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• WPTavern: VoodooPress Celebrates 1 Year Anniversary By Giving Away T-Shirts

  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!
  
• WPTavern: Digging Into WordPress Book Updated To Cover WP 3.3

  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
  
• WPTavern: Situations In Which MultiSite Should Not Be Used

  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.

  
• WPTavern: Press75 Joins The WordPress.com Commercial Theme Family

  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
  
• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 2/3

  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.

  
• WP Windows Phone 7: Version 1.5 Is Here

  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.

  
  
• Matt: LIFE.com

  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.

• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 2/1

  

  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.

  
• WPTavern: DBS Interactive Releases Theme Reference Guide

  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
  
• WPTavern: Recovering From A Crashed WordPress Site

  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
  
• Weblog Tools Collection: The WordPress Theme Review Team Needs Your Help

  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.

  
• WPTavern: Do You Want To See Plugin Specific Dashboard Widgets Disappear?

  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.

  Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

  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?
  
• WPTavern: Theme Review Team Could Use Some More Reviewers

  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
  
• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/30

  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.

  
• WPTavern: WordPress Foundation To Foot The Bill For Meetup.com Organizer Dues

  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
  
• WPTavern: Uncensoring The Web With RePress

  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:

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• Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 1/28

  

  Putte is a clean and beautiful theme with great features.

  

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

  
• Peter Westwood: Tracing things back to where they came from

  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!

  
  
• Dev Blog: Year of the Meetup

  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!

• Weblog Tools Collection: PressTrends Releases Plugin for WordPress Blogs

  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.

  
• WordPress.tv: Christopher Ross: Make a Living by Giving it Away for Free