WordPress.org

Blush is a soft, warm, feminine theme in tones of rose and cream.

Boozurk is a clear theme with a lot of features.

The Frances Wright is a clean and elegant theme.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of responsive themes. Knowing that your WordPress blog will look just as good on a tiny mobile screen as it does on a huge desktop screen is one of the most important factors of design to me, especially in today’s age where mobile device usage is growing so rapidly.

Sadly, there aren’t many responsive themes out there, but Responsive Plugin aims to change that. Once released, Responsive Plugin will make any theme scale perfectly on any screen size. There is no definitive release date, but it is definitely coming out sooner rather than later, and you can find a signup form at the bottom of the site if you want to follow the action.

WordPress community site VoodooPress has recently turned one year old. To celebrate, they are giving away VoodooPress branded T-Shirts. They come at the cost of providing the site some social love by clicking on any of the social media icons on the site. Small price to pay for a chance at a T-Shirt. Congrats to the VoodooPress team and I hope the second year is better than the first!

Just imagine how powerful one would be if they wielded a GPL voodoo doll.

Related posts:

1. Andrew Nacin – One Year Later
2. It’s That Time Of Year Again
3. WPTavern Celebrates Thank A Plugin Author Day!

The WordPress book, Digging Into WordPress has been updated to cover WordPress 3.2 and 3.3. This marks the 9th edition of the book as noted by Jeff Starr. Those of you who are owners of any previous version of the book will receive this update for free.

Related posts:

1. Affiliate Program For Digging Into WordPress Closes
2. Guest Review Of The Book: WordPress & Ajax
3. New WordPress Book – WordPress 3 Site Blueprints

Ipstenu once again has a great article that covers some situations in which MultiSite is not the best tool for the job. If you’re thinking that you need to use MultiSite to accomplish a certain task, make sure that task is not on her list.

No related posts.

Congratulations goes out to Luke McDonald as one of the themes produced by Press75.com has been selected to be part of the WordPress.com commercial theme store. The theme is priced at $50.00 and is called Debut. It’s mobile ready right out of the box along with having post format support. Speaking of post formats, Debut is especially interesting because when users select the Audio post format, it expands into a multi-track playlist. You can see the theme in action via the WordPress.com theme showcase.

Related posts:

1. So Many Commercial Themes – So Many Theme Sorters
2. Alex King Releases Post Formats Admin UI Code
3. Review Of The RichBiz Commercial Theme

New plugins

Quick Notice Bar will help you to display a sticky message in your site’s header.

RePress allows you to circumvent internet censorship by proxying traffic to websites that have been blocked by repressive regimes.

Widget Logic Visual lets you control on which pages widgets appear using conditional tags.

WP Really Simple Health allows you to view memory utilization, server uptime, and CPU load on the new admin toolbar.

Updated plugins

Tallyopia Analytics provides analytics that you can embed into your site using shortcodes or view in your admin dashboard.

Ultimate TinyMCE beefs up your visual editor with a plethora of advanced options.

We’re very happy to announce that version 1.5 of WordPress for Windows Phone is now available. This update focuses on speed and reliability – here’s what’s changed:

• Stats: We’ve moved the stats section to its own page in the app which greatly improved the loading time for the blog panorama. While we were at it we fixed some bugs and improved the styling of the charts. The result is a much smoother experience for keeping up with your site’s stats. Just tap the new stats button in the actions pane to view your stats.
• Post scheduling: The ability to schedule posts was a missing piece in the app. Now you can easily set a future publish date for your posts right from the app.
• Comments: The comments list has been updated and now features a simple way to select multiple comments for bulk moderation.
• Infinite scrolling: Your posts, pages, and comments now keep loading as you scroll down the list. No need to tap an extra button, it’s quick and easy.
• Media uploading: The uploading reliability has been greatly improved. Now the app uploads your media in bite-size chunks, and automatically retries if you lose your connection. This has been tested a great deal and works well in most everyday situations.

In addition to the improvements and bug fixes, version 1.5 of WordPress for Windows Phone has also seen some minor UI enhancements and updates, as well as a number of crash fixes. All in all, we’re very happy with this release, which should make it even easier for you to blog from that fancy Windows Phone of yours.

We’re not resting just yet though. What would you like to see added to or improved on in the app? Comment on this post or shout out on Twitter and let us know your thoughts.

Huge thanks to everyone involved in this release: Dan Roundhill, Danilo Ercoli, Robert Collins, Max Cutler.

LIFE magazine has relaunched, powered by WordPress.com VIP. I’m a huge fan of the magazine’s history and the work of photographers like John Dominis.

Dusk To Dawn is a dark theme that melds old-style organic ornaments with modern design and typography.

Grisaille is a classic and simple two-column design adjusted for mobile browsing.

Stark has 2 columns with a left sidebar, is of fluid width, has both an upper menu and a vertical menu, and is high contrast with vivid red, black and white.

DBS Interactive which is an interactive agency has released their version of a WordPress 3.0+ theme reference guide. The guide is a reworked version of the information you would find in the Codex around template tags. So if the Codex presentation of this data is not your cup of tea, perhaps this reference guide will be easier to follow.

Related posts:

1. Simple Guide To Adding Theme Options
2. Good Guide On Avoiding Theme/Plugin Lock-In
3. Idiot’s Guide To WordPress

Themefuse has a generally good checklist on things to do when a WordPress powered website crashes. While the article doesn’t contain any drastically new information, it’s still a good list of things to do to get your site back up and running as soon as possible if a crash were to occur.

Related posts:

1. 5 Tips To Create A Great Site About WordPress
2. Four Common Sense Ways To Improve Security On Your WordPress Powered Site
3. 14 Things To Consider When Choosing A Webhost For Your WordPress Powered Site

Are you a WordPress blogger? Do you enjoy having thousands of safe themes to choose from in the official directory? Did you know that a small group of volunteers goes through every single line of code in every submitted theme to make sure that they work properly on a basic installation and are free from malicious code? Chances are, you didn’t know that last bit, but now you do.

The Theme Review Team could use your help, especially if you know your way around a theme or two. At this time, there are typically many more theme submissions than active reviewers, so if you’re looking for a great way to help out the entire WordPress community, join the Theme Review Team today! If you’re a theme developer, but don’t have the free time to volunteer, you can at least help the team out by ensuring that your theme meets the guidelines before submitting it.

Joost de Valk was one of the first to start the trend and now, he’s on pace to reverse it. Joost announced that he has decided to remove the dashboard widget which shows the most recent posts on his site from his SEO plugin.

Joost provided some interesting statistics that show where most of his visitors are coming from. As it turns out, the dashboard news are did provide additional traffic but very little in the way of conversions which is one of the reasons for the removal. Looking at the reactions of those that use the plugin, some applaud Joost for this action while others wanted the ability to choose whether to hide or display the news widget. While not mentioned, I think it’s a little humorous as well that within the Plugin UI Guide published by WPCandy recently, they featured the Dashboard News Widget of Joost De Valks SEO Plugin as what not to do.

While I want to see the results of the poll question I asked, I’ll pose a few more questions for you to answer. When is it ok to have a dashboard widget such as the one that used to be within the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast? Is the dashboard considered sacred real estate reserved for only the most important information?

Personally, I like the trend of removing dashboard widgets generated by plugins. In this case, I think less is more.

Related posts:

1. Changing Feeds In The WordPress Dashboard
2. Is It Time To Refocus The Dashboard For News?
3. Chances Of WPTavern Getting Into Dashboard?

The Theme Review Team tried something new this past weekend. Members of the review team that could make it, spent all day in IRC to review themes stuck in the Priority 2 queue which lists themes that have been stuck in the review process for more than two weeks. While the goal was to clear the queue, the last time I checked the number of themes was around 81. Some of the themes have been in the review process for over 6 weeks. Browsing through the queue, I even noticed two themes submitted by Automattic. One was called Duotone which has been in the queue for 5 weeks with Bouquet coming in at 6 weeks. Just goes to show that Automattic doesn’t receive preferential treatment when it comes to the review process.

If you would like to see themes get through the review process faster, please consider joining the theme review team. As a theme author, you can also help make the review process go faster by ensuring that your theme meets the following guidelines.

Related posts:

1. Name Your Dream Theme Team
2. WPWeekly Episode 106 – The Theme Review Team
3. DevPress Plans To Launch Plugin/Theme Review Service

New plugins

No Soup allows you to block users from a specific IP or range(s) of IPs and redirect them to another site.

WhatElse is a widget that lets you manually add related content to every post or page.

Updated plugins

Joemobi allows you to create native Android and BlackBerry applications from your WordPress site.

Social Login for WordPress lets your users log in and comment via their accounts with popular ID providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Live, and over 15 more.

In what I believe to be an excellent use of the WordPress Foundation, Jane Wells has shared news that the foundation plans on footing the bill for Meetup.com Organizer dues that need to be paid by the founder of the meetup group. Considering the amount of these dues range from $12-19/month it’s not exactly cheap.

We’re setting up an official WordPress account on Meetup.com right now, and over the next couple of weeks will be working with existing meetup group organizers, people who want to start a new meetup group, and the helpful folks at Meetup.com to put this program in place. WordPress meetup groups that choose to have their group become part of the WordPress account will no longer pay organizer dues for that group, as the WordPress Foundation will be footing the bill.

This is exciting for several reasons. First, it means local organizers who are giving something back to the project by way of their time won’t also have shell out $12-19/month for the privilege. That alone is a big step. Second, it will open the door to more events and leaders within a community, since leadership and event planning won’t need to be tied to “owning” the meetup group. Third, more active meetup groups means more WordCamps, yay!

This is great news considering how many people use Meetup.com to control all aspects of their local WordPress meetups. Reading through the post, it looks like there are no strings attached but I wonder if by joining the official WordPress Meetup Group if at some point in the future, there will be some sort of Meetup guidelines published that those users will need to follow. If there are any guidelines that will need to be followed, I would hope that they are no where near as stringent as the WordCamp guidelines.

If you’re already a Meetup.com WordPress group organizer or looking to get started, be sure to take the survey so it gives the foundation a good starting point.

Related posts:

1. New Forum For WordPress Meetup Organizers
2. My Experience In Running A WordPress Meetup

A brand new plugin released by GreenHost aims to make censoring the web next to impossible. It’s called RePress and turns any WordPress powered website it’s installed on into a proxy server. The plugin was created in response to piratebay.org being blocked within the Netherlands due to a court ruling.

Header Image As Seen On Their WordPress.org Plugin Page

RePress uses phpproxyimproved as its HTML parser which is another piece of open source code that allows the proxy magic to happen. After installing the plugin, you’ll need to give it a unique URL that will be used when going through the proxy to the blocked website. I received the following message after trying to view one of the default websites that are added to the proxy list:

In order to protect your blog from cross-site scripting attacks, please log out of your WordPress administration backend before accessing any of the proxied site urls.
Please log out of WordPress by clicking on this logout link.

Afterwards you will be directly redirected to the proxied website.
For security reasons. This will also delete all cookies for this domain (your remembered settings will be lost).

So if there is a particular website that you visit often using your site as a proxy, you’ll need to bookmark the URL and visit it only when you’re logged out of WordPress.

If you decide to give RePress a try, please give GreenHost some feedback on it via the following forum thread.

Related posts:

1. Addicott Web Suggests 6 More Plugins

Putte is a clean and beautiful theme with great features.

Red Modern is an elegant theme with red modern menus and elements.

One of the things I find myself doing a lot when developing WordPress is debugging things and so I spend a lot of time thinking of ways I can make this easier for me and easier for everyone else. Overtime this had led to a number of significant improvements to the debug ability of WordPress core including things like WP_DEBUG and the Deprecated Notices as well as the development of great tools like the Debug Bar plugin.

Recently I’ve found that the more context you can get to an issue the easier it is to understand and debug and I also noticed that while we recorded a simple backtrace for queries in core when SAVEQUERIES was defined we didn’t do a good job of presenting the data. Some function calls need more context that just the function name to be most useful – such as when running an action/filter it is useful to know the name and when requiring or including a file is useful to know the file name and some path context. This lead to the idea of refactoring the backtrace capture functionality out of WPDB and into a function that was improved to give proper calling syntax for functions in classes when called statically and was more obviously re-usable by plugins like the Debug Bar.

So today I have introduced wp_debug_backtrace_summary( $ignore_class = null, $skip_frames = 0, $pretty = true ) for #19589. If you provide no arguments you will get back string containing the full trace of the code run up to the place where you call wp_debug_backtrace_summary() – you won’t see the call to it in the trace as it always hides itself.

The best way to see the difference and improvements is to look at how this improves the information in the development version of the Debug Bar (new release coming soon) so after the break I have included some before and after screenshots.

Debug Bar query list before the change showing the previous limited infomation

Development version of the Debug Bar showing the enhanced details

An example of how the Debug Bar currently displays warnings, notices and deprecated function calls.

The development version of the Debug Bar showing how it can use this new function to display much more useful information

One of the things I suspect I will be doing a lot with this new function is dropping calls to error_log( wp_debug_backtrace_summary() ); into code that I am trying to debug and work out how often and from where it is being called.  In the past I’ve done this by using print_r( debug_backtrace() ); which prints out a lot of information (some of which is pretty useful) and more recently I’ve been using print_r( debug_backtrace( false ) ); so as to only fetch and print the stack traces.

Using this new function does mean I lose by using  the access to line numbers and file names I had from the raw PHP functions but I find that with the file names in the require/include calls and the function name being called I can get to the code just as fast as before.

I hope you all put this new function to good use!

We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action.

meet·up \mēt-əp\ noun
A meeting, especially a regular meeting of people who share a particular interest and have connected with each other through a social-networking Web site: a meetup for new moms in the neighborhood; a meetup to plan the trip; a meetup for WordPress users.¹

So what is a WordPress Meetup? Basically, it’s people in a community getting together — meeting up — who share an interest in WordPress, whether they be bloggers, business users, developers, consultants, or any other category of person able to say, “I use WordPress in some way and I like it, and I want to meet other people who can say the same.” Meetups come in different shapes and sizes, but they all carry the benefit of connecting you with potential collaborators and friends, and helping you learn more about what you can do with WordPress. Here are some of the common types of WordPress meetups:

• Hang out and work on your WordPress sites together
• Social/happy hour type gatherings
• Mini-lectures/presentations
• Developer hacking meetups
• Show & tell of how group members are using WordPress
• Formal instruction on how to use WordPress
• Lecture series (possibly with visiting speakers)
• Genius bar/help desk

There’s no prescribed format, as each local group can decide for itself what they want to do. Some groups mix it up from month to month, while others have multiple events each month to satisfy the needs of their community.

The tough part? Running a popular group takes time and money. Just as we worked last year to remove the financial burden for WordCamp organizers and provide logistical support so they could focus more on their event content and experience, we want to start extending that kind of support to meetup groups as well. We don’t want it to cost anything for someone to run a WordPress meetup, or to attend one — building local communities should be as free as WordPress itself!

Since there are so many more meetups than there are WordCamps, we’re going to start with the cost that is the same for every group: meetup.com organizer dues. We’re setting up an official WordPress account on Meetup.com right now, and over the next couple of weeks will be working with existing meetup group organizers, people who want to start a new meetup group, and the helpful folks at Meetup.com to put this program in place. WordPress meetup groups that choose to have their group become part of the WordPress account will no longer pay organizer dues for that group, as the WordPress Foundation will be footing the bill.

This is exciting for several reasons. First, it means local organizers who are giving something back to the project by way of their time won’t also have shell out $12-19/month for the privilege. That alone is a big step. Second, it will open the door to more events and leaders within a community, since leadership and event planning won’t need to be tied to “owning” the meetup group. Third, more active meetup groups means more WordCamps, yay!

In addition to the financial aspects, we’ll be working on ways to improve social recognition of meetup activity by incorporating feeds from the official meetup groups into the WordPress.org site, and including meetup group participation in the activity stream on your WordPress.org profile.² I’m also hoping we can do something around providing video equipment to meetup groups (like we already do for WordCamps) to record presentations and tutorials that can be posted to WordPress.tv, helping meetup groups offer WordPress classes in their community, and getting involved with mentoring WordPress clubs at local schools and universities. Oh, and we’ll send out some WordPress buttons and stickers to the groups that join in, because everyone loves buttons and stickers.

We’re also putting together some cool resources for people who want to start a new meetup group. There will be a field guide to getting started and some supplies to help you get your group going, and a forum for organizers to talk to and learn from each other.

Over time, we’ll be talking to organizers and looking at what other expenses we can absorb and what other support we can provide to local groups. For now, we’re starting with the organizer dues. If you currently run a WordPress meetup group (whether you are using Meetup.com or not) or would like to start a WordPress meetup group in your area, please fill out our WordPress Meetup Groups survey. Filling in the survey doesn’t obligate you to join the official group, it just gives us a starting point to a) find out what groups are around/interested, and b) get some information on existing groups and their expenses and needs. Meetup.com will contact the group organizers who’ve said they’d like to join the new program, and will walk them through the logistics of the change and answer questions before helping them to opt-in officially.

So, if you currently run a WordPress meetup group, or you would like to start one, please  fill out our WordPress Meetup Groups survey. I can’t wait to see more meetups!

1 – Adapted from “meetup” definition at dictionary.com.
2 – Didn’t know about profiles? Check out http://profiles.wordpress.org/users/yourwordpressdotorgusernamehere (put in the username you use in the WordPress.org forums) to see yours!

PressTrends has released a rather fascinating plugin for WordPress blogs. The plugin will allow you to measure various metrics for your posts, comments, and plugin usage, and compare these to averages across the entire PressTrends community.

The feature list may be just a bit basic now, but there are more features on the way, the design is very clean-cut, and if you’re interested to see how you’re doing versus “the status quo,” this is definitely the way to do it.

If you’re a theme designer, you might also be interested in their core product, which provides metrics for theme usage.

ManageWP is a new service that aims to make managing multiple websites as easy as possible. They’ve recently opened their doors to the public and Vladimir Prelovac was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule to answer a few questions I had. Enjoy!

Is ManageWP a webhosting company or simply a means of managing websites that are hosted elsewhere?

We are not a webhosting company, as ManageWP provides an efficient way to manage any number of websites that are hosted on your own servers, but we do offer something new and unique to the WordPress community: one dashboard for all their websites no matter where they are hosted. This ensures that our users maintain total control over their websites while also ensuring that they can continue to expand, without restriction, far into the future.

ManageWP Dashboard After I Added The WPTavern Website

What was the idea or inspiration behind creating ManageWP?

As with all plugins I have developed, ManageWP was created out of the pure need to solve a problem. The problem here was having to do repetitive tasks — like updating and maintaining your sites (something computers and Internet services are supposed to be good at).

As you surely know, managing numerous WordPress sites can be somewhat time consuming. Add several WordPress sites into the mix, and you quickly become a slave to your CMS. I wanted to simplify the process, so that was when ManageWP became reality.

What are some of the things going on behind the scenes to make ManageWP function like a well oiled machine?

It requires a tremendous amount of effort by all of our team members. That’s the first thing that springs to mind. It’s not easy to create and maintain a service this complex, one which also remains in sync with the WordPress development cycle, all while having it work with thousands of different WordPress setups and with thousands of different server/hosting configurations.

It’s not an easy job. But we also have no intention of stopping anytime soon!

Options To Schedule A Backup For A Particular Site

What are some of the benefits of using ManageWP versus using WordPress Multisite?

The most notable benefit is ManageWP’s ease of us. While being a good idea on paper, WordPress Multisite demands a certain level of technical knowledge to install, manage, and maintain. It also takes time, time which many people find valuable. And while Multisite might be good enough for some people, we always want to offer our users so much more value and time-saving functionality.

And we differentiate ourselves by providing many awesome features:

• you can set up and monitor fully automated backups for all of your websites from one location, along with being able to specify exactly where you want those backups stored;
• you can use ManageWP to monitor your website’s up-time;
• you can use ManageWP to monitor crucial SEO performance metrics;
• you can take advantage of incredible third-party services like Google Analytics and DropBox;
• you can change passwords for your admin user on all of your WordPress sites from within ManageWP;
• and the list goes on and on.

As for the similarities between ManageWP and WordPress Multisite — it ends with the ability to update plugins. ManageWP goes far beyond that. However, if you’re already setup with WordPress Multisite, that’s no problem. ManageWP fully integrates with that too!

What types of security practices have been put into place to protect customers?

We know that the success of our business depends a lot on security; this has been our focus since day one. To ensure that our user’s data is secure, we dropped the built-in XML RPC protocol — it’s inherently insecure to work with as it exposes sensitive data. We replaced it with OpenSSL encryption. Because of this, the transmission of your data remains completely secure.

We also never ask users to enter their admin passwords for any websites they are managing with us. We do not have access to your site’s credentials and other crucial information. Our technology is innovative in that it allows ManageWP to talk directly to your WordPress sites through our ManageWP Worker plugin. So by utilizing WordPress’ built-in plugin architecture, we are able to do amazing things to help you manage all of your sites.

As for protecting your ManageWP account, we utilize multiple layers of protection: restricting the login by IP address and two-factor authentication (wherein a security code is sent to user’s email or phone via SMS). This is far beyond industry standards, and it’s only a handful of the things we do to ensure that our users’ sites are safe.

We take great pride in this.

All Sorts Of Cool Things You Can Do From One Location

Are there any differences between the self-hosted product of ManageWP and the ManageWP website?

The Enterprise (self-hosted) version of ManageWP is essentially the same as our hosted version. But we offer this to companies and organizations that want all of the benefits of ManageWP in the privacy of their own hosting environment. For example, this can be (and usually is) important for data compliance within larger organizations.

Our Enterprise users also enjoy our full attention and dedicated support. We often work with our Enterprise customers to provide them with the special features that they need. We always make the extra effort to ensure that our customers’ needs are served.

How has your experience in developing plugins and working with sites such as Mashable contribute to what you’ve accomplished with ManageWP?

I started making WordPress plugins almost five years ago, so getting to know WordPress inside-out helped me tremendously in understanding the needs of the average WordPress user — if such user exists at all, as there are so many uses for WordPress today. After that, it was then only a matter of coordinating with our team to develop a high-quality solution that works on almost any number of different WordPress setups.

And now that we have launched ManageWP, I can direct my focus my attention on improving it further and adding new and amazing functionality. That makes me very happy. I hope it will continue to make our incredible customers happy as well.

Related posts:

1. Talking WordPress With Vladimir Prelovac
2. WordPress And How It Changed Content Management

Apparently, this site has been around for a little while but I’ve just now seen it being shared across WordPress folks on Twitter. It’s the WordPress Honey Badger who has a bad attitude and does things the way it wants to do them which is not always the right way. I’ve been reading some of the recent posts and honey badger is a pretty funny animal. Crude language aside, there is some educational value in the website in that you shouldn’t accomplish tasks the same way Honey Badger does. For example, Honey Badger edits the core files to get things done which is not necessarily the best way to get things accomplished. I personally like Honey Badgers stance on the Capital P filter.

No related posts.

New plugins

Site Background Slider uses fullscreen images (read from a specified folder) to create a slideshow inside your background area.

Updated plugins

Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick e-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent.

FoxyPress is a custom plugin made to integrate FoxyCart e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website.

Slick Social Share Buttons allows you to add Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Digg, Google Buzz, Linkedin, and Stumbledupon social media buttons in a floating or slide out tab.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.