WordPress Weekly Episode 6

This week on Episode 6, we finally see WordPress 2.5 feature froze which is a standard practice for all versions of WordPress. A live WP 2.5 demo site has been made available to the public in case you want to see what you have to look forward to, WP.com intros summarized stats for the stat junkies, Yahoo interviews Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com and discusses a variety of topics. Movable Type does WordPress in a weird sort of way. Your WordPress Weekly Digest update and some tips on making sure that your WordPress plugin using Jquery does not conflict with other plugins using Jquery. Last but not least, some WordPress beginners lingo.

Panel Members:

Andrew Rickmann: Long time user of Wordpress who has molded themes, plugins and hacks within the WordPress code. Fun with Wordpress is Andrew’s solution to putting all those thoughts in one place, and giving something back to the community.

Catch his work at FunWithWordPress

Kaspars Dambis - Author of the WordPress themes Morning Racer, Agneka Simple, Sans-serif Racer and Times Racer. Kaspars is also a WordPress plugin developer.

View his work at Konstrucktors

Jeremy Clarke - Jeremy Clarke is a PHP, HTML, CSS and WordPress hacker from Montreal. He works on Global Voice

He blogs at SimianUprising.com

David Peralty - A man who seemingly needs no introduction, but I’m going to give him one anyways. David is a very busy man who has love/hate relationships with WordPress. He currently is the marketing guy for SplashPressMedia and has coded over 100 themes for WordPress.

You can catch all of David’s blogging related material here BloggingPro

Show Notes:

WordPress.com Introduces Summarized Stats - WordPress.com users can rejoice as they now have a summarized version of their stats available for consumption. The summarized results includes detailed information such as referrers, search terms, and clicks. Andy also let’s us know that there is a refresh time limit of 180 seconds or 3 minutes before the data within your stats is updated. Definitely an awesome update for all of us stat junkies.

WordPress 2.5 Now Under Feature Freeze - No more new features will be added. Concentration will be on fixing bugs, polishing up the new admin design, and finishing off the new features that are already in. We still have some styling work to do on the new design, but the big changes are already in.

Yahoo Speaks With Matt Mullenweg - Yahoo had a chance to interview Matt Mullwenweg which allowed us to get some good information related to WordPress 2.5, PHP4 versus PHP 5 and some other nifty tidbits.

MovableType Plugin Mimics WordPress Dashboard - What started off as a joke, has now turned into an excellent proof of concept that the MT backend could have an alternative interface with little effort involved. This thing looks like an almost exact replica of the WordPress administration area. If I didn’t know any better, I would of thought WordPress invaded Movable Type.

WordPress 2.5 Demo Site Launched - Chris Johnston has announced the availability of a public WordPress 2.5 demo site.The other way of seeing WordPress 2.5 is by manually installing an SVN or Subversion installation of WordPress which requires time, and effort. This makes it painless for end users. Be sure to check in from time to time each week to see the progress.

Building A Web App In 45 Minutes - Matt Mullenweg will be participating in a panel featuring Kevin Rose from Digg.com and other web app superstars at the Future Of Web Apps conference being held Feb 28 - March 1st. However, Erick Schonfeld has yet to decide what he wants these panel members to build and is conducting a poll which you can vote on to help decide which app should be built.

Kaspars Of Konstruktors.com Shares Some Jquery Tips - Kaspars lets us know of a few tips that would help out plugin authors planning on using Jquery within their plugin. There is a certain Jquery line of code that you need to know about to prevent conflicts with other plugins also using Jquery.

Weekly Digest For Feb 4th - Feb 10th 2008 - As 2.5 is now under feature freeze, it’s time for the WP Dev team to really crank out the bug fixes. Here are some things worth noting in this weeks diget

• Renaming of is_front() to is_front_page() to avoid conflict with bbPress (#3682)
• Update to jQuery 1.2.3 ([6757]).
• Introduction of the ability to have random post ordering (#4617).
• Reversion to full content, including content after the more tag, for feeds (#2582).
• A more informative error message when theme files are not writeable (#5783).
• Removal of gzip_compression(). Leave it to the server to handle (#4342).

www versus non-www: On the WordPress Support Forums, clarification on the issue of www to non-www has been given. WordPress 2.3 offers “canonical URLs” which redirect www to non-www or vice-versa. Go to Options > General and set the URL to whatever you want it to be, with or without the www and WordPress will automatically redirect visitors and search engines to the correct URL and permalink.

WordPress Beginners Lingo - Earlier this week I wrote up a post the described various WordPress terms that people who are just starting out in the world of WordPress may hear about, but may not know the definitions to. The lingo post contains 8 words and I believe I will be writing a part 2 of this post containing even more.

WordPress Tips Of The Week:

Andrew Rickmann - If you are running more than one local version of WordPress and want to standardise your local theme and plugin folders so you can test them all without copying them to different folders you can make some minor changes and use a quick plugin to do that.

I have written more about it on my blog at the link below:

http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/2008/02/09/testing-on-mulitple-versions/

Kaspars Dambis - Kaspars tip of the week dealt with semantic blog posts. Users should use the heading tags as well as using a proper title tag when inserting a link to your article.

Jeremy Clarke - About my tip of the week, people can find the codex Firefox search bar plugin at this page, which has the search results for searchbars related to wordpress. The one I recommended is called “WordPress Codex”, though “Wordpress Support” might also be useful. On that page you can just click on the name of the searchbar thing and it will install like a FireFox plugin. While people are there they should see if there are other sites they want in the search bar. I love it for everything. (the php.net manual one is very useful for coders and who doesn’t need the youtube one?)

Jeremy also posted a video link which highlights some of the work that the folks from Happy Cog have done. How Not To Get Noticed

David Peralty - David recently helped a friend migrate from Typepad to WordPress while keeping their permalink slugs in tact. David explains the tactics he used and why the technique was successful. A good read if I must say so myself. View the article here Migrating Post Slugs From Typepad To WordPress

Jeffro2pt0 - If you notice that many of your posts that are older than one month are attracting spam bots, login to your admin panel and browse to the plugins tab, then click on Akismet configuration. Check mark the box that describes the option to automatically discard spam comments on entries more than a month old and click the save button. This has really cleaned up my Akismet spam filter.

Listener Participation:

So how can you be a part of the show? Well, there are a number of ways. The easiest way is to create an account on Talkshoe.com. Then, download and install their client software. The Talkshoe software serves as a bridge of communication between the host, and his/her listeners. The software contains a chat room as well as phone number information to call into the show.

However, you do not need to install the software in order to listen to the show live. Friday at 9PM EST, look on the front page of Talkshoe.com or click on the LIVE NOW button and look for the Wordpress Weekly show. Instead of clicking on the JOIN IN button, click underneath where it says LISTEN ONLY. This will tune you into the live stream.

If you want to call in to the show via telephone, Skype, etc., use your phone to call 724-444-7444 and follow the audio instructions. *Note* In one of the recent updates to Talkshoe, anonymous calling is now supported. This means you can call in and participate without the need to create a Talkshoe account. However, if you have a Talkshoe account, your registered name will show up within the Talkshoe client letting others know who is speaking.

You can also use SIP clients such as ProjectGizmo or X-Lite. For example, when I use X-Lite to dial in, I type in 123@66.212.134.192 and then follow the audio directions.

Remember this information as it will be required when you want to dial into the show.

Talkcast Name: WordPress Weekly

Talkcast ID: 34224

Phone Number: 724-444-7444

This would also be a good time to remind you that Talkshoe now has a web client that you can access without the need to download and install anything. The web client makes it as easy as pie to participate in the show.