I’ll be heading to WordCamp NYC this weekend, which at present time already has 607 attendees registered!

It’s not too late to buy tickets, so if you are in the area, definitely check it out.

A few highlights include:

8 tracks of content, to cover every WordPress-lover’s area of interest/expertise*

Over 50 confirmed speakers for Saturday’s sessions

Sunday morning unconference

Sunday afternoon “Best of WordCamp NYC” Ignite-style recap

Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com

Theme/Plugin Competition, Project Runway style

Fantastic shirts

Yummy lunch on Saturday

Door prize raffle

Genius Bar to help people with their WordPress woes (meet the Happiness Engineers in person!)

Hacker Room for hardcore developers who want to contribute to the open source project

Should be a great event, and looking forward to seeing lots of familiar faces and a few news ones too.

If you are trying to get in touch with me to meet-up during the event, feel free to drop me a note here.

WordCamp Phoenix is all set to really rock and roll with great WordPress, blogging, and SEO experts on November 13, 2009, in Arizona at the Arizona Grand Resort.

Some of the hottest folks in WordPress and web tech are lined up to speak and attend, taking advantage of PodcampAZ and Az Entrepreneurship Conference happening the same weekend. Speakers include Matt Mullenweg, Merlin Mann of 43 Folders, John Hawkins, Brent Spore, and Dave Moyer of Bitwire Media and WordCast. Oh, and little ole me.

The Phoenix WordPress event will be live streamed thanks to sponsor, GoDaddy, so you can watch the event from around the world from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm MST.

Registration is almost sold out, so get signed up right now to ensure you have a seat. You can follow all the Twitter fun on the phxwc tag and hashtag.

WordCamp Netherlands

WordCamp Netherlands a week ago was amazing. The speakers were fantastic, great fun at the WordPress Genius Bar was had, and lessons learned more from the audience at times than the speakers! What an amazing group.

The attendees at this WordCamp in Holland were not beginners by any means. They were, for the most part, experienced WordPress users and bloggers. They had intelligent questions to challenge myself and the other speakers and attendees, including a couple representatives from Automattic. While we converted a few non-bloggers and non-WordPress users, for the most part, they challenged us on how to use WordPress better and more.

The enthusiasm was amazing, and a WordPress Meetup was quickly arranged and held Wednesday afternoon in Rotterdam, attended by about 20 people from all around Holland. Wow!

I’ll be heading back to the states in the next few days for a day or so of rest and then on another plane to WordCamp Phoenix, my last WordCamp of the year.

2009: A Packed Year of WordCamps and WordPress Events

I’ve learned a lot this year from all the WordCamps I’ve attended, including WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp San Francisco, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Whistler, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Dallas, WordCamp Portland, WordCamp Seattle, and WordCamp Netherlands! Whew! That sounds like a lot, and still doesn’t include all the many non-WordPress events, conferences, and workshops I spoke at and attended.

To find a WordPress Meetup or WordCamp in your area, check out WordCamp Central, which includes instructions and guidelines for running a WordCamp. There are also news, events, and articles with tips and techniques for WordPress Meetups and WordCamps on The WordCamp Report and WordCast, as well as on blogs by those who have run these events.

Check out WordPress Meetup Groups where you can browse a map and list of cities where there are WordPress events and activities and where ones are wanted. You can also search Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress, WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events, and Upcoming events tagged with “WordCamp” or “WordPress.”

If you are interested in creating a WordCamp or WordPress Meetup, check out WordCamp Central and the articles I’ve written below, as well as more on the WordCamp Report.

• WordCamp and WordPress Meetups: The Events Heard Round the World
• How WordPress Changes Lives
• WordCamps 2009
• Do You Have All the Information on Your WordCamp Blog?
• Exploring WordCamp Logo Creativity
• What You Need to Consider When Planning a WordCamp Event
• It’s What Happens After the Event That Counts
• WordPress Event and WordCamp Speakers Rights Release Form
• When WordCamp Sponsorship Raises Questions
• Why You Should Get to a WordCamp Near You
• It Takes a Team to Do a WordCamp
• WordCamp Dallas: What Does a WordCamp Cost?
• Tips for Planning and Organizing a WordPress Event and WordCamp

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

Our book, Digging Into Wordpress, is now for sale!

Discount

For the launch, we are offering a $5 discount for the first 10 days. Use coupon code DIWEARLY in the cart to get yours. The regular price of the PDF book is $27 and so the coupon brings it down to $22.

PDF Now, Print Later

This is a PDF version of the book for now. Print will be coming later. Anybody who buys the PDF now will get a a fair discount on the print version if you want to pick that up later. Both are going to be very cool. I love print, but the PDF is pretty ideal as all the links are active, you can search it easily, and you can copy and paste code!

A Lifetime Subscription

Buying the book now gives you a lifetime subscription to the book. We intend to keep the book updated and add new content as time goes on. This won’t become a stagnant old outdated book. When we release a new version, you’ll automatically get an email to download the new version.

Affiliate Program

If you like the book and want to help sell it, you can earn money doing so. For the PDF right now, we don’t have the substantial costs that are printing, handling, and shipping. So, we are offering 50% of all affiliate sales. Hey, you are doing the legwork, and we appreciate it. Learn more here.

Thank You

Thanks in advance to anybody who picks up a copy. It goes a long way toward helping both me and Jeff create all the other free content we love to share.

This weekend, November 14-15, a whole bunch of the friendly faces from Automattic and WordPress.com will be in New York City to attend WordCamp NYC. If you’re a NYC area local (and really, with Acela service being what it is, doesn’t that almost mean anywhere from Boston to D.C.?), we hope you’ll join us at what’s shaping up to be one of the most exciting WordCamps of all time.

(Okay, I’m one of the organizers, so of course *I* think it will be awesome, but in this case, I’m right!)

What’s so great about this WordCamp? Allow me to tell you:

• 8 tracks of content, to cover every WordPress-lover’s area of interest/expertise*
• Over 50 confirmed speakers for Saturday’s sessions
• Sunday morning unconference
• Sunday afternoon “Best of WordCamp NYC” Ignite-style recap
• Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com
• Theme/Plugin Competition, Project Runway style
• Fantastic shirts
• Yummy lunch on Saturday
• Door prize raffle
• Genius Bar to help people with their WordPress woes (meet the Happiness Engineers in person!)
• Hacker Room for hardcore developers who want to contribute to the open source project

We’re being hosted by Baruch College, a great venue in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. We will not be streaming WordCamp NYC online due to bandwidth limitations, but we hope to post videos from the event on WordPress.tv after it’s over.

It’s like 2 days of WordPress Paradise for less than going out to dinner (thanks to generous sponsors like Microsoft, Media Temple and other great companies). Over 550 people have already signed up. What are you waiting for? Get your ticket now and come meet us there!

*Tracks are: Newbies, Bloggers, CMS, Beginning Developer, Advanced Developer, BuddyPress/MU, Academic, and Open Source Community.

Version 1.8 is a lot more developer friendly: any options set on the settings page can be overwritten:

In your theme, you can now write:

<?php smart_archives('format=list&exclude_cat=123,543'); ?>

This works for the shortcode too. In any post or page, just write:

[[smart_archives format=list exclude_cat=123,543]]

What’s neat about this is that you can have more than one archive, or have the archive display differently in different parts of your site.

This tutorial will only disable active HTML tags. So someone can still post something like:

<a><em><strong>

And it will show up, but the tags will not be functional. So if someone uses the strong tag, it won’t bold the text. Besides not many SPAM bots have time to do this because this way takes up a lot of time and it is not beneficial for them.

All you have to do is simply open your functions.php and add the following code:

// This will occur when the comment is posted
function plc_comment_post( $incoming_comment ) {

// convert everything in a comment to display literally
$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = htmlspecialchars($incoming_comment['comment_content']);

// the one exception is single quotes, which cannot be #039; because WordPress marks it as spam
$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = str_replace( "'", ''', $incoming_comment['comment_content'] );

return( $incoming_comment );
}

// This will occur before a comment is displayed
function plc_comment_display( $comment_to_display ) {

// Put the single quotes back in
$comment_to_display = str_replace( ''', "'", $comment_to_display );

return $comment_to_display;

Source – The original author also offers a plugin that you can download from his site.

The reason why this way is better is because it does not require you to change the core files. If you want to edit your core files then you may go to wp-includes/kses.php and edit the codes there. (This is not Recommended, but it is here for the sake of knowledge. (WP Codex for more details)

Related posts:

1. How to Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress
2. How To Rearrange Comments in WordPress – Display the Most Recent One on Top
3. How to Disable Post Revisions in WordPress and Reduce Database Size

switching from HTML to Visual editor, wordpress changes things. Not everything, but enough to make it very annoying – if I’ve gone into HTML and coded things a certain way, I do not want wordpress to second-guess me.

The first thing we have to realise is that there are 2 types of users:

• regular folks that just want to write the damn post and publish it
• power users that need <iframes>s embedded in <div>s that form an unordered list of tag soup

So how do we please both?

First, let’s take into consideration regular word processors. Does Microsoft Word or even OpenOffice have a noticeable button that allows you to edit the underlying XML of a document? Of course not!

So why should an average user see it in WordPress?

Part 1 of my proposal:

Hide the HTML tab by default, but allow users to enable it from their profile. *

This eliminates clutter for normal users, but what about the power users?

Well, since the HTML tab is hidden by default, they will have to consciously enable it. In doing so, they have signed the disclaimer that says “I know what I’m doing”.

This brings us to the second part:

When the HTML tab is enabled, don’t change anything in the HTML, even when using the visual editor.

What do you think?

_____

* This is what the interface would look like:

Editing modes:

[x] Visual editor
[  ] Raw HTML

Step 1 – Setting up a secure database

Because the database is associated with virtually everything you do on your site, it is best to perform any modifications before configuring your options, installing plugins, and adding options. During the installation process, there are some effective ways of increasing the overall security of your WordPress site.

One of the first things that you can do to bolster security is to setup a proper database, user, and password. First, create the table that will be used for your WordPress installation:

CREATE DATABASE `wordpress`;

Now we need a user to go with that database. The key here is to create a user with only the required permissions. Enter the following SQL query to create a user that will have access only to the wordpress from the local server:

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser'@'localhost'
IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

By requiring that the user access the database from the local server only, we mitigate the possibility of remote database attacks. Further, by granting the user access to only the wordpress database, we ensure that other databases will remain safe should an attacker gain access.

Once the database and user have been setup, install WordPress as normal and continue with the next step.

Step 2 – Setting up a secure configuration file

There are two things we want to do with the wp-config.php file: implement Authentication Unique Keys and change the default database prefix. Let’s do it..

Implement Authentication Unique Keys

Directly after your MySQL database credentials in the wp-config.php file, you have the option of specifying a set of Authentication Unique Keys. These keys improve WordPress’ authentication system, providing strong security to your site. It is highly recommended that you take advantage of this feature.

/**#@+
 * Authentication Unique Keys.
 *
 * Change these to different unique phrases!
 * You can generate these using the {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ WordPress.org secret-key service}
 * You can change these at any point in time to invalidate all existing cookies. This will force all users to have to log in again.
 *
 * @since 2.6.0
 */
define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
/**#@-*/

To do so, visit the official secret-key generation service and paste the results into your config.php file (replace the four lines beginning with “define”).

While you are you setting up the WordPress configuration file, you also may want to go ahead and optimize performance and implement some other choice configuration tricks.

Change the default database table prefix

While in your wp-config.php file, take a few moments to change your default database table prefix. By default, it’s “wp_”, but this is a well-known fact of which attackers and automated scripts take full advantage. By changing the table prefix to something unknown/random, you are using security through obscurity to help mitigate SQL-injection threats.

/**
 * WordPress Database Table prefix.
 *
 * You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique
 * prefix. Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
 */
$table_prefix = 'wp_';

In your wp-config.php file, locate the above lines and change the table prefix to something random or difficult to guess. I like to include the letters “wp” within the new prefix to help me identify tables specific to WordPress. For example, I might change it to something like, “wp_i337”.

Step 3 – Setting up a secure administration

Once you have finished with your database and configuration file, it’s time to setup a secure WordPress Admin area. We can do this by changing the default Admin username and protecting the wp-admin directory.

changing the default Admin username

By default, all WordPress installations have a default Admin username of, creatively enough, “admin”. As with the default database prefix, this fact is well-known to attackers, who target the admin account with password brute-force attacks. Thus, changing the username of your Admin account will help mitigate this potential vulnerability. To do so, execute the following SQL query on your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin:

UPDATE wp_users SET user_login = 'admin', user_login = 'digwp';

Your default Admin username is now changed to whatever you specified in the query. In this example, your new username will be “digwp”, so you will probably want to change it to something that is more difficult to guess.

Additionally, make sure that the password for the Admin account is as strong as possible. Use a random mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, and throw in a few underscores and numbers for good measure.
 

Protecting the wp-admin directory

All of the administrative files for your WordPress site are contained in the wp-admin directory. By protecting this directory against unauthorized access, we greatly strengthen the security of our site. Depending on your particular needs, there are at least two ways to go about doing this. Let’s look at each of them.

Allow open access only to specific addresses

This method uses a few choice HTAccess directives placed in your site’s root .htaccess file:

# SECURE WP-ADMIN
<FilesMatch "*.*">
 Order Deny,Allow
 Deny from all
 Allow from 123.456.789
</FilesMatch>

Once in place, this code will deny access to all visits from any IP address that is not listed. Simply edit the “Allow from” line with your actual address, and create additional lines for multiple IPs. You can then check that it’s working by visiting your Admin area via proxy service. This is an effective way of protecting your wp-admin directory, but you may prefer using a password-based method instead..

Password-protect

Another option for securing your Admin area involves implementing secondary password protection via basic HTTP authentication. This is an excellent way to lock things down while still enabling access by anyone with the password from anywhere on the Web. To set it up, we need to create a text file with your desired username/password, and then require the username and password via .htaccess file.

For the username/password text file, use a password-generation service and paste the results into a file named “.htpasswd” (without the quotes!) and place it in a secure location on your server, preferably above your “public_html” or root-web directory.

Once the password file is in place, create an .htaccess file for your wp-admin directory and add the following code:

# SECURE LOGIN PAGE
<IfModule mod_auth.c>
 AuthUserFile /full/path/.htpasswd
 AuthType Basic
 AuthName "Password Required!"
 Require username
</IfModule>

After editing the username and full server path to your password file, you’re good to go. Make sure to test that everything is working before cracking a beer.

Important note about protecting wp-admin

As you implement this method, keep in mind that the wp-admin directory is used by a number of plugins, scripts, and even users. For example, if you allow open registration to your visitors, they will be unable to access the registration pages if your admin directory is blocked. Another good example is the Subscribe to Comments plugin, which provides an admin page through which users may unsubscribe to comments. This ain’t gonna work if they can’t access the admin area.

Just the beginning..

Of course, when it comes to the security of your WordPress site, these techniques are merely the beginning. As you continue in your WordPress travels, you will discover many, many more ways to increase the security of your site. By implementing the methods presented in this article during the setup process, you will be strengthening the security of your site’s foundation, providing yourself a solid platform on which to build.

November 9th 2009 is Firefox’s fifth birthday. Firefox and WordPress have grown up next to each other so we’ve always felt a brethren spirit with their team as we work toward the same goal, making the web a better place, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Just out of curiosity, I wondered how Firefox was doing in our browser stats compared to the posts I did in 2008 and 2007.

1. Firefox — 45.7%
2. Internet Explorer — 38.7%
3. Safari — 8.75%
4. Chrome — 5.2%

This is the first time I’ve ever seen Firefox pass IE in market share for a mainstream audience like WordPress.com has.

As you can see, competition in the browser market is still alive and well. Of everything available, Firefox still continues to be my primary browser for every day usage. (And Thunderbird for my email.)

Take a few minutes and wish them a happy birthday.

(The statistics were tabulated from server access logs and include WordPress.com users as well as visitors, as we no longer run Google Analytics across WordPress.com.)

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to utilize the add_meta_box() functionality to add two things to your pages:

1. Excerpt box.
2. Custom taxonomies boxes.

Being able to add these meta boxes to pages isn’t the limit. This tutorial should serve as a starting point. You could do the same for custom post types, links, or anything that fires the do_meta_boxes action hook.

Adding an excerpt box to your page editor

The first thing you should do is open your theme’s functions.php file in your favorite text editor. Paste the following PHP code into it:

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'my_page_excerpt_meta_box' );

function my_page_excerpt_meta_box() {
	add_meta_box( 'postexcerpt', __('Excerpt'), 'post_excerpt_meta_box', 'page', 'normal', 'core' );
}

Now, you’ll be able to add excerpts to your pages, just like posts. This can come in handy with themes that display search results in excerpt form.

Adding custom taxonomies to your page editor

This one will be a bit trickier. I’ll have to assume you’ve created a custom taxonomy specifically for pages. If you’re unfamiliar with this process, you need to familiarize yourself with creating custom taxonomies.

Let’s assume you’ve created a “People” taxonomy for pages. Your custom taxonomy code should look a little like this.

register_taxonomy( 'people', 'page', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'People', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );

The important thing in that line is page. We’ll be adding meta boxes for all taxonomies that have been registered for pages.

Again, we’ll go to our theme’s functions.php file. Paste this PHP code in:

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'my_page_taxonomy_meta_boxes' );

function my_page_taxonomy_meta_boxes() {
	foreach ( get_object_taxonomies( 'page' ) as $tax_name ) {
		if ( !is_taxonomy_hierarchical( $tax_name ) ) {
			$tax = get_taxonomy( $tax_name );
			add_meta_box( "tagsdiv-{$tax_name}", $tax->label, 'post_tags_meta_box', 'page', 'side', 'core' );
		}
	}
}

Once that’s done, you’ll be able to use your page-based custom taxonomies.

Please note that hierarchical taxonomies aren’t going to be available yet. Maybe in WordPress 3.0?

A good move by WordPress

I’m glad WordPress is moving in this direction with some of its functionality. Average Joe might not realize the implications of something as simple as moving code to another file, but developers should rejoice. The reuse of code is a cornerstone of good development practice. By making things more modular, it becomes easier to create new things without rewriting a lot of code.

I’ve shown you how to do these things with pages. Just imagine being able to make these simple and quick changes for custom post types (i.e., content types), essentially having the ability to create any type of site you want with WordPress.

Version 2.3.0

Major overhaul, mainly to extend flexibility so that this plugin could be used on WordPress.com without actual code modification (only actions/filters are used instead to modify it).

• Updated SyntaxHighlighter package to v2.1.364. Highlights of the changelog include:
  • ColdFusion brush (aliases: coldfusion, cf)
  • Erlang brush (aliases: erl, erlang)
  • Objective-C brush (aliases: objc, obj-c)
  • Eclipse theme
  • padlinenumbers parameter. Set it to false for no line number padding, true for automatic padding, or an integer (number) for forced padding.
  • rb alias for Ruby
• Commenters can now use this plugin to post code.
• Plugin’s shortcodes now work inside of the text widget again. Requires WordPress 2.9+ though.
• Overhaul of the TinyMCE plugin that assists in keeping your code sound when switching editor views. Thanks to Andrew Ozz!
• This plugin’s stylesheets are now dynamically loaded. If they aren’t needed, they aren’t loaded.
• Lots of sanitization of shortcode attributes. Invalid keys/values are no longer used.
• Chinese translation thanks to Hinker Liu. Will need updating for v2.3.0.
• New filter to control what shortcodes are registered. Used by WordPress.com to trim down the number of them.
• Saving of user’s settings is now done using register_setting() instead of manually handing $_POST. Yay!
• By default, a post meta is used to mark posts as being encoded using the 2.x encoding format. This is bad for a site like WordPress.com. You can use the new syntaxhighlighter_pre_getcodeformat filter to return 1 or 2 (based on say post_modified). See SyntaxHighlighter:get_code_format() for more details. Don’t forget to remove_action( 'save_post', array(&$SyntaxHighlighter, 'mark_as_encoded'), 10, 2 ); to stop the post meta from being added.
• New syntaxhighlighter_precode filter to modify raw code before it’s highlighted.
• New syntaxhighlighter_democode filter to modify example code on the settings page.

Please leave all comments and feedback on the plugin’s homepage. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Plugin Update: SyntaxHighlighter Evolved v2.1.0
2. SyntaxHighlighter v2.0.0 Released!

WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet

WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet is the new document, of the Visual Cheat Sheet family, that contains a practical reference guide to WordPress 2.8. [Via: WLTC]

WPWorldMap.net

WPWorldMap is a brand new service powered by Google Maps. WPWorldMap allows you to plot your location in the map. You can plot your location and add your details. Click the image above to visit my profile out there.

How to Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog

If you are running multiple blogs, an easy way to spread the word about them is by displaying posts from one of your blogs onto your other blogs. You can quickly do this by displaying the recent posts via an RSS feed.

How to Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress

WordPress offers you a complete range of RSS feeds. You may not need all of these, so why not disable them? With a little code added to your themes.php file, you can quickly and easily disable the feeds.

Tools required to Develop a Wordpress Plugin

If you are into WordPress plugin development, or planning to take a step into it, you'll need to get yourself setup with some tools. WordPress Arena gives you a big list of tools that you can use to develop WordPress plugins.

Our Friend: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Online - Read the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle including Sherlock Holmes

Create a new file called twitter.php file located in your themes folder. Remember to make sure that you change WPBeginner to your username.

<?php
$tw = get_option("twitterfollowerscount");
if ($tw['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() – 3600 ) )
{
$xml=file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=wpbeginner');
if (preg_match('/followers_count>(.*)</',$xml,$match)!=0) {
$tw['count'] = $match[1];
}
$tw['lastcheck'] = mktime();
update_option("twitterfollowerscount",$tw);
}
echo $tw['count'];
?>

Then simply paste this code any where you want in your theme files.

<?php include("twitter.php"); ?>

Now you can display the number of twitter followers on your WordPress site as text.

Source: WPRecipes

Related posts:

1. How to Add a Digg Button in your WordPress using Custom Fields

Simply paste the following code in any WordPress file that you choose. Preferrably in a custom page that you create.

<?php include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/feed.php');
$rss = fetch_feed('http://feeds.feedburner.com/wpbeginner');
$maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(5);
$rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
?>
<ul>
<?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo '<li>No items.</li>';
else
// Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>
<li>
<a href='<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>'
title='<?php echo 'Posted '.$item->get_date('j F Y | g:i a'); ?>'>
<?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Make sure you change the feeds url and the quantity and any other setting that you like.

Source: WordPress Codex

Related posts:

1. How to Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress
2. Control Your RSS Feeds Footer in WordPress
3. 9 Extremely Useful RSS Tricks and Snippets for WordPress

First of, several users requested a way to allow only certain posts to be editable. This is easily done now, with a few lines of code. See examples here.

Secondly, there are two new editable fields: If you’re on a category archive and your theme uses single_cat_title(), you will be able to edit the category title on the spot. The same goes for tags.

Other improvements:

• added $echo parameter to editable_post_meta()
• don’t load CSS or JS if the current user can’t edit any of the fields
• switched from Autogrow to Growfield (fixes IE compatibility)
• added Georgian translation (thanks to Levani Melikishvili)

Thanks to those who suggested improvements and did beta testing.

The Turbo link is in the top right of your WordPress admin

Finding yourself in need of something a little bit faster? WordPress has the ability to turbo charge your experience using a function aptly named “Turbo”.

Turbo uses a browser-extension called Google Gears to store files on your computer locally, and run certain scripts on your computer rather than on your server. This speeds up WordPress’s loading times significantly.

Google Gears is a browser extension that enhances web applications (such as WordPress) by allowing them to store files on your computer and run certain scripts and processes on your local system rather than on the server.

WordPress uses Gears for Turbo mode, which, when enabled, will allow it to store images and web page components and processes in the user’s local computer. This will not only decrease loading times but also reduce unnecessary web traffic. The speed increase will be most noticeable during periods of slow Internet speeds (when loading files and processes from your own computer will have the most significant speed difference from loading them from your server).

How do I enable Turbo in WordPress?

To turbo charge your WordPress, simply click on the “Turbo” link near the top of the administration panel. You will then be prompted to download an extention called “Google Gears” which is required in order for “Turbo” mode to work.

The browser will then need be restarted. Go once again to the administration panel and click again on the “Turbo” link to allow Google Gears to work its magic.

Turbo mode is enabled for both .org (self-hosted) and .com (hosted) WordPress versions.

Hear more about Turbo in WordPress in WordCast 74: Turbo Speed, Captain!

Beginner Tips is a new feature on WordCast, your source for everything WordPress and blogging, delivered to your eyes and ears 24/7. We’d love to get your feedback! Comment on this post below, call our voicemail at 818-924-3388, email us at mail [at] wordcastpodcast [dot] com, or yell at us on Twitter- we’re @WordCast.

The changes are massive and subtle at the same time. A quick breakdown:

• The theme has a completely new set of skins… Each color scheme has been re-defined in a rather systematic manner.
• Two new color schemes (beige and olive) have made it in the zip. v.1.0 of the theme will have all of the core skins (except shades) in 12 schemes: beige, black, blue, brown, gold, green, navy, olive, purple, red, silver and teal. I might add a few more schemes by then, e.g. marine, pink, violet… (opinions welcome)
• The canvas has got a few slight edits, but old skin customizations should continue to work as expected in spite of them. Two exceptions. One is the widget title backgrounds for the boxed skins, which *might* break; and
• The number of inline boxes has changed, from 2, 3, or 4 boxes depending on the width of the layout, to 2, 2, or 3 boxes. That one would break any custom theme if you're using the header or footer boxes bar.
• The typography got some love, resulting in slight changes to the font stacks.
• The classy skin, which is now the default skin, has been completely redone. I dearly hope it'll live up to its name.
• The Custom CSS editor got a slight improvement, in that it now has an "Extra" area where you can add arbitrary CSS. That screen also includes pointers on the theme's CSS selectors.

Expanding on the first and last points… Over the years, vocal Semiologic theme users have been requesting shadows, rounded corners… all sorts of fancy stuff. In the past year, I've mostly been hearing about easier to customize colors and (most importantly) background colors.

These new skins have been redesigned in such a way that they look "the way they should" in modern browsers that understand CSS3, and very acceptable in other browsers (read: IE).

In other words, background images are mostly gone, and it's once again easy to change background colors. As a bonus, the skins load much faster, and the zip's size was trimmed so much that I added 12 more skins.

On the minus side, it means that rounded corners and shadows no longer work in IE (except for the letter template); I can live with that. I hope you can too.

By the way… at the time of writing, I'm still not entirely happy with the boxed and copywriter skins. Basically, I hate the header. I tried white, and it felt empty; a neighboring color, but it looked weird; a saturated, slightly brighter color, but a few (red) looked horrible; and finally an unsaturated, much brighter color, but it lacks some tonic. I'll keep trying to find something. :-)

I’ve also included the init script in wp-footer to avoid an extra HTTP request.

What does this mean for you? No more errors in IE and a slightly faster page load.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Shadowbox JS WordPress Plug-In Passes 100,000 Downloads
• Shadowbox JS WordPress Plugin Updated to Version 3.0.0.2
• WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin Part 3
• Still Looking for WordPress Plugin Maintainers
• 2 More WordPress Plugins Have New Homes

Two months ago we turned on support for rssCloud on WordPress.com. Today we’re announcing some improvements.

Initially rssCloud limited update pings to the IP address that made the notification request. To get around this a domain parameter was suggested, that included a challenge mechanism to verify the notification request. WordPress.com now supports the domain parameter ( and challenge ) for rssCloud notification requests. The WordPress.org rssCloud plugin supports it as well.

An issue that was specific to WordPress.com also came up. Under certain conditions it was possible to get a cached version of an RSS feed that didn’t have the most recent post in it, even after receiving a rssCloud ping that the feed had been updated. Now we make sure the feed cache is updated before sending out an update ping.

Enough of the technical bits, how about some stats! More than 135,000 blogs hosted on WordPress.com have at least one rssCloud notification registration. During the first week of October WordPress.com sent an average of 83,000 update pings per day. Today we average more than 105,000 update pings per day.

We’re just at the beginning of the trend towards push notifications, keep an eye out for more announcements in this area.

October was another busy and productive month. We released Publicize for Yahoo! Updates and Twitter, and upgraded the Theme Viewer for WordPress.com. Coming out of the Automattic team meetup in Québec City, we launched new image templates and mobile themes, and open sourced our After the Deadline proofreader. We also shipped WordPress 2 for iPhone and added support to VideoPress for Ogg, an open video format.

Many of us will be heading out to the Big Apple this month for WordCamp New York, and we hope to see you there!

Here are the stats for October:

• 467,107 blogs were created.
• 6,690,017 posts were published.
• 494,186 new users joined.
• 7,623,730 file uploads.
• 4,986 gigabytes of new files.
• 842 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 9,281,146 comments.
• 7,856,864 logins.
• 1,405,459,558 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,474,457,685 on self-hosted blogs (2,879,917,243 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,509,895 active blogs and 25,386,866 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,600,608,549 words.

More good stuff:

Almost 100 of you heeded the call to get creative with the WordPress logo.

There were 23,458,553 mobile views last month.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched Investor.gov on WordPress.com VIP.

WordPress was cited as one of the leading open source content management systems in the 2009 Open Source CMS Report.

Wired magazine’s digital presence is now run entirely on WordPress.

October WordCamps: WordCamp Spain, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Kyoto, and WordCamp Netherlands.

WordCamps in November: WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Victoria, WordCamp New York, WordCamp Bangkok, WordCamp Mexico, and WordCamp Peru.

It does this by keeping a list of single posts that the user has seen and then checking that list when redirecting.

Usage

Just put this line anywhere in your theme where you want the link to appear.

<?php random_post_link(); ?>

You can specify the text you want on the link like so:

<?php random_post_link('Feeling lucky'); ?>

Episode 74

WordPress 2 now available for iPhone

podPress resuming development, sometime… soon?

WPWorldMap launched

WordPress 2.8.5 released (hear why upgrading now is important in WordCast 68: WordPress Security and Safety)

Celebrity Pressers:

• Babyrazzi
• Mark Cuban
• (both hosted on WordPress.com VIP- check out Harry McCracken’s thoughts in WordCast 63)

WordPress Tip of the Week: WordPress Turbo

Kym’s pick: Custom Login Page 2.0

Dave’s pick: Pretty Link and Pretty Link Pro

When we announced After the Deadline, the proofreading tool used on WordPress.com, many of you asked us to add proofreading to the HTML Editor.

The HTML Editor lets you edit the HTML in your posts and pages directly. It is also very lightweight.

We’ve been hard at work and now you can check your spelling, style, and grammar from the HTML Editor. Here is a screenshot:

The proofreader for the HTML Editor has the same features as the one for the Visual Editor.

Click to check your post for errors.

Click to resume editing your post.

You can learn more about the proofreading feature on our support page.

For self-hosted blogs, the After the Deadline WordPress.org plugin has this new feature as well.

It’s a work in progress but should help other plugin developers who want to interact with the cache.

Suggestions and comments welcome.

PS. If you’re in Cork on November 14th, head along to BarCamp Cork III. I’ll be giving a talk, “How WP Super Cache Works”. It’ll be less technical than this but I’ll answer questions too. Check out the other sessions too.

Related Posts

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• WP Super Cache 0.8.7
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