Vote on your favorites. I like the brownie bites!

WordPress plugin for Google Analytics users by Remy Sharp that will start tracking visitors to your site with JavaScript disabled. This is an ever-increasingly important statistic as JavaScript becomes more and more vital to websites. Early adopters of HTML5 know that some JavaScript is needed for Internet Explorer to get the CSS to work properly. Knowing your JavaScript enabled stat may help you decide if you are ready for HTML5.

WordPress has more than 1,000 action and filter hooks.

Function has updated their popular approach to creating custom write panels in WordPress. Now more efficient and more expandable. Write panels are basically ways to add custom fields that are a lot more user friendly than the standard custom fields area.

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

Sometimes you need to see what’s wrong with a WordPress install, and you need to see it fast. I’ve had a set of hacks around for a while to do that, but finally started combining it into a WordPress Debug Theme. This theme is quite simple for now, as it only does a few things, but does them quite effectively.

Visualizes for you all kinds of important data about the page you are looking at. All kinds of fun for us WordPress nerds.

404 link removed: https://yoast.com/wordpress-debug-theme/

Steve Taylor takes PHP error-logging to the next level by making it easy for WordPress users to display the latest errors as a widget on the WordPress dashboard. Just drop the script into your functions.php file, configure a few variables, and enjoy tracking of your site’s PHP errors from your WP dashboard. Works great as-is, and looks like a great starting point for further development into plugin format. Update 2024/05/01: This linked article has been taken offline.

Justin Tadlock takes WordPress user-management to the next level with his new “Members” Plugin. Members improves WordPress’ content-management capabilities by providing some serious “fine-grain” control over the users of your site. The plugin features many functional “components,” which may be selected according to your specific needs. From editing roles and content permissions to widgets, shortcodes, and template tags, Justin’s new Members plugin looks like the ideal solution for your user-management needs.

I’ve always used plugins for breadcrumbs, but of course rolling your own is always appealing. Gilbert Pellegrom shows us how to do it with our own custom functions.

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

Over on CSS-Tricks, I describe a problem I had of trying to create an RSS feed of pages that were buried two deep under a parent page. The standard query_posts can’t go two levels deep with pages, or accept multiple parent pages to run the query. Instead I had to create multiple feeds from a custom template and stitch them together.

Web developer and WordPress enthusiast Peter Wilson explains an improved method for including WordPress’ comment-reply.js. His method “checks if the visitor is browsing either a page or a post, if comments are open for the entry, and finally, if threaded comments are enabled. If all of these conditions are met, the JavaScript required for threaded comments is added.”

Nathan Rice shares an clever technique to serve your IE6 visitors the Default WordPress theme (or any theme, for that matter). He even wraps it all up into a nice plugin that you can use for your site. I think this is a good middle-ground between completely ignoring IE6 and breaking your back trying to accommodate it. You could even design an “all-purpose” theme for IE6 to streamline new site development. Drag, drop and done. (404 link removed)

Use the WP-DB-Backup Plugin, have it send a copy to your email. This is what we do on DiW and it works great. Part of security is having clean and recent copies of your data in case of failure.

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

WordPress is like Windows, it’s a huge target so hackers are extra-motivated to exploit it.There has been a bunch of brew-ha-ha over WordPress security over the last week or so. It started off a few weeks ago with a really easy URL hack to reset the Admin’s password. That ballooned into a far nastier exploit allowing a new admin to be created who could totally hose a site. Matt Mullenweg does a little damage control here by essentially saying the best way to stay secure is to stay updated to the latest version. I wholeheartedly agree, and think that that step is just a part of a complete security breakfast (the upcoming book will have lots on security). I have probably nearly 20 WordPress sites I maintain and every single one of them was at 2.8.4. It’s so trivially easy to upgrade, It’s a no-brainer.

WordPress is a CMS out of the box, but sites that are really deep in page templates and hierarchies can benefit from some help on the back end for managing them all. This roundup of plugins do just that.

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.