As part of their ongoing series, WPEngineer has published a cool post that explains how to add new menus to the admin bar coming in WordPress 3.1. In the example, Frank adds a Codex Search button to the admin bar which is pretty convenient! He covers the function add_menu() and it’s various parameters as well. In the comments of that post however, Latz brings up an interesting point.
Oh great, now every plugin will put a menu in the admin bar, Next stop: a plugin preventing others from cluttering the admin bar.
While it’s pretty funny to think about the admin bar containing menus for all sorts of different plugins, it’s a potential problem that users may have to deal with in the future. Hopefully, plugin authors are diligent with not adding a menu to their options page as part of the default package of a plugin. For certain plugins, the idea works well but not for all of them.
So while this is a neat little tutorial on how to add menus to the admin bar, are you worried that plugin developers may take this too far?
One of the biggest problems facing users of WordPress today especially when it comes to themes is malware. I’ve seen my fair share of websites using themes whose functions.php file contains base64 encrypted code that when decrypted, shows spam links. However, there also a number of themes that have code within them that installs malware onto the web server. After Chip Bennett, one of the Theme Team Reviewers noticed at least one of his themes were being made available on a website that claimed to have free WordPress themes, he discovered that something was not right. All of the themes available on the website contained some sort of malware that would be installed onto the users site once enabled.
Otto does a great job going in-depth and explaining exactly how this particular piece of theme malware works. Most of the explanation is over my head but it gives you a sense of not only how desperate but also how clever these spam kings are getting in having their way with your website. This is why we preach that you always get your free themes from the WordPress.org Theme Repository because each theme is now reviewed with human eyes to make sure none of that garbage gets into the repository.
The theme repository contains almost 1,300 themes but quite a few of them look like they were designed in early 2000. So I can understand why users would want to expand their reach and check out the wider marketplace of freely available themes but just remember, when you download and use a theme that is outside of the repository, you do so at your own risk.
As an aside, this video which was produced by Leland of Themelab.com provides a great explanation as to why you want to stay away from using Google when searching for freely available themes.
Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider both whom are in attendance for the LeWeb 10 conference were recently interviewed by TechCrunch reporter, Alexia Tsotsis. The interview doesn’t go into much detail but we do get a glimpse as to how things are going for Automattic as a company. WordPress.com is getting about 300 million unique pageviews a month from 30 million publishers that make up 10% of the websites on the web. In terms of revenue, Automattic is breaking even but as a company, they make a little under $1 million per month with all services combined. TechCrunch figures that this equates to $10 million a year. Perhaps it’s just me but if that is correct, that number seems pretty low considering how large WordPress.com is.
However, the best part of the interview comes down to the final question regarding any potential exit potential for the company. Their response: “Our goal’s not to be acquired“.
There are thousands of themes available for WordPress. Today, the largest collection of WordPress themes can still be found through the official Theme Directory and its Tag Filter, but two new directories have brought some new concepts to the plate when it comes to finding your next WordPress theme.
WPCandy’s Theme Finder offers an elimination-style overview of available themes utilizing color, number of columns, and price (free v.s paid) as factors.
Theme Garden’s Layout Browser offers a very comprehensive directory of themes based strictly on layout.
While WPCandy’s Theme Finder is filled with mostly premium themes and Theme Garden’s Layout Browser is restricted solely to their theme marketplace, the two bring something new to a field that was long thought to be well saturated by the official Theme Directory.
What do you think of these new theme directories? Do you think that some of these features should be added to WordPress’ official Theme Directory?
If you’re writing or editing your new WordPress plugin or theme, and you’re in need of a handy repository of cool and popular code snippets, WordPress Snippets is the place for you!
Let’s pretend that you needed a way to identify logged in users. You could hunt through the Codex for this function, or go to WordPress Snippets and quickly find this straight forward snippet.
The incredibly simple WordPress Snippets is currently packed with forty-six useful code snippets, it appears to be growing steadily, and feedback and suggests are welcome.
So, you’ve got WordPress, Akismet, and more spam comments than you can keep track of. Wouldn’t you like to know which posts are drawing the most spam attention? Well, Ozh has the perfect script for you!
Simply upload the script to your WordPress root directory and enjoy a listing of your most prominent spam magnets, complete with “a pretty interactive pie chart.” Use the script to track down and close off your spam magnets, research the keywords catching the spammers’ attention, or just do it for fun.
When I ran this script on my blog, I found two spam magnets that shouldn’t have had open comments in the first place, and all of my posts mentioning the WordPress Support Forums were drawing the most attention from spammers.
Here are the results from Weblog Tools Collection (spam comments are deleted on a regular basis, so this only includes the most recent spam comments):
If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.
Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.
To Lorelle, “a mind blowing WordPress Plugin is one that breaks the rules. It is unique and original in its implementation, and pushes WordPress. It might not be a Plugin that everyone must have on their site. It might not be a Plugin that even interests you. What these will do is to get you to look at the incredible diversity of Plugins available.”
Her recap not only briefly covers the topics discussed during her session, but she also lists all of the plugins that were featured, and that list is well worth exploring. Even if you think your blog couldn’t possibly use any more plugins, you might find something that you (or rather your blog) just can’t live without.
The 300,000 Biggest Websites, Visualized With Their Icons: Gizmodo had an interesting post today about a chart/image that contains the favicons of the 300,000 most trafficked websites on the Interwebs. I thought the interactive version was interesting and found Weblog Tools Collection completely hidden right under the lower left corner of the Blogger icon. The traffic data came from Alexa and it was put together by Nmap.
Lessons Learned From Maintaining a WordPress Plug-In: Joost de Valk’s list of seven lessons learned from writing and maintaining a WordPress plugin. I was nodding my head all the while I was reading through them. Some of these are applicable to the general WordPress plugin developer while others are more particular to the individual project that Joost was working on but almost all of them are good advice. All in all, I think this is a good read for both seasoned as well as newbie WordPress plugin developers.
