WordPress Theme Releases 07/23
Squared Squared is a very simple theme, two columns, widget ready, and valid XHTML 1.0 Simple A two column colorful theme Rateka Two column theme comes widget ready. Custom sidebar ad widgets. Also has 3 color schemes incorporated. Allows you to add subscription by email from admin panel. Easy to manage ads from php file. Scruffy Scruffy is a WordPress theme with a standard two column layout and all the basic WP features. What makes this theme special is it's unique “grunge” design. Web 2.0 Blue G..
Weblog Tools Collection (19 hours ago)
Review of WordPress for iPhone
On the way home last night I was browsing through unread feeds and saw someone talking about installing the new WordPress app on their iPhone. I jumped straight into the App Store and downloaded it for free (look for it under “Utilities”). The download was quick (even on an Edge connection), and within seconds I was setting up my own blogs and checking out the available feature set. There has been all sorts of positive buzz about the application today. I found the most interesting to be Dan's writ..
Theme Playground (2 days ago)
How to get featured in our Daily Releases
Our aim here at Weblog Tools Collection is to provide a platform for authors of themes and plugins and at the same time provide WordPress users a single place to keep up-to-date with the WordPress world. We try to keep abreast with both plugin and theme releases. The first place that we look for releases is the WLTC News Forum and in this post I'll try to cover some of the points that you should keep in mind to facilitate your listing. 1. Post in the appropriate category The forum has been divided into severa..
Weblog Tools Collection (2 days ago)
How to combat WordPress TrackBack Spam
How to combat WordPress TrackBack Spam At the end of last year BloggingTips was getting a lot of comment spam . Comment spam has thankfully reduced since then however in the last few weeks I have seen a big increase in the amount of trackback spam here (more than 30+ a day!). Trackback spam is a little more difficult to control than regular comment spam. Most are created automatically via bots and the links they use to promote their sex or prescription drugs website usually has offensive language in it so it&..
Blogging Tips (2 days ago)
WordPress iPhone App Now Available
It's official , the WordPress application for the iPhone has officially been released. Now you'll be able to publish to WordPress powered blogs right from your Jesus phone. Here is what you can expect from this free app: Support for WP.com blogs and self-installed blogs version 2.5.1 and higher Embedded Safari for true previews of posts Full tag and category support Photo support for both camera pictures as well as library photos Support for multiple blogs Ability to password protect a post, save as a draft, ..
Weblog Tools Collection (2 days ago)
WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/21
Events Manager A plugin to manage events such as music gigs, art expositions, or job meetings. Events Manager inserts an Events page in the Manage menu of WordPress Administration, to let you insert, modify and delete events. You can describe events specifying their date and location, and also add a few notes. You can then add events list, calendars and description to your blog using a sidebar widget; if you’re web designer you can simply employ the template tags provided by Events Manager. General Stats Co..
Weblog Tools Collection (3 days ago)
WPMU.org - WordPress MU plugins, themes and news
WPMU.org has changed hands and the blog is now written by James and Andrew from Incsub . WPMU.org is intended to be a WeblogToolsCollection for WordPress MU with the latest and greatest news, MU plugins, themes, SEO tips, ‘How to’ guides etc. If you are a WordPress MU user, add their feed to your feed reader and if you have something to share with their readers, take a gander at their contribute page . Incsub has been an ardent supporter and reader of WeblogToolsCollection and they are good people.
Weblog Tools Collection (3 days ago)
Plugin Competition Update and Prize List
There were a total of 51 entries into the Plugin Competition this year . A list of all the entries with their respective voting and download pages will soon be published. The entries are being sent to the judges as we speak. In the meantime, here is the list of prizes for the participants and the winners of the plugin competition. Thank you prizes: $10 to every participant as a thank you for their hard work and dedication $250 prize: For the best WPMU compatible plugin from Incsub Consolation Prize: 12 month ..
Weblog Tools Collection (4 days ago)
WordPress Gallery and EXIF
WordPress Gallery and EXIF The release of WordPress 2.5 included a built in gallery feature. Nothing major by any means, but it gave you the option of using a simple gallery to display your photos. It also included the ability to pull the EXIF data from your photos. However, whilst the features are there, there’s not much information or tutorials on using them. Hopefully this post will give you a bit more information on how to get the most from this new feature. Create the Gallery You can create the gal..
Blogging Tips (4 days ago)
WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/19
Open Book Book Data Insert OpenBook tags and a book's ISBN into a post, and OpenBook will replace it with a book cover, title, author and publisher. It links to more book details at its data source, Open Library ( http://openlibrary.org ). Fluency Admin A plugin that beautifies and enhances the default WordPress Admin interface. SuperLinks SuperLinks is a WordPress 2.5+ plugin that replaces the standard Links sidebar widget. SuperLinks gives the site owner greater control over how links in the sidebar are dis..
Weblog Tools Collection (5 days ago)
WordPress Theme Releases for 07/18
Only two themes on the platter today. WordPress Dating Theme Simple, two column, widget ready theme for dating sites SuperFresh SuperFresh is a 3 Column fresh theme base with natural green. It contain 2 widget-ready sidebar, custom templates, with a featured post section in the main page. It’s compatible with up to WordPress 2.6 and has been tested with in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Opera, and Safari. Would you like to have your theme featured on WLTC? Then, head over to the News Forum and post a lin..
Weblog Tools Collection (6 days ago)
NEW WordPress Theme Directory
This is pretty exciting news and I am very enthusiastic about it. The new WordPress Theme Directory has just been announced. It is available through http://wordpress.org/extend/themes just like the plugin directory and has all the features and infrastructure support of the WordPress Extend umbrella. The look of the plugin area has also been maintained to provide a familiar feel. That being said, there are only a few themes on the new directory. You can upload your themes by just logging into the Theme Directo..
Weblog Tools Collection (6 days ago)
The Official WordPress Themes Directory is Back
Hip hip hurray! Almost one year passed since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes, and I was critic about that in the past if you remember. But I sure know how to recognize both sides of the coin, and I think that the WordPress team did an excellent work with the new directory, located at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ . As you can see the themes directory is now integrated under the main WordPress.org website, under the “Extend” section. It looks more organized than the previous..
Daily Blog Tips (6 days ago)
Theme Directory
It's been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory , we've wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/ . Bringing the new theme directory under the Wor..
WordPress Development Blog (6 days ago)
WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/16
WordPress Automatic Upgrade This is the latest version of the popular plugin that helps ease the upgrade of your WordPress blog. Epic Theme Viewer This plugin uses that native theme viewer in WordPress 2.6 to display a front end display of all the themes available on your blog. Recommended Books This is higly configurable widget to WordPress sidebar. It displays up to 10 books with liks to Eruditor.com bookshop and optionaly with jacket images, prices in dollars or pounds and/or discounts. Servage Referral Wi..
Weblog Tools Collection (8 days ago)
BlueSensation WordPress Theme Released
Last month we missed the free WordPress theme release, but the one for July is available now. BlueSensation is a clean theme with a traditional look: large content column on the left and a single sidebar, ready to display 125×125 ads. Here are the features of the theme: Advertising ready : The theme comes with 6 125×125 blocks styles already. The sidebar could also fit 300×250 and 120×600 units. Big RSS Icon : On top of the sidebar you have a big RSS icon, making sure that visitors will ge..
Daily Blog Tips (8 days ago)
WordPress Theme Releases for 07/15
PositiveNoize A simple, light-weight, fast-loading, widget-ready two column WordPress 2.5+ theme Base BASE is a very solid two column WordPress theme, covering all the basic features a standard WordPress theme should have…plus one or two extras. simple.business simple.business is a simple two column WordPress theme with a tabbed sidebar
Weblog Tools Collection (9 days ago)
WordPress 2.6 Is Out
Matt just posted on the WordPress Development blog announcing that version 2.6 is available for download. The main novelties are the possibility to track changes in posts now (wiki style), the possibility to blog from around the web and the integration with Google Gears. Minor changes include: Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore. Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images. Bulk management of plugins. A completely revamped image contro..
Daily Blog Tips (9 days ago)
WordPress 2.6 Released Officially
WordPress 2.6 has been officially released today . Matt surprised many of us by releasing WordPress 2.6 almost a month ahead of schedule. There are several new features in WordPress 2.6, few of which we had covered earlier . The WordPress team have also created a video that demonstrates the new features bundled with WordPress 2.6. Download WordPress 2.6
Weblog Tools Collection (9 days ago)
WordPress 2.6
I'm happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available , almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner , contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5 . We've prepared a brief video tour of 2.6, if you have 3 minutes and 29..
WordPress Development Blog (10 days ago)
WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/14
Version Creator This plugin have made to put your site's version on it. You can give your version number, version name, version note whatever you want and the release date organize automatically. PicasaView With picasaView you can easily view your picasaweb-albums in your WordPress blog. Tagline Rotator The Tagline Rotator plugin does pretty much what it sounds like it would do: it randomly selects a tagline (that’s the description of your blog beneath the title) from a list of user-compiled taglines, then ..
Weblog Tools Collection (10 days ago)
WordCast Mugshot Contest
The guys and gal over at the WordCast Podcast is currently holding a Mugshot contest . The contest is all about taking a photo of your favorite mug. Check out this awesome line up prizes: 4th Place: WordPress mug and WordPress T-shirt 3rd Place: WordPress mug, WordPress T-shirt and Lijit T-Shirt 2nd Place: WordPress mug, WordPress T-shirt, Lijit T-Shirt, signed copy of Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging , and one single-user Revolution theme license of the winners’ choice 1st Place..
Weblog Tools Collection (11 days ago)
Control Your Content Part 2
Control Your Content Part 2 Last week I explained the 3 content tags , which you can use either in your WordPress template files or whilst writing your post. So how can you use these to create a different front page? Using a simple if statement you can determine which post you’re displaying and alter your settings to suit. For example, display your most recent post in full, then the rest of the posts in excerpt format. Using The Loop The WordPress Loop is used to display the post(s) or Page content on t..
Blogging Tips (11 days ago)
WordPress Theme Releases for 07/12
HelloBlogger A simple two column blue and white WordPress theme Typography A fixed two column outfit and some modern typographic styles. The front page shows the latest post in excerpts with an article image pulled via the custom fields, while the sidebar features a custom built news slider. Bullit Bullit WordPress theme with a fixed two column outfit and some stylish black layout. The front page shows the latest post in excerpts with an article image pulled via the custom fields, while the sidebar features a..
Weblog Tools Collection (12 days ago)
How many Queries are too many?
I have been asked this question quite a few times and I never have a perfect answer. It is obviously an important question to ask but it can be answered in many different ways based on preferences, need for plugins, optimization techniques used and a variety of other factors. Weblog Tools Collection uses a lot of plugins and is very query heavy but the in spite of that, the front page uses 59 queries to generate itself. I think the default (on a vanilla WordPress install on the default theme) is 27 or somethi..
Weblog Tools Collection (12 days ago)
WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/11
AVH Extended Categories A replacement of the category widget to allow for greater customization of the category widget. AVH Amazon The avh-amazon plugin gives you the ability to add a widget which will display a random item from your Amazon wish list, baby registry and/or wedding registry. dilw It lets you see displayed the Daily Dilbert. It uses the DilbertDailyStrip RSS feed. Enhanced Recent Posts Enhanced Recent Posts is a widget that comes as a replacement to the built-in widget. As the first enhancement,..
Weblog Tools Collection (13 days ago)
WordPress for iPhone App
WordPress for iPhone : Big news from the Automattic team yesterday. They released a first look at their iPhone App that works on both WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs. The application is Open Source, available from the iPhone App store and will be available for free. The screen real estate problem with the large on screen keyboard looks to be largely solved with this app and it adds the ability to modify previous posts and view your blog on the web. The official iPhone app for WordPress blog is linked ab..
Weblog Tools Collection (13 days ago)
Last Day for Plugin Competition
Today is the last day to submit entries to the WordPress Plugin Competition. We will accept entries till 11:59 PM EST tonight. A little leeway will be allowed because of time differences across the world. However we will not accept any entries that come in tomorrow. Please make sure that all entrants are registered on the Plugin Competition Blog and have written at least one post about their plugin entry If you find a bug, please resend your entry. A plugin that crashes and burns in a fatal error on install i..
Weblog Tools Collection (14 days ago)
Interview with WordPress Theme Designer Small Potato
There are a few names which stick out in WordPress developer/designer circles. One of those names is, curiously enough, a made up name: Small Potato. Small Potato ran a very popular website devoted to WordPress called WPDesigner . Since some time last year Small Potato has disappeared and hasn't (as far as I know) been in contact with anyone in the development community. Luckily I pulled together this interview with him before he left. Small Potato in a classic shot, eating an orange. What first brought you t..
Theme Playground (15 days ago)
Evolution of WordPress: B2/Cafelog to WordPress 1.0
A few days ago we had told you what you should know about WordPress 2.6 . The post described new features that will be introduced shortly in WordPress 2.6. Though there are several new features that you may like in this new version, there might be many that have gone unnoticed that were introduced in the earlier versions of WordPress. To quell the anticipation that users might have for the latest version, we wanted to write a series of posts that will cover WordPress from its infancy to WordPress 2.5 (the lat..
Weblog Tools Collection (16 days ago)
Interview with WordPress WPBits Blogger Leonid Mamchencov
I had the opportunity some time ago to interview someone who is very much interested in WordPress development: Leonid Mamchencov. He's the blogger over at WPBits , and makes a point of explaining that his blog is not a blog about blogging . I think I like him already. Full text of interview below. Used with permission . What first brought you to WordPress? I was looking for a better tool for my personal blog. I've already been through a few alternatives, all the way from the scripts of my own to widely used o..
Theme Playground (16 days ago)
Bloglet, Stylish Minimalist Blogging
Thanks to the ongoing pestering from me, Scott Andreas has thankfully released Bloglet , his stylish minimalist theme. He uses it himself, so you know he has put some care into it.
Theme Playground (17 days ago)
Control Your Content Part 1
Control Your Content Part 1 Controlling how your posts display throughout your site is easily done with a choice of 2 template tags and a bit of additional code. Full posts are displayed by using the_content() and excerpts are displayed by using the_excerpt() . the_content() and more This tag will display a full post unless you use the more tag . The more tag is set whilst writing the post. You can click a button on your post area’s toolbar or, if you’re not using the richtext editor then you can ..
Blogging Tips (18 days ago)
10 Impressive Tumblelog WordPress Themes Reviewed
Tumblelogs are a popular form of blogging, whether they take the traditional minimalistic form or not. When the amount of information is available the way it is online via blogs, strong and simple messages are all the more valuable. The popularity of Jason Kottke's kottke.org and John Gruber's Daring Fireball are two examples of this trend in action, despite the fact that their sites don't fit the new accepted tumblelog design format. Wikipedia defines the tumblelog as: …a variation of a blog that favo..
Theme Playground (25 days ago)
Using Conditional Tags
Using Conditional Tags Conditional tags allow you to control the information displayed on a page depending on whether a certain criteria is met. They’re always used in a standard PHP if statement and there are conditional tags for almost every check that you could think of. The PHP Code The PHP code used with conditionals is a standard PHP if statement . ie. if (condition) { statement here; } Using a Conditional Tag The most used conditional tag I use is the tag to check if the page the user is currentl..
Blogging Tips (25 days ago)
Adding a Class to the First Post
Adam Brown has a nice little post detailing how to (with simple PHP ) add a class to the first post on your blog page . Thanks, Adam.
Theme Playground (25 days ago)
Max Banner Ads WordPress Plugin Released
Post from: Blogging Tips Max Banner Ads WordPress Plugin Released Today sees the release of a WordPress Plugin which I’m sure will be popular. Pawan Agrawal from Max Blog Press contacted me a few weeks ago to give me a preview of this new plugin which aims to make adding advertisements to your blog quicker and easier. By default, the plugin lets you add banners to 4 zones : Within the post, the sidebar (via a widget), top of first post and bottom of first post. You can also add new zones. The add…..
Blogging Tips (31 days ago)
Liz Strauss: The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog Ebook
When Liz Strauss stood before WordCamp Dallas and said she had 60,317 comments on her blog, the audience was staggered. Even Matt Mullenweg was impressed. Everyone was impressed and wanted to know her secret. Now you can get the secret behind online community building from Liz Strauss. After several years of research and writing, Liz just [...]
Lorelle on WordPress (31 days ago)
Free SEO Friendly Wordpress Themes
Post from: Blogging Tips Free SEO Friendly Wordpress Themes Today marks the first day of a long weekend for me. You see, this weekend I plan on fully optimizing all of my blog themes, cleaning up the code and adding in the final needed plugins to make them as search engine friendly as possible. I started working on this earlier, and during a coffee break I got the itch to hunt around for a few themes that were already well optimized. The following is a list of what I found. First two up to…
Blogging Tips (35 days ago)
Announcing Theme Playground WordPress Discussion Live on Ustream.tv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQU_7MopNBk What I'm calling Theme Playground On WordPress (Live) — real original, right — will be an hour long discussion, from 9pm to 10pm EDT tonight at Ustream.tv. The link to bookmark is: http://ustream.tv/channel/theme-playground-on-wordpress Tonight's discussion will last for one hour, as most nights, and be on the following topics: Chris Pirillo's WordPress theme WicketPixie , theme review and tips for use WordPress workflow on a Mac BuddyPress update and wha..
Theme Playground (36 days ago)
The Cyclical Nature of Blog Stats
In 2006, I completed a year long informal study on several of my blogs about the best times and days for me to publish content on my blogs and published what I learned in When is the Best Time and Day to Post on Your Blog? My conclusions were that Mondays and Tuesdays were the [...]
Lorelle on WordPress (38 days ago)
Chris Pearson and User-Functions.php
Chris Pearson has put together a nice tutorial all about creating a user-functions.php file in your WordPress installation. Do you enjoy your widget-ized sidebars? Then you have functions.php to thank. Theme developers can also use functions.php to add extra functionality to their themes. Just recently I customized a functions.php file in order to enable a theme options page, a method I’ll share with you later this week. Here’s what Chris had to say: One idea that immediately comes to mind is the creation..
Theme Playground (39 days ago)
Highlight Featured Posts
Post from: Blogging Tips Highlight Featured Posts Sometimes you want to write a post that stands out from the rest. Usually giving the selected post an additional CSS class will do the trick, but how do you work out which posts need highlighting? This is simply done by creating a new category called ‘Featured’ (note you can call the category anything you like, but I’ll refer to it as Featured in this post). If you create a new category called ‘Featured’ to highlight your posts, y..
Blogging Tips (39 days ago)
WordPress Blogs and More Hacked by Google Redirects
Hackers are just determined. There are no new security flaws reported recently in WordPress, but that hasn’t stopped imaginative and determined hackers. The recent security issues concern hackers who work with Google and other search engine results and redirects traffic from your blog or website. The searchers clicks on the link and is redirected to the [...]
Lorelle on WordPress (43 days ago)
My Top Commentators WordPress Plugin
I am glad to release the third WordPress plugin by Daily Blog Tips. My Top Commentators is a plugin that allows a blogger to discover who are the most active commentators on his blog (via the WordPress Dashboard, so other people will not see this information). You can also use different time frames for this, so you can see the top commentators: Today Yesterday Last 7 days This month Last month This year Last year Secondly, you can also see all the comments left by a single person, and edit or delete them via ..
Daily Blog Tips (43 days ago)
My Top Commentators WordPress Plugin
Post from: Blogging Tips My Top Commentators WordPress Plugin Daily Blog Tips released a new wordpress plugin today entitled ‘ My Top Commentators ‘. Unlike other top commentators plugins, this plugin does not add a top commentators list to your sidebar. Instead it generates statistics about your commenters in your WordPress dashboard. I removed the top commentators list from BloggingTips last year because it was being spammed and the ones making the top ten list were mostly the ones who were leav..
Blogging Tips (43 days ago)
WordPress Podcast Wants Your Favorite WordPress Plugins
This week’s WordPress Podcast with Charles Stricklin and Jonathan Bailey is asking listeners to email them their top 10 favorite, can’t-live-without WordPress Plugins. WordPress Plugins are invaluable tools and extensions that help you do more with your WordPress blog. There are a lot I couldn’t live without, but that list changes over time as Plugins come [...]
Lorelle on WordPress (44 days ago)
BloggingTips Simplicity Theme Released
Post from: Blogging Tips BloggingTips Simplicity Theme Released The Simplicity Wordpress Theme is a basic yet effective theme which we have released under the Creative Commons License . To see the theme in action please visit the Simplicity Demo Page . By default the sidebar only has 3 areas : Subscription, Recent Comments and Recent Posts. The theme is widget ready so you can add more to the sidebar very easily however I wanted to keep things simple with this theme. I think this would be a great theme for an..
Blogging Tips (46 days ago)
Index Your Posts
Post from: Blogging Tips Index Your Posts When you write a post on WordPress a visitor can see this post on a variety of pages - the front page, the category page(s) that the post is under, the archive page, the author’s page, the tag page(s), plus, of course, the single post page. If you display the full post on each of those pages then there’s the potential for duplicate content issues. That aside it also doesn’t allow for easy navigation through your site to older posts. Instead of thinki..
Blogging Tips (46 days ago)
How to Access Banned WordPress.com Blogs
As discussed in WordPress.com Banned Again: Why Aren’t You Concerned?, WordPress.com continues to be a target for censorship and blocking from various countries and groups around the world attempting to penalize the whole for the “wrongs” of the few the courts or governments decide to penalize, those cutting off thousands of blogs from access. I was [...]
Lorelle on WordPress (47 days ago)
