I think WP Candy is really killing it lately being a great source of breaking quality WordPress news, interviews, and other articles. Now they have an iPhone app they developed in-house to bring all the content to you that way. They are rolling it out “reverse” style, where for two weeks it’s $5.99 then later it drops to $0.99, so it’s an opportunity for the community to opt-in to paying more to support the site, which is neat, especially considering their crazy no advertising policy.

MediaElements.js is an open source jQuery-based project (which I use and like) which allows you to use HTML5 video and audio in any browser all the way back to IE 6. It tests if the browser supports HTML5. If yes, it uses that. If no, it falls back to displaying the media through Silverlight or Flash. Regardless of what it uses, the UI is always consistant.

Now available as a WordPress plugin to make it even easier. Just use simple shortcodes to link up the video and specify what options you want (e.g. autoplay, fullscreen, etc).

Congratulations to all 10 of our Holiday Giveaway Contest Winners! Thank you to everyone who entered (click through to see who won)!

Without touching a line of code, you can harness the power of Ajax to boost performance, improve usability, and fill your site with win.

I created a course for Lynda.com which is an 4.5 hour, in-depth step-by-step tutorial course on creating a WordPress theme from start to finish. We start from nothing and consider our clients needs and CMS capabilities, then to go Photoshop, then to HTML/CSS, then to a WordPress theme. We go a bit further talking about topics like custom fields, JavaScript, and plugins. There is a lot here! Lynda.com subscriptions start at $25/month with no long-term commitment.

WordPress is biggest on all accounts, but when you look at dollars spent, WordPress is only just about 50%.

If you’re looking for some great plugins to bring more interactivity and user participation to your WordPress-powered site, check out my guest-post over at ProBlogger – it covers Google Search, Star Ratings, Favorite Posts, and other techniques to empower your visitors.

I’ve worked on sites in the past where I needed to get two values out of a custom field. For example, I was creating an eCommerce site where some products had options. The options were in a dropdown menu. Each option in the dropdown had a value for what you actually see, and then another value for how that option effected the price. When entering a custom field, I often did it like this:

New WordPress-only snippets repository. Nice clean design, good functionality, quality content (like this gem). This one should be a winner.

Nicolas Gallagher:

How to create a custom Tweet Button for WordPress using the bit.ly and Twitter APIs. The HTML and CSS is completely customisable and there is no need for JavaScript. PHP is used to automatically shorten and cache the URL of a post, fetch and cache the number of retweets, and populate the query string parameters in the link to Twitter.

WPCandy is back under Ryan Imel and it’s been loaded with good stuff lately, including this great run-through of how to use Chris Shiflett’s URL sentences idea in WordPress.

digwp.com/thinks/this-is-a-cool-idea

404 Link Removed

Peter Wilson walks us through making sure print stylesheets are loaded after the rest of the page is loaded, so they don’t hold up page rendering.

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

Pardon my ignorance here, but Rasmus starts talking about latency and concurrent requests about 16:30. He then mentions “one line of code” installation of something that sounds like “aqua code cache” that gives WordPress a 3x performance boost in response time / number of transactions per second. Anyone knows what he’s talking about there, shoot a note and I’ll update this permalink with the info. He goes on to talk about much more hardcore-PHP-nerd WordPress optimization stuff.

The scoop via Joost Schuur:

Rasmus is talking about an ‘opcode cache’. It essentially caches the parsed PHP scripts in memory. That means PHP doesn’t have to read it from disk or even convert the humanly readable PHP script code into executable machine code (opcode). The one he’s referring to is APC, which is likely going to be included in the next big release of PHP. Xcache is another popular kind. I run it on my site and got about a 3x performance increase on page request server times, so the numbers add up. The W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin has the option of using Xache or APC to keep popular pages in memory via opcode caching.

Just a reminder that WordPress version 3.0.1 is available, so take a few moments and update your website. Staying current is one of the best ways to keep things running smooth, safe and secure. The new version addresses about 50 minor issues and helps to make WordPress 3.0 even better.

Amazingly, WordPress 3.0 was downloaded nearly 11 million times in 42 days. So HUGE congrats and thanks to the entire WordPress crew for an amazing piece of software.