The WordPress Podcast

1. Automattic CEO and WordPress project leader Matt Mullenweg was a guest on episode 17 of the WordPress Weekly podcast with Jeff Chandler, and during the show, I asked Matt why WordCamp San Francisco, scheduled this upcoming August 16th at the Mission Bay Conference Center on the campus of the University of California at San Francisco, would be only one day instead of two, as it had been in previous years, as well as the overlap between it and the New Media Expo.
2. WP Comment Remix is an entrant into the current Weblog Tools Collection plugin competition and it promises to bring “a plethora of new options and features to WordPress.” Ronald Huereca reviewed it at Weblog Tools Collection Videos. Some of the features it includes are:
   1. Reply and quote links for commenters - You can add a Reply link to each comment, which, when clicked, adds “@OriginalPoster”, and links it to the anchor of that comment. Also, clicking the Quote link has a similar action to the Reply link, but it adds the entire comment in a blockquote tag.
   2. Comment Ordering - You can choose how you want to order the comments for your readers - By Author name or Date, and Ascending or Descending
   3. Either separate or remove trackbacks- You can choose to separate the Trackbacks from the comments and move them to the bottom of the list, or remove them completely
   4. Comment Tags - allow your readers (and you) to find comments more easily, instead of having to read through potentially hundreds of comments in a single post to find something specific
   5. Mark comments as ‘In Need Of Reply’ - adds a button, similar to the “Awaiting Moderation” button that shows up on the right hand side of the Comments menu link. The new button tells you how many comments are in need of a reply, and when clicked, takes you to a list of those comments.
   6. New comment display links, allowing you to edit, reply, quote or mark as replied each comment directly from the comment admin page
   7. Added AJAX functionality allows you to edit pages and posts directly from the management admin pages
   8. Adds 4 new widgets allowing you to display recent comments along with gravatars, another to display recent trackbacks, one to display the most active posts based upon comment count, and one to display your more frequent commenters, along with their gravatars if you so choose, as a way of recognizing your more devoted readers. Each widget is tokenized, meaning you control the look and feel.
3. WordPress Theme Design written by Tessa Blakeley Silver and published by Packt Publishing is a recently published, 244-page book detailing just about everything you’d need to know about designing and coding themes for WordPress. It’s current as of version 2.5, and is available in paperback and as a digital download as well.
4. No WordPress.com until Lorelle recuperates from surgery.
5. Eric Amundson kicks off our inaugural “Ask Matt” segment with the question, “What resources are there about using WordPress as a Content Management System?” Matt directs Eric to a draft on the Codex for more places to look.
6. Dave Jackson asks what our “Top 10 Plugins” are. We oblige, although Jonathan and I shared four identical choices (five if you count Jonathan’s waffling between Defensio and Akismet), so here are our combined “Top 16 plugins” (in no particular order):
   1. Fluency Admin/WordPress Admin Drop Down Menu
   2. PodPress
   3. Photo Dropper
   4. Digital Fingerprint
   5. Popularity Contest
   6. Related Posts
   7. WordPress Database Backup
   8. WP Ajax Edit Comments
   9. Defensio
   10. WP Super Cache
   11. FeedBurner FeedSmith
   12. Akismet
   13. Woopra
   14. What Would Seth Godin Do?
   15. Subscribe to Comments
   16. Share This
7. Mark Ghosh’s comments during episode 39 of The WordPress Podcast recorded live at WordCamp Dallas 2008 about Bad Behavior and high server usage prompted a response from the plugin’s author, Michael Hampton.

 

 Standard Podcast [68:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2544)

I’ve been busy with other things and sitting on this episode, which Jonathan and I recorded several weekends ago. I’ve finally gotten around to editing it down and it includes:

• WordPress 2.5.1 was released April 25th, and includes a significant security fix, so you should update as soon as possible if you haven’t done so already. This version does break the reset password feature, however. (Thanks to Ryan McCue for providing a patch file.)
• Matt Mullenweg announced Sphere integration into blog content to display related posts, and automatic theme-creation for photo bloggers at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco.
• WordPress and WordPress.com are Webware 100 award winners in the Publishing category.
• Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror took a lot of heat for his characterization of WordPress as a “Destroyer of CPUs“, and the subject of caching reared its ugly heat once again.
• Raj Dash loves WordPress, but hates WordPress 2.5. Jonathan asks for a way to change the color scheme of the admin panel.
• A new search feature allows for the search of over 3 million WordPress.com blogs. Search results can be ordered by relevancy, our magic secret sauce algorithm that’s the default, or by most recent, so you can see the latest and greatest on any given subject. There are also language-specific engines for every language WordPress.com supports.
• WordPress.com now includes many of the same features available to WordPress 2.5 users.
• WordPress.com blocked in Brazil.
• When you attempt to login to a WordPress account, you are given fairly specific error messages if you enter the username or password incorrectly. This can be helpful to an attacker if they are trying to guess usernames and/or passwords. Login Error Cleanup simply returns the message “Error” if the combination submitted is not valid.
• Widgetized Admin Dashboard is a Wordpress Plugin for 2.5+ that lets you edit the Wordpress Dashboard in the Design > Widgets area. It also removes the WordPress Developer News and WP Planet News that many consider to be “Dashboard Spam” and lets you see exactly what you want to see on your dashboard.

Episode 42 was also recorded a while back and I’ll be publishing that over the next week or so.

 

 Standard Podcast [43:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2797)

Note: I didn’t mean to publish this to the podcast feed, but I guess podPress assumed it was a episode and published it anyway. Cest la vie! So, consider this lagniappe. - Charles

This is a collection of voices and interviews from WordCamp Dallas 2008 with Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress and the The WordPress Podcast.

Lorelle wandered around during the breaks at WordCamp Dallas asking participants for their opinions on the weekend event and their thoughts on WordPress and blogging in general. Everyone was so open and sincere in their appreciation of the event, excited to meet Matt Mullenweg and the rest of the Automattic team, and the top notch speakers, some of whom shared their thoughts on the event with me in this interview.

The variety of bloggers present were incredibly diverse, covering everything from life blogging to cooking to high technology. DB Ferguson of No Fact Zone, one of the top Steve Colbert fan sites shared her blog post and thoughts about sitting behind the famous Matt Mullenweg during the conference - close enough to touch!

Dorian Karthauser of DK Enterprises had only been blogging for three weeks, one of the “youngest” bloggers present. She took time out to share her thoughts on being new to blogging and WordPress, citing some of the challenges she’s had learning how to blog with WordPress as well as the lessons she took away from the conference.

Charlene Mullenweg shared some thoughts and insights into being the sister of one of the most famous “Matts” around, and about her own experiences blogging, and being in a blogging family.

Lorelle enjoyed talking to people about their thoughts on WordCamp Dallas, WordPress and their personal experience with blogging. Sit back and enjoy the next 32 minutes of insights and lessons learned.

The voices include:

00:10 Bill Sholar of Webfratelli
00:37 Dan Bates
00:59 Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today
01:45 Ptah Dunbar
02:34 Bryan Lee
03:14 Cory Miller of iThemes Media
03:44 Henry Pugsley
04:07 Kerry Webster of WEBsmith internet consultants
04:44 Wendi McGowan of Wendistry, LLC and Scott Ellis of vsellis.com
05:36 Dave Curlee and Katherine Curlee of RealCookN.tv
06:28 DB Ferguson of No Fact Zone
07:48 Alexander Frison of Not a Niche
09:18 Tony Cecala of Holistic Networker
10:04 Mike Borschow of MetroQ.com
11:55 Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection
12:30 Dorian Karthauser of DK Enterprises (beginner blogger)
17:35 Charlene Mullenweg (sister of Matt Mullenweg)
23:15 Jim Halloran of AlcoholismDiseaseFree.com
24:13 Ryan Joy and Michelle Greer of Volusion and Michelle’s Blog
26:41 Kathleen Ratliff
27:14 William Addington of Williamedia
28:31 Doug Smith of smithsrus.com and Hide a Pod
29:25 Ronald Huereca of Readers Appreciation Project and Weblog Tools Collection
30:23 Dimitri (blog not public - biotech)

 

 Voices of WordCamp Dallas [32:03m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2198)

In this episode of The WordPress Podcast:

1. Jonathan and I briefly discuss our experiences at WordCamp Dallas
2. Technorati has decided to not index vulnerable and exploited WordPress versions
3. Will Apple bundle WordPress into the iPhone?
4. I interview John Podzazides about Woopra
5. I interview Mark Ghosh about Weblog Tools Videos
6. WordPress Dev Donncha O Caoimh’s Theme Tester plugin
7. AJAXed WordPress plugin
8. Matt Mullenweg agrees to a “Ask Matt” Q&A segment in future episodes

 

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