vBulletin Tagging

We’ve been working our asses off and finally have a beta to share.  Download, test, and enjoy the pretty visuals.  The word most people use when first seeing it is “sexy”.   This is a great design, and I’m very pleased with how it has turned out.  When the visuals are complete and the new icons are in, 2.7 will be a very good looking release.

Try this exercise.  Load up the Write Post page in 2.6 and in 2.7.   Compare the location of the title field between the two.  Notice the vertical distance.  That’s one of my favorite 2.7 features.

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Implementation of the new visual design of WordPress 2.7 is almost done.  One of our primary objectives with the new design is to offer interface flexibility and customization.  You can drag-and-drop and show or hide many UI elements.  Here’s the Write Post page stripped down the way I like it.  Title, Content, Categories, and Publish.  That’s all I use and now that’s all I have to see.  Even the navigation is tucked away on the left so I can concentrate on writing.

I have a role to write articles, someone else has a role to look over it and edit and deem as feasible for reading, but what does the role I have mean?

Meta: Words or phrases marked in italic will be explained in future posts.

You have a role of doing something wherever you are at or at whichever position you are, those roles are pre-defined and involve certain things that you can do and cannot do, some times we do break rules, however with software we usually cannot.

Likewise with WordPress there are some roles that are pre-defined and have certain capabilities that you…

A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you…

The vBSEO team is proud to announce its latest release!

Don’t miss out on the 72 hr vBSEO End of Summer Sale!

<div id="cd-container">End Of Summer Sale ends in:<script src="http://www.vbseo.com/countdown.php?timezone=US/Eastern&amp;countto=2009-09-07 20:00:00&amp;do=t&amp;data=0"></script></div>
vBSEO End of Summer Sale Details

vBSEO 3.3.1 is now available in your Downloads area. 3.3.1 is primarily a maintenance release, but does include some new features as outlined below. This update is available for all non-expired licenses. [Check License Status]

Bug Fixes:
FIX: Invalid argument in functions_vbseo.php on some server instances
FIX: Virtual HTML breaks W3 validation
FIX: vBSEO Acronym expansion for Guests
FIX: Acronyms – Ajax edit
FIX: Missing 301 redirect for member profiles applied
FIX: Social Groups – Discussion title caused invalid…

How to Write with a Knife: I have been a big fan of CopyBlogger for some time and I try to read their articles as often as I can, though not as often as I would like to. The above article, followed by another one in the series called “Do Long Blog Posts Scare Away Readers?“, have some really good advice for bloggers. I have implicitly tried to follow some of them because my past training and weakness for the English language, but having them spelled out succinctly is really helpful (I already caught myself making one of the mistakes…

Stats – Stats – Stats.  They can drive everything for your WordPress site.  They can help you understand how visitors move around your site; how they got there in the first place; what are the most popular posts they are visiting; what browser and OS they are using. The list can go on and on.

I have spent a lot of time over the last few months looking for just the right plug-in to track stats on my WindowsObserver.com website and I think I may have hit the mother lode with my most recent discovery.

CyStats is written by Michael Weingaertner and…

Comments are the incentives you get for writing a post and if you write good ones you are bound to get 100s and 1000s of comments on your posts.

But wait not every comment on your blog is directly related to the post itself, there are times when commentators respond to other commentators, in short we call that a discussion.

Flashback to WordPress 2.7, there was a new introduction in the form of threaded comments, this was done so that people on your blog can comment and respond to each other and communicate and discuss.

Coming back to future, it has been so…

I often get asked something along the line of, “If you weren’t leading Automattic, what would you work on?” There’s not a single answer to this question; the answer changes day to day. But I think if you asked me today, I’d say I would like to start a bank.

There are very few people who really love their bank. We’ve all dealt with overage fees that stack up, brain-dead fine print, and a general malaise. There’s also a unique opportunity in that mainstream contempt for financial institutions has never been higher, while at the same time there is an incredible…

In a few weeks, I will be a presenter at WordCamp Birmingham 2009 (that’s Birmingham, Alabama, not England, by the way). Last year, I did a presentation on “The Future of WordPress“, shortly before the release of version 2.7. I briefly considered doing the same thing this year, updated with speculation about the upcoming versions 2.9 and 3.0, but that seemed like a cop-out. I wanted to do something a little deeper.

One of the things that always frustrates me about starting to work with a new programming language, or with a new framework for a language I already know, is…

Back in early July, I asked the question is WordPress a thankless community? Not surprisingly, this post struck a chord with both developers and end users. The point of the article was to raise awareness that there are a number of people who give to the WordPress community and it seemed as though a large portion of the community was not stopping to at least say thank you for the contributions. In the article, I present a few different methods for showing appreciation or for giving back but too many people in the comments focused on the monetary aspect of…

vBulletin.com Blog Entry: Widget Programming
Author: Edwin Brown
Published: 14th August 2009 05:01 AM

<div>Widget Programming

Introduction
This is intended for reasonably experienced PHP programmers with some experience in vBulletin programming. You should have at least a basic understand of the vB templating system and phrasing. If you don’t, I strongly recommend you do some homework before trying to program a widget. I will use as an example the static html widget.

It’s very early to be writing this, I know. I can’t say exactly when alpha testing will start on the CMS system, which will be part of the suite. Soon, but…

vBulletin.com Blog Entry: Widget Programming
Author: Edwin Brown
Published: 14th August 2009 05:01 AM

<div>Widget Programming

Introduction
This is intended for reasonably experienced PHP programmers with some experience in vBulletin programming. You should have at least a basic understand of the vB templating system and phrasing. If you don’t, I strongly recommend you do some homework before trying to program a widget. I will use as an example the static html widget.

It’s very early to be writing this, I know. I can’t say exactly when alpha testing will start on the CMS system, which will be part of the suite. Soon, but…

Over the years, I’ve variously either obsessed over or ignored my site stats. I’ve always found website analytics interesting, but since I’m not selling anything here, I don’t have a lot of motivation to really dig in and try to make sweeping changes for the sake of increasing clicks or search engine rankings. Oh, I have dabbled with things here and there — related posts links, the SEO Super Comments plugin, etc. — but my major motivation is typically to 1) make it easier for my readers to find useful content, and 2) make it harder for spammers to slip through…

There have been a number of new platforms popping up recently that claim to increase your user engagement, get you more comments, increase your traffic, and more, through means that I consider short-sighted and harmful. Since people seem not to mind, I thought I’d write a guide for how to increase the number of comments you get by 400-1,000% and ruin whatever shred of community you had on your site.

Don’t Moderate. Allow anybody to post anything regardless of whether it contributes to the conversation or not. Stupidity, libel, hate, curse words are all okay because in the comments you have plausible deniability.…