WPStart.org

WordPress News

• Wordpress and Twitter
  Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have already or will have plans to enter the twitterverse. If you are using Wordpress then there is good news as there are plenty of tools to help you promote your twitter profile, manage your tweets and generally promote your tweetdom in a bid to gain more followers.
  - By WebDesign Lessons
• Plugins And The Lack Of Change Logs
  The other day, I noticed I had about 9 plugins that needed to be upgraded. So I browsed to the plugin management page in WordPress 2.8 and noticed the link to view the details regarding the new plugin version as I figure that will tell me why I should upgrade. Once I click on this link, I get a lightbox popup showing me the same view I would see if I were looking at this plugin on the WordPress.org plugin repository. Tabs to see the description, installation, screenshots, Faq and other notes. No Change Log link.
  - By WP Tavern
• WPWeekly Episode 58 – WordPress Deep Dish Style
  In this episode of WordPress Weekly, David and I are joined by Jacob Santos, Brad Williams, Lisa Sabin Wilson and Kim Parsell to talk about WordCamp Chicago. Afterwords, David and I dived into the news of the week including the release of WordPress 2.8, iThemes going GPL, and the merger between the self-hosted WordPress software and WordPress MU.
  - By WP Tavern
• Digging Into WordPress
  Got a little news for ya’ll. Remember when I announced me and Jeff Starr were looking for a publisher for a book about WordPress? Well, that worked, and we talked a number of different publishers. They were all very nice, but after weighing everything out we decided that when we are done we’ll be self-publishing it as a PDF for now.
  - By CSS Tricks
• Killing The WordPress Bugs and Helping Out With User Problems [WordPress Community]
  The best thing about an open source platform is that there are users who contribute to make it much more bigger and better, WordPress is no different and it has a huge user community that not only contributes to the core, but, also help in answering user questions and solve their problems.
  - By Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress 2.8 News

• WP Q&A: When Should I Update WordPress?
  Hello again everyone. This is Chris Jean, iThemes’ very own Code Monkey. Today, I’m going to do my best to help you prepare for and plan WordPress upgrades.
  - By iThemes
• Wordpress 2.8 Features and Themes Compatibility
  The good news is now finally out! Wordpress 2.8, with code name “Baker,” is now available. Once you log on to your Wordpress you will be receiving a notice on the availability for download of this latest Wordpress version.
  - By Templatelite
• Caution When Updating To WordPress 2.8
  Users reporting me, that they are missing files, after they automatically updated to WordPress version 2.8 and there were a problem while updating. I checked out the WordPress Trac and found a brand new record, which confirms this
  - By WP Engineer
• New User Features in WordPress 2.8
  With WordPress 2.8 out, many people are loving the new drag and drop widget page, plus the faster-loading-by-compression backend
  - By WP Tavern
• Wordpress 2.8 And 10 Things That You Should Know Before/After You Upgrade
  Wordpress 2.8 had been released at 10th June 2009. There are a lot of add on features and improvements in this version. It is good for Wordpress users to upgrade to the latest version. Today, we are going to summarize some of the important features and also something that you should read/consider before you upgrade to the latest version.
  - By WebDesignBooth
• How WordPress 2.8 upgrade will improve your blogging experience – My video review
  I just upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.8 today. Not as major upgrade as WordPress 2.7 but WordPress 2.8 has couple of huge changes in Appereance menu. These changes will make it much easier for bloggers to find, install and change themes on their blogs without having to use FTP and without uploading files onto the server.
  - By How To Make My Blog
• 5 Things of Interest to Developers in the New WordPress 2.8
  With each major WordPress release, public changes like the new widgets administrative interface usually get all the glory. Here are some new features in WordPress 2.8 that most users won’t even know exist but you will probably care about, if you’re a WordPress developer.
  - By Pressed Words
• 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets
  I’m very excited to announce to everyone that the latest and greatest version of WordPress, version 2.8 “Baker,” is immediately available for download. 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. We also fixed over 790 bugs. This release is named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.
  - By WordPress Blog

WordPress Tutorials, Tips & Hacks

• 10 Ways to Install Accordion Menus in Your Wordpress Theme
  Today you will learn 10 ways to install accordion menus in your Worpress theme!
  - By Pro Blog Design
• How to detect the visitor browser within WordPress
  To ensure maximum cross-browser compatibility on your blog theme, you have to be able to detect the browser used by the visitor. Sure, you can use conditionnal comments, but WordPress itself can detect client browser. Let’s see how to do.
  - By WP Recipes
• Define Your Own WordPress Action Hooks
  WordPress is based on the so-called Hook-System. This serves WordPress, and all extensions to involve functions in a certain place. The Hooks are not only to hook, but can also be used in custom extensions and thus create a better overview and offer additional interfaces for more possibilities to develop. Especially the second option is interesting when you create a theme, which aims to offer a variety of interfaces, or create a Plugin which can be expand by other authors or serve as a framework.
  - By WP Engineer
• Creating user-defined RSS feeds in WordPress
  RSS feeds are very useful, and indeed, very popular. WordPress creates RSS feeds by default, which is good in 99% of times. But how to create your own, custom RSS Feed? Just read this post to find out!
  - By WP Recipes
• Escaping API updates for WordPress 2.8
  The WordPress escaping API functions have been updated. Escaping is a way of using untrusted text that “neuters” anything that could do damage. Escaping is used in WordPress to avoid SQL injection and cross-site scripting/script injection (XSS), among other things.
  - By Mark on WordPress
• How to create a sales letter landing page with WordPress Thesis Theme
  If you want to sell your own product, you need a sales letter landing page to send potential buyers to either from your own blog, via affiliates or via PPC search engine marketing. Landing page template can help you improve conversions and drive sales.
  - By How To Make My Blog
• 22 Mixed Quality Wordpress Hacks
  WordPress needs no introduction among designers and writers. It’s usually known as a synonym for blogging. Now days every other WordPress blogs look more or less similar, to stand uniquely out from the rest, you need to tweak it a little bit by using quality hacks.
  - By instantShift
• A Guide to the Actions API
  WordPress theme frameworks have been all the rave nowadays, and rightly so. Everybody’s either using one or rolling their own flavor. Theme frameworks introduce several new concepts to theme authoring that till now, only plugin developers have been taking advantage of. In this article, I’m going to introduce you to the actions API, and break it down so you can understand how it all works.
  - By WP Candy
• Hosting your JS at Google
  While in a previous post I talked about WordPress database optimization, with this post I intend to show you how to improve your sites performance a bit more by hosting your javascripts with Google.
  - By Yoast
• Quick Tip – Separate Page Templates in Wordpress
  Making unique page templates is surprisingly simple to do in Wordpress, and is often an overlooked feature. There’s no need for bloating a single file with series of PHP loops to determine the file name and content. This is built in simplicity, and we’ll start with a brief explanation of how it works.
  - By Build Internet
• 10 Things You can Do with WordPress Besides Blogging
  Today you’re going to learn 10 things you can do with WordPress besides blogging, and whether you’re a WordPress newbie or longtime veteran – I guarantee that you will learn something after reading this post!
  - By WP Candy
• WordPress 2.8 Tips and Tricks Collection
  Now that WordPress 2.8 has been released, it really would be more useful and helpful to get a big list of tips and tricks that addresses several new things in WordPress 2.8 and helps to learn or tweak the new features, these tips come from several users who have been using WordPress 2.8 for sometime and have contributed with several posts that may help you make the best out of the latest version in WordPress.
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• Get Posts With Same Custom Field VALUE As Current Post
  So, you’ve read all the tutorials on how to get custom field values and how to get posts that have a certain key/value, but what about if the post your are viewing has a custom field, and you want all the other posts with that custom field value; a value that you won’t know in advance…?
  - By Epic Alex

WordPress Plugins

• Security And Anti-spam Plugins For WordPress
  I did a post for a Antivirus plugin for WordPress, several users commenting about different plugins that improve the security of WordPress, so I decided to sum up some of the plugins that provide security and comment spam protection for WordPress blogs.
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• Antivirus Plugin For WordPress
  WordPress in itself is very safe and secure platform, however there are chances that your blog may get affected because of loopholes in your themes.
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• WordPress Plugin Releases for 06/13
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• Should you use a Mobile WordPress Plugin?
  Twitterized answer? Abso-freakin-lutely! Take a look at the following graph. It shows the pageviews and unique visitors on this blog from mobile browsers since we started tracking last year. Notice the numbers and the trends? How many of your visitors, do you think, come back to your blog after your page takes five minutes to load on their iPhone, and needs the twenty flick, carpal thumb scroll to read browse through the huge header? If you care about your reader and want to keep up with this growing populations’ reading habits, a mobile plugin on your blog is a necessity. Now what you use is up to you.
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• Plugin: Automatically Link Keywords & Phrases in Posts
  SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
  - By Blog Perfume
• WP-Click-Track WordPress Plugin
  Did you ever want to be able to track the clicks on the links that you use inside posts and pages? If so, you should check the WP-Click-Track plugin. It comes with two different features
  - By Daily Blog Tips
• Top 20 Wordpress Plugins – June 2009
  Back once again with the Enterprise Master… er …mind. Neglect. Thats all I can call it and I have to hold my hands up and admit that I have neglected this blog completely in the last few months. So in a small gesture of recompense my Top 10 Wordpress Plugin roundup for June is a Top 20.
  - By Enterprise Mastermind
• Wordpress Status Bar Plugins
  Display status in your blog became very useful when you write often and want to update your readers what you do and where you are.
  - By WP Feed

WordPress Themes

• 16 Popular WordPress Clone Themes
  Just for fun one day, I was looking around for how many really cool WordPress clone themes there were out there. I found some and here the ones that I found really impressive.
  - By PimpMyWordPress
• Hybrid 0.6: Leaner, more powerful, and ready for WP 2.8
  When I originally created the Hybrid theme, I had done so with the thought that I’d only use it for my personal projects. It was not meant to be a publicly-released theme. A couple of months later, that changed. I released it into the wild.
  - By Theme Hybrid
• WordPress Theme Releases for 06/15
  - By Weblog Tools Collection
• WordPress Theme Releases for 06/10
  - By Weblog Tools Collection

Pro Blogging & SEO

• 12 Excellent Free Tools for Monitoring Your Site’s Uptime
  A website or web application’s high availability is very crucial; users who constantly encounter problems accessing the content of a site will not likely come back. For web applications – poor uptimes means users won’t be confident about your product: if they constantly experience issues with your apps’s availability, they will likely look for another solution that isn’t as problematic.
  - By Six Revisions
• Use Webslug To See How Fast Your Site Loads
  I have a great new tool to add to my repository! I do a lot of web troubleshooting and I am constantly helping people make their websites load faster.
  - By MakeUseOf
• How To Create a Landing Page With Viral Potential
  If you’re going to consider yourself a PROblogger, it won’t take long for you to realize that sometimes the blog isn’t the best place to make an offer. Inevitably, you’re going to find yourself using a landing page.
  - By David Risley
• 30+ Advanced SEO Tactics, Techniques and Resources (55+ Links)
  There is no single definition of advanced SEO. There are a few of attempts to describe what it might mean or consist of and what not but there is no entity or authority that could define such a broad term like advanced SEO.
  - By SEOptimise
• How To Submit Your Website To Bing & Google For More Traffic
  With all the hub bub about Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, I decided to check out what the process is to submit your blog or website to Bing and compare it to the Google process.
  - By MakeUseOf
• Moving Your WebSite to New Domain Notify Google for Change of Address
  Today Google Webmaster team has roll out new Webmaster Tool Interface for all. From today onwards when you login to Google Webmasters you will see a new Webmaster Interface. Along with new Google Webmaster Interface new feature in Google Webmaster Tools named as Change of Address.
  - By BlogsDNA
• How blogging ideas spread – 6-step plan for creating something big
  We all have dreams, we all have a passion for something. But not many of us do anything towards achieving those dreams.
  - By How To Make My Blog