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Yearly archives: 2011

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DigWP Book Winner!

Congratulations to Helen Hou-Sandi for winning a free printed copy of Digging into WordPress. Here’s what she likes most about the WP 3.1 update:

Love the admin bar – makes managing one of thousands of pages/posts on a multisite install a breeze. With some custom adding and subtracting of items and things like the Snack Bar, almost everything I need to do while logged in is one click away.

You can read what other people are saying about WordPress 3.1 in the comments of the announcement post. Again, congrats to Helen for winning – your new book is on the way!

Poll: Love or Hate the WordPress Admin Bar

Poll: Love or Hate the WordPress Admin Bar

As most WordPress users now are aware, WordPress 3.1 includes the new Admin Bar (later renamed to the Toolbar). It’s enabled by default for users of all roles and capabilities, and it provides some quick links to key Admin pages. Overall it seems useful, but there have been some strong opinions on both sides of the fence. So let’s get a better idea of what people think and put it to a vote:

Digging into WordPress 3.1 Update

Digging into WordPress 3.1 Update

We’re stoked to announce that Digging Into WordPress is now updated all fresh for WordPress 3.1. This is the book’s 8th major update, with new material for WordPress 3.1 and extensive revisions and new content throughout.

Without a doubt, the new version of Digging Into WordPress is more focused and current than ever.

6 .htaccess Tricks for Better WP SEO & Security

6 .htaccess Tricks for Better WP SEO & Security

Here are six htacccess tricks that will help improve the security and SEO quality of your WordPress-powered site. We do this using .htaccess to establish canonical URLs for key peripheral files, such as your robots.txt, favicon.ico, and sitemap.xml files. Canonicalization keeps legitimate bots on track, eliminates malicious behavior, and ensures a better user-experience for everyone. On the menu:

Sidebar Login / Register / Password Widget

WordPress alchemist Jeff Morris turned my custom login/register/password code into a fully functional toolkit featuring tons of awesome:

  • Client-Side & Server-Side Validation
  • Use as widget, shortcode, or template tags
  • Simple CAPTCHA with tamper-proof encryption
  • Smart Register Tab

ZB Toolkit also includes a couple of bonus “home-brewed utilities” to make it all sweet. Demo available at the plugin home page in the sidebar – Check it out!

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

What We Learned Publishing Digging Into WordPress

What We Learned Publishing Digging Into WordPress

Digging into WordPress is an entirely self-published book. It’s not that way because we just arbitrarily decided that self publishing was hip and that was what we were going to do. In fact, the plan early on was the opposite. Step one, we thought, was to write the book. So we did that. Then step two became find publisher to publish it, so we asked around. We talked to five (or so) tech book publishers.

Waiting List for DigWP 3.1 Printed Books

As mentioned, the v3.0 printed books are out of stock, but we’re updating DigWP for WordPress 3.1 and plan on printing more books soon. In response to requests, we set up a waiting list for people who want to be notified when the new (3.1) printed books are available.

DigWP Version 3 Sold Out

DigWP Version 3 Sold Out

Just a quick post to let everyone know that printed copies of Digging Into WordPress version 3 are now sold out. The current plan is to update the book for WordPress 3.1 and then print up another batch.

Thank you to everyone who already purchased a printed copy of Digging Into WordPress version 3!

New WP Plugin: User Submitted Posts

Empower your visitors to submit posts and images from anywhere on your site and from anywhere on the page. User-submitted posts may include tags, categories, post title, and author name & URL. Submitted-post status can be set to draft, publish immediately, or publish after some number of approved posts. User Submitted Posts (USP) also handles multiple image uploads, custom URL redirects, and much more. And the easy USP Settings Page makes setting up and fine-tuning a breeze.

New DigWP Theme: Quantify

New DigWP Theme: Quantify

Quantify is a clean, well-styled WordPress theme focused on usability and readability. Quantify is the base theme used for my new design, built with HTML5, liberal doses of CSS3, and a few jQuery snippets thrown in for good measure. Here is the demo, and here is a quick run-down of the features:

Roger Johansson on WordPress

He’s posted a bunch of good, specific, detailed articles on WordPress lately on 456 Berea St. Worth checking out.

How did WordPress win?

Totally agree:

…people feel more comfortable hacking PHP did and still to this day.

Seriously?

…if I had a dollar every time a significant and loyal TypePad and Movable Type customer confided in me that an employee of Automattic cold called them to encourage and entice them to switch to WordPress I would have quit a rich man.

My opinion:

  • Themes are just a folder with of handful of files. That’s easy to understand and play with.
  • The UI is awesome.
Hosting Client Sites on a WordPress Network

Hosting Client Sites on a WordPress Network

Regular updates keep WordPress secure and expand the feature set, ensuring the platform meets both the developer’s and their client’s needs.

The flipside of regular updates is the maintenance of WordPress installs. Once you start maintaining more than a few installs for your clients, keeping both plugins and WordPress up to date can become a bit repetitive.

Ajax Requested Page Return Only Content

Ajax Requested Page Return Only Content

I posted a little tip on CSS-Tricks the other day about how you can load only parts of other pages on a site via Ajax, and how to do that without needing additional HTML wrapping elements to keep it clean. A common criticism of this is that the Ajax request still loads the entire page, using all that bandwidth, it’s just that it only places onto the page the part you specify via CSS selector.

Sometimes it’s hard to have discussions like this without looking at specific use case, but I see where they are coming from. Loading content you aren’t going to use is a waste of bandwidth. It does make progressive Ajax enhancements a lot easier though. And in fact, that’s how our All AJAX theme works.

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