5 Things of Interest to Developers in the New WordPress 2.8

With each major WordPress release, public changes like the new widgets administrative interface usually get all the glory. Here are some new features in WordPress 2.8 that most users won’t even know exist but you will probably care about, if you’re a WordPress developer. Widgets API The new widgets API lets you create widgets by […]

Frequently-Used WordPress Filters and Actions

Edward Dale has grepped through the WordPress plugins repository to find the most frequently-used filters and action hooks. In case you didn’t know, the filters and action hooks API is the glory of WordPress: it’s what makes WordPress so easily modified and extended. Seeing which are the most often used should say something about what […]

WordPress Use Declines Among Top 100 Bloggers

…but just barely. Last year, 34 of the top 100 bloggers used some version of WordPress. This year it’s 32. Movable Type / TypePad use has increased—again, barely—from 23 to 28 of the top blogs. Most of the changes seem to be a result of blogs coming and going from the ranks of the top […]

Paged Comments and the SEO Problem: A Solution

The paged comments feature new in WordPress 2.7 is handy for reducing page size, but it introduces the search engine optimization (SEO) problem of putting the same content on different permalinks, as some have pointed out. That’s because the complete post would appear at all of these permalinks: http://example.com/my-post-permalink/ http://example.com/my-post-permalink/comment-page-1/ http://example.com/my-post-permalink/comment-page-2/ My solution in this […]

WordPress Themes and Vagueness

Recently there’s been a kerfuffle in the WordPress blogosphere over the fact that WordPress.org suddenly removed 200 themes from the Extend repository, in order to make all themes comply with this apparently new stipulation: Themes for sites that support “premium” (non-GPL or compatible) themes will not be approved. Alister Cameron has written a post that’s […]

Monthly Archives Idea

Charles Stricklin, WordPress Podcast guru, had an interesting idea for arranging monthly WordPress archives, which is basically to make an archives page like this.

Beware Upgrading to a Fake WordPress 2.6.4

The Register mentions an attack on WordPress blogs that tells users to upgrade to a bogus 2.6.4 version of WordPress. This attack seems to be taking advantage of the security vulnerability that necessitated WordPress 2.6.3, whereby if an attacker could get control of an RSS feed that you publish on your blog (for example using […]

Happy Halloween

WordPress 2.7 Theme Comments How-To

Otto has a good tutorial on adjusting a WordPress theme to take advantage of the upcoming comment features in WordPress 2.7, including comment threading and paging. Keep in mind that WordPress 2.7 is still under development, and these features could change somewhat before 2.7 is released.

Does Google Discourage the use of WordPress Permalinks?

A recent blog entry by Google’s Search Quality Team members Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski somewhat confusingly gives the impression that Google does not like WordPress-style permalinks. Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all? That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent […]