Articles written by Austin Matzko for Pressed Words

Austin Matzko is a web developer living in Boston, Massachusetts. He blogs and helps out with WordPress development as “filosofo.”

You can contact him at austin@pressedwords.com

WordPress 2.6.1 Released

Bug-fix version 2.6.1 of WordPress has been released. it’s been a while since I’ve seen a release announcement say “You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.”

Previews of the Default BuddyPress Theme

Andy Peatling, who works on BuddyPress for Automattic, has posted screenshots of the new default theme that will part of BuddyPress. In case you didn’t know, BuddyPress is a “WordPress MU Based Social Network Platform,” which in other words means that it’s similar to Facebook, except open source.

WordPress Admin Bar Updated

Viper007Bond has released version 3.0.0 of his WordPress admin bar, which puts a navigation menu for admin pages at the top of each external WordPress page, for logged-in users. By default, this admin bar looks a lot like the one at WordPress.com, but it (optionally) includes all available admin menu items, and there are a […]

Remove Microsoft Word Garbage from WordPress Posts, by Default

Dave Addey has released a compact WordPress plugin (about 10 lines long) that enables by default the TinyMCE feature that “cleans up” Microsoft Word markup. Typically, if you paste content from Word into WordPress’s WYSIWYG, TinyMCE, you get a ton of unsightly markup, such as font and alignment tags, which can wreak havoc on your […]

TechCrunch: Do as We Say, Not as We Do with WordPress Upgrades

A recent TechCrunch post makes it sound as if WordPress security releases are desperately following close on the heels of widespread attacks. The author, Nik Cubrilovic, then seems to suggest that open source applications are particularly at risk: Hackers are taking advantage of the open-source nature of the software to analyze the source code and […]

Zero-Day WordPress Exploit? Probably Not

The blogosphere has been all a-Twitter about a WordPress security vulnerability. Known as the “AnyResults.net” hack, it redirects blog hits with Google as the referrer to one of several spam sites. According to Donncha O Caoimh of Automattic, this exploit took advantage of a vulnerability that has been fixed in the latest stable version of […]

Plurk Plugin for WordPress

Ricardo González has released a new WordPress plugin that widgetizes your Plurk status messages, so you can make them appear in your blog’s sidebar, for example. Or you can call <?php plurk_messages(“username”); ?> directly to make them appear anywhere in your theme. In case you don’t know, Plurk is like Twitter, except that it has […]

Gravatar Now Supports Transparent Images

Since Automattic took over Gravatar.com, one thing users have repeatedly asked for is to be able to have transparent Gravatars. Now that feature has returned.

Yahoo! Answers Philippines Uses WordPress

… as WordPress Philippines points out. Oddly enough, Yahoo!’s blog is using WordPress 2.3.1, even though it started in May and WordPress 2.5 was released in March.

Matt Mullenweg on PHP 5, WordPress Versions at Greek Blogger Camp

At the end of May, Matt Mullenweg spoke at the 2008 Greek Blogger Camp. Mullenweg posted some of his pictures from the camp, and you can view a video of his talk here. I thought he mentioned a number of points of special interest to WordPress users and developers: PHP 5: The PHP developers are […]