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WordPress

• Automattic releases BuddyPress – Official “Sister Project” to WordPress
  Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic, announced the release of BuddyPress last week on the official WordPress site. The BuddyPress site is live, with free downloads and installation instructions for BuddyPress 1.0 – which expands a typical WordPress blog installation into a full social network with most of the features of mySpace, Facebook, Ning, and other popular sites.
  - By Aaron D. Campbell on WordPress Informer

WordPress 2.8

• Handling Plugins Options in WordPress 2.8 with register_setting()
  In the upcoming WordPress 2.8 there’s an interesting function set meant to help authors manage their plugin custom options. In a nutshell: whitelist your options, define how you want them to be validated, and just lean back and rely on the API to handle everything for you.
  - By planetOzh

WordPress Inspiration

• 15 Impressive and Beautiful Uses of WordPress
  WordPress is no longer just used to power blogs. It has become the CMS of choice for many web designers. It’s always interesting to see how it’s flexibility provides web designers with the freedom to design sites with no limitations. Here are 15 beautiful web sites all powered by WordPress.
  - By Web Design Ledger

WordPress Tutorials, Tips & SEO

• WordPress Theme Development Check List – PDF Version
  Today it is time to release an improved official PDF version of the Checklist for the WordPress crowd. This PDF version is clean and easy to print, which makes it an excellent checklist when you are developing your new WordPress Theme.
  - By Stefan Vervoort on WP Toy
• WordPress Tip: Obscure get_option Parameter
  Any WordPress Plugin developer worth their salt knows about the get_option function, which allows options to be retrieved from the database. What I recently discovered is that this function accepts a second parameter, indicating a default value to be returned if the option doesn’t exist in the database.
  - By Will Anderson
• Build Your Own WordPress Themes the Easy Way
  WordPress is by far one of the most favored blogging tools, and WordPress themes are certainly popular. A custom theme is a handy service to sell to a client, while creating your own theme for your blog is a fantastic way to let your personality and skills shine through — much more so than downloading some run-of-the-mill theme already being used by five hundred other blogs.
  - By SitePoint
• 10 Easy Ways to Secure your WordPress Blog
  - By Alex Denning on Cats Who Code
• Force CSS changes to “go live” immediately
  If you update your WordPress theme’s style.css, you may have noticed that you have to “force-reload” your site in your browser to see the changes.
  - By Mark Jaquith
• How to Stop Trackback Spam on WordPress
  One of the problems with most blogging platforms is that people can easily abuse the trackback feature. On WordPress, for instance, you have a box right below the text editor titled “Send Trackbacks.” If users put the URL of your post there and publish or update their posts, your blog will get a trackback notification and probably put a link on your comments section to that blog.
  - By Daniel Scocco on Daily Blog Tips
• Easily get posts with a specific custom field/value on your WordPress blog
  Ever wanted to be able to only get the list of posts which have a specific custom field key as well as a specific value? If yes, just read on. Our friend John Kolbert have this short, but useful recipe for you.
  - By Jean-Baptiste Jung on WP Recipes
• Screencast 3: Designing for WordPress: Part 1: HTML to WordPress
  Designing for WordPress is something that a lot of people want to learn how to do. But don’t know where to start. Why? There aren’t too many great tuts out there for people wanting to get started with WordPress theme design. In this screencast we’ll be converting HTML to WordPress: a great place to start for any aspiring theme developer.
  - By Alex Denning on Nometech

WordPress Themes

• WordPress Theme Releases for 05/02
  - By Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Plugins

• Automatically Tweet WordPress Posts with WordTwit
  Twitter has exploded in popularity over the past year as many mainstream media sources have been using the service to communicate with their readers/viewers, but did you know that bloggers can now use Twitter to promote their content as well?
  - By Kyle Eslick on WP Hacks
• 6 WordPress plugins that help your blog’s maintenance
  Ever heard of the broken windows theory? Basically it says that external signs of vandalism encourage bad behavior. Some say that websites would obey the same rule, comment spam and broken links being the broken windows of the internet. If your website is based on WordPress, here are a few plugins to help you keep a neat blog.
  - By Designer Daily
• Analyze WordPress Performance – Plugin
  Performance of Wordpress can be quickly and easily negative effected by using some Plugins. You don’t have to be an expert to know, that more function will provide more load. However, provides the simplicity of creating a Plugin for WordPress, which have made it so popular and I very much appreciate, a problem – You don’t have to be a professional developer to create a Plugin, but an optimized syntax lead to a much improved performance of a WordPress installation.
  - By WP Engineer

bbPress

• How to create a forums list in bbPress
  While redesigning the Theme Hybrid support and community forums, I needed an easy way to show off the list of forums with links to the RSS feeds and number of posts next to each forum name.
  - By Justin Tadlock

Pro Blogging & SEO

• 17 Statistics to Monitor on Your Blog
  Today your task in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge is to spend some time looking at your blog’s statistics/metrics package to see what you can learn from it.
  - By Darren Roese on ProBlogger
• Thinking out of the “text is king” blogging box
  I always focus on creating new content. So are the majority of bloggers. And that is what majority of the blog advice sites suggest. Write great content consistently and grow your blog and audience that way.
  - By Marko Saric on How To Make My Blog
• Simple Dummy Text Generation
  Those people outside of the world of web design might sit and wonder, “Why might somebody need an entire web site dedicated to creating made up words?”. However, those people inside of the web design world know that dummy text generation makes it handy to test a web site without having to fill it up with real content, just yet. Needing some dummy text of your own? Check out and save the Blind Text Generator for help.
  - By Mitchelaneous
• Find a WordPress Job With Twitter
  If you’re a WordPress freelancer, you already probably have your regular web sources for your gigs (and if you don’t, do read How to find a WordPress job right now). Did you know that Twitter was also a fine potential source of information for your next project ?
  - By planetOzh
• Sunday Morning SEO: Stay Motivated by Tracking Your Rankings
  It often takes time to see the results of link building in terms of traffic. Compare this to social media marketing. With social media, you can see traffic spikes right away whenever you get stumbles, diggs, and retweets.
  - By Dee Barizo on The Blog Herald
• Write a ‘Review’ Post
  I know that many bloggers already write ‘reviews’ on their blogs but you can never have enough practice on this type of post.
  - By Darren Rowse on ProBlogger
• Hunt for Dead Links
  Blogging is built on the ‘link’. One blog links to another blog who links to another who makes comment on another. This is a wonderful thing – but what happens when one of the blogs that you’re linking to is retired, is deleted, changes it’s link structure, moves etc?
  - By Darren Rowse on ProBlogger
• Prepare an Emergency Backup Blogging Kit
  When an unexpected family situation kept me from blogging for several weeks, I learned a valuable lesson: ALWAYS BE PREPARED.
  - By Andrew G.R. on The Blog Herald

Blog Development/Design

• How to Stop Spam Harvesting With Email Obfuscation
  he day I discovered the “mailto:” link was glorious. I could publish my address on a web page and anyone could email me with a single click. This was in the more innocent days of the web – before the spam harvesters took over. Use a “mailto:” today and your first viagra message will appear 30 seconds later. So how can you publish an email address without attracting unwanted attention from spammers?
  - By Craig Buckler on SitePoint
• Create an Image Rotator with Description (CSS/jQuery)
  An image rotator is one great way to display portfolio pieces, eCommerce product images, or even as an image gallery. Although there are many great plugins already, this tutorial will help you understand how the image rotator works and helps you create your own from scratch.
  - By Soh Tanaka on DesignM.ag
• 11 Syntax Highlighters To Beautify Code Presentation
  When sharing codes on a website, even they are wrapped with code tags or styled differently, it is always a challenge to read them without syntax highlighting.
  - By WebResources Depo