New Plugins

HDLNS Today

Automatically insert HDLNS headlines as a widget using the post date.

Strip Ad

Add a Strip Ad above the header to your blog.

Code Comments

Automatically Escape HTML Entities of Code Fragments in Comments

Updated Plugins

Top 10

Count page views on posts and display a list of top posts by page views.

Contextual Related Posts

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed.

Where did they go from here?

This plugin will show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page. This is similar to Amazon’s product pages which state “Readers who have bought this, also bought”

WP-Table Reloaded

This plugin enables you to create and manage tables in the admin-area of WordPress. You can then show them in your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode.

WatchCount.com WordPress Plugin (WCCWPPI)

The WatchCount.com WordPress Plugin (WCCWPPI) is a free plugin that allows you to display Most Popular eBay items and auctions in real-time, directly on your blog. You can also display eBay items from any particular seller.

Shout Stream

Shout Stream plugin aims to be the bridge of your wordpress and your stream (shoutcast or icecast).

In New York last month I did a fireside chat with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts which is now available online. The video features myself, Liz Danzico, and the back of Jason Santa Maria’s head.

Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too in NY Times. I eat lots of beef and BBQ because I heard cows have a big carbon impact.

First off, Merry Christmas everybody! I’ve been doing some tweaking here around ma.tt. The biggest thing you’ll notice is that I’ve imported about 12,000 photos from my old Gallery-powered gallery, which was broken since I upgraded to PHP5, into core WordPress, and you can see them under this category. I even managed to bring over people tags and comments from the proprietary system I had written. I feel so much safer now that all this data is in WordPress, I know it’ll still work in 10 years. I might have to change how “random” works, though, to exclude the really old photos, because they can be fairly embarrassing.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! from Flickr

We would like to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Weblog Tools Collection team and our advertisers.

Be safe, have fun and be sure to spread the cheer!

Merry Christmas! One of the things that was discussed at the core commit team meetup was release scope (and scope creep). Now that 2.9 is out and it’s time to start thinking about 3.0, we think it would be appropriate to stop and take a breath before diving in, and make a plan in advance. What winds up happening is that during each release cycle a few new features are selected for inclusion, but then right up until feature freeze (and/or beta cycle), people keep adding feature requests, patches for enhancements, and ongoing bug reports. This means each release winds up getting pushed out later than planned, and with so many things going in per release, it becomes harder to catch new bugs.

The as-long-as-we’re-not-in-freeze-yet model isn’t working. People wind up waiting months longer for new features they want, like Trash and Image Editing, because we’re still adding other things and then we need to test them all. If we kept the releases smaller feature-wise, we could push out the new stuff sooner (3 releases per year is the goal) and have more focused beta testing, making the releases themselves better. It’s hard, because everyone has their pet features and fixes, and if there’s a patch, why not get it in this release rather than waiting? Sometimes people complain that a patch has been waiting to be committed for weeks or months, but what no one ever seems to bring up is that sometimes patches introduce new bugs, and the more we add at once, the harder it is to keep it all well-tested on various platforms, in different hosting environments, etc. So. What’s our proposal?

We take a page from the world of project management and we make a project plan before we jump into the dev cycle. We let everyone propose features and enhancements, and we choose a limited number to include in 3.0 (in this case we need to be especially stringent, because the merge of WordPress and WordPress MU will automatically mean a lot of work) and set a realistic release date that we stick to. We create a tentative set of features for the next two releases, to be re-evaluated at the beginning of the next cycle, so that people know the community is committed to certain features, as opposed to the vague “future release” label we now use for everything not included in the current version. We fix bugs that are reproducible and affect a large number of users before focusing on edge case bugs or bugs that haven’t been well-described or reproduced. We stop diverting our attention from agreed-upon goals when a “squeaky wheel” decides we should all be focused on something else. There are always things that pop up unexpectedly, but we need to do a better job of restraining ourselves when it comes to trying to sneak things into the current release (I include myself in this, of course…as a UX person I always wish we could do everything all at once!).

As an open source project, we accomplish more when we work together than we do following individual agendas, and we need to keep our project focused on commonly-agreed-upon goals instead of following tangents whenever a community member starts to take us on one, regardless of whether it’s to follow a cool idea that everyone loves or a suggestion based on a personal agenda, and regardless of whether it’s a newbie who doesn’t know any better or a frequent contributor or committer who has a strong opinion and a loud voice (so to speak). The issue here is that it’s easy to get distracted, so we need to create a structure that will help us keep moving forward instead of getting sidetracked. We need to keep Trac clean for the current dev cycle so that it includes confirmed features and bug reports, and all new feature suggestions go into a different milestone.

We think it’s at least worth a try. When we re-start the weekly IRC dev chats in 2010, the first meeting will be to talk about the scope of 3.0. When we’ve got a general agreement about what will be included, we’ll create the appropriate Trac tickets, and punt tickets for non-3.0 feature requests/enhancements to a future release so we can stay focused. New bug reports will still come in to the current milestone. It’s going to be hard. There are at least a dozen new features that I feel like we’ve pushed back multiple times that I’d like to see in core, but for this experiment, I’m just going to keep reminding myself, “You can do that with a plugin!”

Sound off on the features you would like to see in version 3.0.

blutheme

Feature rich theme with support for thumbnails, feedburner, twitter, widgets and gravatars

Crispp

Crispp is a minimal theme with clean lines that lets visitors focus on your content. A separate administrative section allows you to change the color scheme however you like. The theme is very flexible

Insanitious

Fluid width two-column theme with widgetized sidebar, gravatar and comment ready

Dusty City

Dusty City is a WordPress Theme with 5 Sidebar / Widget positions. One below the navigation, one left and right, one between them, and one at the bottom. If you combine the Theme with the Side Posts Plugin, you will have a great flexible Magazine Theme. There is also an Option Page to populate the Footer. Page in German

Santa

SantaTheme is a WordPress Theme for Christmas with one Sidebar, and one Footerbar for Ads or whatever Widget you want to place there. There is also an Option Page to populate the Footer of the Blog.

Elegant Blog

Elegant Blog is meant to be a go-to theme for a content driven site, that aims to eliminate the need for some common plugins and be good to go right out of the box. There’s 7 colour schemes available to choose from and an easy to edit css file to add custom colours. There’s also built-in support for Twitter, various social bookmarking sites, and Google Analytics.

A few days back, Jeff had told you about WordPress 2.9.1 being around the corner. The WordPress team has worked hard to get it out of the doors and a beta version of WordPress 2.9.1 is now available for downloads. It fixes bugs with scheduled posts and pingbacks which some users had been facing, due to a bug in curl.

The new version is not immediately available for downloads through the automatic upgrade, however you can download the WordPress Beta tester plugin and go to Tools->Upgrade and perform an automatic upgrade.

Please remember that this is not the final WordPress 2.9.1 release, so you might want to wait for another day or two for a stable release, if you are not comfortable using beta versions.

While paying for plugins is nothing new, I’m predicting that by the end of 2010, there will be a large assortment of plugins for WordPress that will be available for purchase. As we wind down 2009, I’m already beginning to see the trend in action with at least 3 of my 31 installed plugins switching to a paid model. Each person is doing something a little different but the end result is the same. I have to pay to keep using it.

Now I don’t particularly have a problem with plugin authors charging for support or for services around the plugin but I’m seeing the plugin being bundled as part of the purchase. So in a way, you’re not only paying for the plugin, you’re paying for access to support. In most cases, the free plugin becomes dormant and I’m forced to either stick with what works until a version of WordPress is released which breaks the plugin or I pony up the cash to receive upgrades. Shopp, GravityForms and now Ajax Edit Comments each have their own repository server that enables customers to receive upgrades. This is all part of the deal.

I remember a post a year or so ago asking people what would they pay for that they currently did’nt have to. WordPress was one of the things people would pay for if it had a price tag. My question is slightly different. What if every plugin you use on your site requires you to pay money before you get access to upgrades, support, etc? Personally, I don’t mind paying for great work and I can part with my cash for three or five plugins but not for 31.

Not to put down the work of those making a business out of their plugin but something to keep in mind is that as it stands, plugins hosted in the WordPress.org plugin repository contain no price tags. However, some of them do have links, wording, and such to up-sell services or the pro version of the plugin. I don’t have a problem with that as long as the slimmed down version is not crippled to the point where it doesn’t make sense to use the lower end version.

If the authors of the plugins I use on my own site all decided to ditch the free version in favor of a paid model in order to help them make a living, that is their decision to make. However, one of the greatest assets of the WordPress plugin world is that there is an abundant amount of choices for most tasks. Some better than others.

My hope is that the WordPress plugin repository will continue to be free of pay-for plugins. This will insure that I will always have a place to browse an assortment of free alternatives. If the plugin repository were to ever allow commercial plugins to be listed alongside free ones, I’m thinking that the commercial choices would far outweigh the free ones. I really don’t want to go down the road I traveled with Joomla where anytime I wanted to have cool functionality added to my site, I had to pay for it.

Is this a trend you also see in 2010 or do you see something else? Any thoughts on the matter?