Jean-Baptiste Jung, mastermind behind the popular sites Cats Who Code, WP Recipes, and the newer Cats Who Blog, reviews our new book, Digging into WordPress!

One of the most powerful comment-editing solutions for WordPress just got a major upgrade. Ajax Edit Comments enables your visitors to “self-edit” their own comments, greatly improving the usability and “coolness” factor for your site. And with the latest upgrade, AEC gets even better, with a revamped popup box, easy “undo” options, comment-blacklist feature, new icon themes, increased security and tons more.

WordPress 2.9 should really be a nice release. Check out this article for some interesting stuff like the_post_image(), the trash can, image editing, oEmbed, and some other cool features and improvements.

Tim Haslam shares a very nice theme called “One Day At A Time” designed to promote awareness of breast cancer. Check out the demo, grab yourself a free copy, and support a good cause.

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

In this one we cover the GPL and how it benefits WordPress, why WP is under the GPL, commercial themes, how the GPL fosters innovation, creates value, and affects themes and plugins.

I certainly learned some stuff about the GPL. Like 1) You can sell/profit from themes that are GPL and 2) Anything built around an existing GPL product must also be GPL.

One of the easiest ways to display your FeedBurner subscriber count number in plain text is to use the Feed Count plugin by Francesco Mapelli. I have been using this plugin at Perishable Press for a long time, and it has always been great. Unfortunately, Francesco’s site seems to be suffering from malicious behavior these days, with tons of spam comments, weird files that are automatically downloaded to your computer, and even one of those scary warnings from Google: “Reported Attack Site,” or whatever it says.

In any case, the Feed Count plugin is too awesome to let disappear into the ether, so it will be hosted here at Digging into WordPress until Francesco’s site checks into a rehab center and cleans itself up. Hopefully that will be sometime soon. In the meantime, to download a squeaky-clean copy of the Feed Count plugin, simply click on the title of this post.

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.