffered from some pretty significant inefficiencies in this regard, and I think that a big part of that was limited resources (time and servers.) Luckily we we’re now not significantly limited by either of those things.
– warning beginning technical details which may be safely skipped over if you don’t care –
The way that images were stored originally was: a complete image was made for all sizes between 1×1 and 80×80 pixels, a directory made for each rating, and a symlink placed from the rating to the appropriate image (either the users image or the default image in case the rating was too high.) So that’s 80 images, 5 directories, and 240 symbolic links. The reason for this, I believe, was to attempt to serve the avatar content without any database interaction whatever. The files were then archived, uploaded to Amazon S3, and an entry added to Amazon SQS. Finally the SQS entry was retrieved by the serving server, the file downloaded, extracted, and placed on the filesystem. So this is why it took several minutes once you uploaded and cropped your image for you to be able to browse the rest of the site again. You can imagine how many files Gravatar was comprised of by the time we got a hold of it! We knew that this would simply NOT work for our new 512×512px avatar sizes. Lastly there were a couple of directories which had several hundred thousand entries (either files or other directories) which were nearly impossible to even get a listing inside of. So we had a list of things NOT to do. We just needed to figure out what TO do 
So we decided that we would render all our avatars dynamically from the highest quality copy of the image we can manage… down. We would only store one version of the image, though we would store it in multiple places (a local file server for speed, and S3 for redundancy.) We would still rely heavily on caching. And we would asynchronize as much of the workload as was possible, so that you don’t have to wait for things to happen after you finish cropping (to do this we employed various techniques and hacks best left for another day and another story.)
– ok this batch of details has been concluded –
So the problems were many, one year ago, and the challenges were fascinating. I recall being overwhelmed by support requests for quite some time. I would get 40 emails on a good day, more on a bad. And believe it or not your emails very much shaped the future of Gravatar. I would group them into specific problems, and always fix at least the largest problem (volume wise) each week. Over time the service has grown quite stable, support requests have gone down to just a handful every day, and things are generally peppier than ever.
We had some some bumps tuning our caches… for a while there we accidentally told your web browsers never EVER to re-validate an image. But we got that handled in short order… and things are zipping along quite nicely.
Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers. 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server. That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day. That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests each and every day! 96% of all of those requests are served directly from cache. These days we get around 5,000 uploaded images every day. Even with this staggering increase in the number of requests we’ve been able to make Gravatar faster, and more reliable than it’s ever been.
So here we are, one year later, looking out over the vast frontier of the internet and contemplating the future of Gravatar. There are a great many things that it could become. We know that we don’t want to loose focus on the core of the project: Serving your avatars (that’s what it’s all about!)
We know that an avatar is “a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet,” But it’s also “an embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.” And that is exactly where we are headed: Making Gravatar a place where you can do more than just store an image, making it a place that can be your presence online. So we’ll be rolling out more features in the near future to allow you to store more data inside Gravatar — and more importantly to allow you to use that information in other places on the internet through open standards.
We hope that you’ve had as awesome a time using your Gravatars as we’ve had making it all work. And we look forward to the future — to when your identity doesn’t have to be cemented to a specific site, but is fluid and flexible, and persistent. We hope to see you there!
Cheers!
The Gravatar Team.
Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/10
106 Views Published 3 months ago in WordpressNew Plugins
Adds a Lib Dig box to WordPress posts and pages
This plugin for WordPress allows you to show Scrnshots.com captures on your sites
This plugin for Wordpress allows you to download backups of your Uploads, Themes and Plugin directories. It also allows you to download the entire wp-content directory. Not suitable for WPMU without alteration, or for large sites.
This plugin enables a simple method of displaying an Entrecard Widget on your Blog and will also display a “U Drop I follow” Image below it for members of the U Drop I Follow Moment
Updated Plugins
The avh-amazon WordPress plugin gives you the ability to add a widget which will display a random item from your Amazon wish list, baby registry and/or wedding registry.
Display related posts based on their category. (Page in German)
Displays statistics about your posts and post frequency on the WordPress Dashboard
Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.
Alt Link Text adds “Alternative Link Text” and “Alternative Title Attribute” fields to the Write Page and Manage Page screens.
Pods is a Wordpress plugin that adds CMS abilities to blog posts.
Drain Hole is a centralized download manager with full monitoring, statistics, versioning, SVN support, and proper SEO download URLs
Tags: google, manage, plugin, release, seo, Wordpress, wp, writeWeblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/09
128 Views Published 3 months ago in Wordpress
Blue Grace is a simple three column WordPress theme with a rotating header image
Two column WordPress theme which really lets your blog stand out from the crowd. Make your blog unique by changing the main blog color (pink, yellow, green), background pattern (available over 20 background variations), banner etc through an options page. In addition you have the ability to choose the color of sidebar blocks (violet, yellow, green).
Two column, white and grey, gravatar theme with ad ready stops with psd files included
Hello Red is a 2 column red, white, and black, widget ready WordPress theme.
Three column, widget ready, fast loading, search engine optimized theme
On the subject of themes, Matt has a tutorial Separating Pings from Comments in WordPress 2.7.
Tags: comments, options, release, Wordpress, wp
vBulletin 3.8.0 Beta 1 Released
75 Views Published 3 months ago in News and Announcements, vBulletin.org
Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/08
155 Views Published 3 months ago in WordpressZdMultilang is a Multilingual plugin for Wordpress allowing you to blog in more than one language. You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel.
Gravatar recent comments is a plugin allowing you to display recent comments using Gravatar instead of just the name of the user.
This plugin displays functional ovulation and due date predictor. It can be used from women to check their future fertile time and due date.
Remove ‘Howdy’ and restructure the ‘Howdy’ line.
WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
Display the list of revisions for a post, without having to go through the admin interface
This plugin was written do allow usage of different themes for logged in users. It is intended for theme developers who want to test their themes on live sites without breaking things for visitors.
Wp2BB integrates your WordPress blog and your phpBB forum. It automatically creates new topics in the forum for every new post in your blog.
This plug-in adds up to six buttons at the end (or the top) of every comments to automatically insert Comments Navigation, Reply and Quote functions
Zina is a graphical interface to your MP3 collection, a personal jukebox, an MP3 streamer.
Tags: comments, phpBB, plugin, release, test, Wordpress, wpWP Super Cache version 0.8.3 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.
Double Caching
This releases fixes a long standing compression bug. In older versions of the plugin, the cached page was compressed twice. Once to display to the current visitor, and once again for the cached files stored on the server. This has now been fixed and there’s a noticeable speed increase for anonymous visitors. Unfortunately as a side effect, it’s not possible to display the “super cache gz” html comment now. To verify that html pages are being served from the supercache directory you’ll have to add an error_log() somewhere and check that visits aren’t logged.
The plugin now uses fopen() instead of gzopen() which according to a comment on the gzopen() manual page is unreliable under high load.
IE7 Fixes
Apparently IE7 has problems when gzipped files are served as “x-gzip” files, under certain circumstances. This is an obscure bug but this has been fixed. If you’re upgrading, either remove wp-content/cache/.htaccess and visit the admin page and that file will be regenerated, or edit that file and change “x-gzip” to “gzip”.
A number of smaller bugs were also fixed. Check the changelog for further info.
Related Posts
Tags: plugin, release, server, test, Wordpress, wpOne of the things I’ve noticed since using WordPress is that after you install a number of plugins, it becomes clear that there is no standard for where to place the plugin configuration link. Sometimes, the configuration link for a plugin shows up in the dashboard while other times, the link appears within the Manage panel. To top things off, many of the plugins provide links to their specific settings in the Settings panel. How much time do you think you have wasted so far by always searching for a particular plugins settings page?
Over the weekend, I happened to come across a post written by Andrew Rickmann which showcased an idea to create a configure link next next to the usual Activate/Deactivate Edit links found within the Plugin Management panel.
Andrew’s point of view is that, instead of adding top level menu items to the WordPress administration panels, it would be far easier to click on a configure link that would open up a sliding panel which would present anywhere from 1-5 configurable settings. Not only does this idea make configuring plugins faster, but it makes browsing the WordPress administration panel much easier as the top level navigation system is not filled with links. On top of that, the configure link makes complete sense to be located next to the Deactivate/Edit links. In doing so, configuration options are in a predictable location.
In my opinion, here are a couple of reasons why we are not seeing something like this already being used. Number one, WordPress is open source meaning anytime you try to implement anything close to a standard, it probably won’t work. People will come up with their own solutions to the problem which is one of the beauties of Open Source but can also be a contributing problem. Secondly, this was brought up over two years ago. You can see the initial forum thread here and the post on the WP-Hackers Mailing List from Owen here. Considering we have gone two years without any move towards a solution such as the one Andrew suggested, perhaps we will always be at the mercy as to where plugin authors place their configuration links.
Plugin authors can bring up the fact that they provide directions within their readme files that indicate where to find the configuration page. While they may help in the short term, that doesn’t solve the root of the overall problem. Andrew’s idea is something that can be implemented by plugin authors right now. In terms of something like this being added to the core, according to Andrew, the process is so simple, it probably doesn’t need to be added.
Where do you stand on this issue? Would you like to see more plugin authors implement Andrew’s idea into their own plugin or is there a better alternative?
Tags: manage, options, plugin, Wordpress, wp(I had intended to get this posted early last week, but pushing all of the meetings, etc. from the week prior to WordCamp Utah to last week torpedoed that pretty effectively.)
WordCamp Utah was a great event - well organized by Joseph Scott (thanks Joseph!), well attended and with some very good speakers.
I gave a presentation about WordPress plugins. This was a challenging talk because of the vastness of the topic combined with the variety of the interest and technical background of the audience. Here are the slides.
Some folks seemed upset that I didn’t give a technical demo of how to build a plugin. However, I chose to keep the talk at a high level based on the make-up of the audience.
Instead of getting into the code, I talked about techniques and approaches, and different kinds of plugins. My intent was to give people an idea of what they can do with plugins; and a little start on how to approach writing one. We may change this at WordCamp Denver and have some technical presentations.
I also announced a couple of goodies at the end of the talk. We pulled an all-nighter on Friday getting everything ready for release. My presentation might have suffered a bit as a result. 
We’ve released some development tools for other WordPress developers to use. These are things we’ve had to build over the years, and thought others could make good use of.
- WordPress Install (SVN Checkout) Script - a shell script will walk you through a checkout of multiple versions of WordPress from SVN and set up the requisite config file and database structure. This makes it easy to create a series of installs for testing purposes.
- WordPress Compatibility Plugin - sets some constants and some other little things that provide backward compatibility for older versions of WordPress.
- Quality Assurance (QA) Checklists - checklists to help guide plugin and theme testing. Includes considerations such as WordPress version, theme compatibility, browser type, WordPress settings, etc.
The biggest announcement - and the one I’m most excited about - was the Carrington theme, but I’ll have a follow-up post about that as there is just too much to cover here.
Thanks again to everyone who made WordCamp Utah a success.
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Tags: comments, database, plugin, release, test, testing, Wordpress, wpvBulletin Blog 2.0.0 Beta 3 Released
61 Views Published 3 months ago in Announcements, vBulletin FansvBulletin Blog 2.0.0 Beta 3 Released
59 Views Published 3 months ago in Announcements, vBulletin FansSearch
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