WordPress News: Can You Spot a WordPress Blog? WordPress 2.8 News, Plugin Directory Searchable, iPhone App Tested, and More

app in testing for next release. WordPress.com gets a new data center. More WordPress Tattoo news. WordCamps in Miami and India this weekend, Denver next. Singapore starts its first blogger meetup, including WordPress fans. WordPress jobs, and tips for WordPress Plugin and Theme authors.

WordPress News

WordPress 2.7.1 Released: WordPress 2.7.1, a maintenance release, is out. If you are using WordPress 2.7, take advantage of the automatic built-in upgrade. If you are not, then consider upgrading to WordPress 2.7. Sixty-five files were modified with 68 bug and feature fixes and improvements, and I covered more details about the release on my blog.

Improvements in the WordPress Plugin Directory: At long last, the WordPress Plugin Directory now has a new and improved search function using Sphinx open source SQL full-text search engine to help you find the Plugins you need in the directory from the site as well as the WordPress Plugins panel.

Improved LiveJournal Migration: For those looking to migrate from LiveJournal to WordPress.com, there is now an even easier LiveJournal migration process that the WordPress.com team has come up with to help the ever increasing number of people moving to WordPress.com from one of the oldest blogging platforms in the world. The new technique is a step by step approach that improves the importing from importing by the month without comments to now include comments, handle “friends only” posts, private posts, improvements in tagging, link back to LiveJournal blogs, and connection to the LiveJournal API to download all posts and comments in one pass. One LiveJournal users helped test the importer which handled over 3,700 posts and nearly 200,000 comments. The new importer will be included in the next major release of the full version of WordPress.

The WordPress Tattoo News: Ed Morita of Baker’s Hours, the first recipient of a permanent WordPress logo tattoo, was just featured on the BBC Radio Podcast episode: “Pods: Pods and blogs 17 Feb 2009.” Other news agencies have contacted him and interviewed him about his tattoo, but have yet to be released.

WordPress 2.8 News: Ryan Boren reports that development for WordPress 2.8 is underway. A lot of the work is focused on the script loading and improving database performance, as well as the WordPress Theme installer and WordPress Widgets Administration Panel. Custom tag taxonomies now have a built in Administation Panel, and support for PHP5 to permit proper timezone and Daylight Savings Time support.

Can You Spot a WordPress Blog? In “How To Identify a WordPress Theme,” W-Shadow gives you a list of things to investigate to determine whether or not that cool looking site is run on WordPress or not. Sometimes it takes some serious detective work. How do you know if it’s a WordPress blog?

iPhone WordPress App in Testing Mode: The latest version of the WordPress iPhone app is underway and they are looking for hardware testers for the next version. The changes in the iPhones operating system delayed this new update, but now they are nearly ready for the release to the Apple store. The upcoming version includes landscape mode with the extra wide keyboard, link creation help, editing and creating Pages, comment moderation, asynchronous publishing, photo resizing, and a few more goodies.

bbPress On Fire: Matt Mullenweg has announced that this is going to be a very active year for development of bbPress, the open source forum software that drives the WordPress forums. It begins the year with some new announcements and activities including two new bbPress releases. One is a security fix to prevent XSS attacks on login pages for Internet Explorer 6, which is highly recommend, and the second includes code improvements that increase the speed at which bbPress interacts with MySQL and integration with WordPress.

Help The WordPress Support Forum, Please: Long time WordPress Support Forums volunteer, MichaelH, has taken on the task of remind WordPress that there is always room for improvement in “Wish list for the WordPress Support Forums software.” Run on bbPress with a ton of customizations, there are a lot of limitations and problems on the Forums that could easily be fixed, and MichaelH joins a growing voice requesting the Forum be upgraded for increased functionality both by the users and the volunteers and staff who spend a lot of time helping others fix and use WordPress.

Don’t Let WordPress in Your Domain Name: Do you use “wordpress” in your blog’s domain name? This is in violation of the WordPress trademark. If you find a site using WordPress in their domain name, remind them of the trademark rules so they won’t be asked later to remove it. And WordPress is spelled with a capital P.

Considering Hiring a WordPresss Consultant? WPHacks had a guest post called “Using WordPress Consultants - What You Need To Know!” with good tips for hiring a WordPress consultant.

Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Are you just catching up now to our Blog Herald WordPress News? Check out the past news in last week’s WordPress News: WordPress 2.7.1, WordPress Tattoo, BuddyPress, WordPressMU Gets Plugins, Plugin Book, and More.

WordPress on Your Calendar

WordCamp News: WordCamp India and WordCamp Miami is this weekend. Denver is next weekend and sold out. Singapore is putting together their first blogger meetup for WordPress, MovableType, TypePad, and other blogging platform fans. WordCamp Columbus is open for registration. WordCamp New York set for October. WordPress Meetups are forming all around the world to bring together WordPress fans, such as the weekly WordPress Meetups/Beer and Blogs in Las Vegas.

WordPress Meetup or WordCamp Near You? If you are putting together a WordPress event, please email me so I can publicize it here. If there is a WordCamp near you, go. If you are interested in setting up a WordCamp, stay tuned for news and information on to bring a WordCamp event near you.

Here are some WordPress-related dates and events to put on your calendar.

February 2009

Delhi - WordCamp India - February 21-22, 2009 Miami, Florida - WordCamp Miami 2009 - February 22, 2009 San Francisco - WordPress Surf and Turf - February 24, 2009 Austin WordPress Meetup Group - Almost Everyone is a WordPress Expert - February 24, 2009 Las Vegas WordPress Meetup - February 26, 2009 Singapore Blogger Meetup Froup - February 27, 2009 WordCamp Denver 2009 - February 28, 2009 (Facebook) Dallas/Fort Worth WordPress Meetup - Dallas, Texas - February 28, 2009 Atlanta WordPress Users Group Meetup - Learning WordPress 2.7 - Atlanta, Georgia - February 28, 2009 The Chicago WordPress February Meetup - February 28, 2009

March 2009

New Jersey - The New Jersey WordPress March Meetup - March 4, 2009 Mobile, Alabama - Gulf Coast WordPress/Blogger WordPress Meetup - March 5, 2009 Las Vegas WordPress Meetup - March 5, 2009 Los Angeles WordPress Users Group - March 8, 2009 The Southern California WordPress March Meetup - Long Beach, California - March 15, 2009 Ft Lauderdale - South Florida WordPress March Meetup User Group - March 11, 2009 Las Vegas WordPress Meetup - March 12, 2009 Austin, Texas - SXSW 2009 - March 13-22, 2009 Las Vegas WordPress Meetup - March 19, 2009 Atlanta, Georgia - Atlanta WordPress Users Group - March 24, 2009

April 2009

New Orleans, Louisiana - WordCamp NOLA - April 10-11, 2008 (Twitter) DATE CHANGE

May 2009

Chicago - Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) - May 1-5, 2009 WordCamp Toronto - May 8-10, 2009 Ohio - WordCamp Columbus - May 16, 2009 Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia - WordCamp Mid-Atlantic - May 16, 2009 Milan, Italy - WordCamp Milan 2009 - May 22-23, 2009 WordCamp San Francisco 2009 - May 30, 2009

June 2009

WordCamp Chicago - June 6-7, 2009 WordCamp Dallas 2009 - Dallas, Texas - June 27-28, 2009

July 2009

WordCamp UK - England, July 18-19, 2009

October 2009

WordCamp New York City 2009 - October 24, 2009

Upcoming WordCamps not scheduled or confirmed:

WordCamp Indy (Indianapolis) WordCamp Augusta WordCamp Seattle (WordCamp Seattle Twitter) WordCamp Argentina WordCamp Perú WordCamp New Zealand WordCamp Iowa

Upcoming WordCamp and WordPress Event News

WordCamp Denver News: WordCamp Denver is this weekend. According to Alex King, it is sold out and they are now offering “overflow tickets” to fit in some extra people. They are also looking for volunteers to record the sessions in HD.

WordCamp NOLA News: The date for WordCamp NOLA, New Orleans, has been changed from March to April 10-11, 2009. You can follow the news on their site or on their Twitter @WordCampNOLA.

WordCamp Toronto News: WordCamp Toronto is having the WCT 2009 Awards and is asking for nominations. The deadline is April 1, 2009. The student contest to design a logo for WordCamp Toronto is over and announcements will be made soon.

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 News: WordCamp San Francisco 2009 is open for registration. Some hot speakers are already lined up for the May 30, 2009, event at the Mission Bay Conference Center, including Matt Cutts, Tim Ferris, Philip Greenspun, Douglas Hanna, Tara Hunt, Andy Peatling, and Steve Sounders. This often sells out so get your ticket and arrangements to attend the parent WordCamp event of the year now.

WordCamps and WordPress Meetups Everywhere

WordPress Meetup: A WordPress Meetup is a frequent meeting of WordPress fans. If you would like to start a WordPress Meetup group, find a meeting place and announce it among your friends, and add a listing to the Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events and tag them “WordPress Events” and “WordPress”, as many track WordPress event announcements there. WordCamp: A WordCamp is a day or two long event with sponsors and dozens if not hundreds of WordPress fans gathering annually. If you would like to sponsor or host a WordCamp, check out the new official site for tracking WordCamps is WordCamp Central, which includes instructions and guidelines for running a WordCamp. Get a Twitter account and add a listing to the Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress and WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events and tag them “WordPress Events” and “WordCamp. WordPress and WordCamp Event News: In addition to our weekly Blog Herald WordPress News, you can learn more about the various WordPress and WordCamp Events on the official WordCamp Central site, The WordCamp Report, Yahoo Upcoming events for WordPress, WordPress Meetups Upcoming Events, and Upcoming: Public events tagged with “WordCamp”. WordPress Fan Blogs and Podcasts

Weblog Tools Collection: Recent news, Plugin and Theme reviews, and helpful posts on Weblog Tools Collection include:

Recent posts by Weblog Tools Collection include:

A Belated Welcome to the New Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Review: Yawasp WordPress Plugin Releases for 02/16 WordPress Theme Releases for 02/17 WordPress Plugin Releases for 02/18 Plugin Authors, Are you making the best of Readme.txt? WordPress Plugin Releases for 02/20 WordCamp India is On! Plugin Review: Post Avatar Wish list for the WordPress Support Forums software

WordCast Podcast: In the last podcast with Lorelle on WordPress with Dave Moyer, WordCast 45: Is that WordPress on your wrist? reported live as the permanent WordPress logo tattoo was created on Ed Morita, talked about WordPress 2.7.1, interesting WordPress Plugins, new ideas for WordPress Widgets, Andy Skelton getting married, BuddyPres, choosing a WordPress consultant, Valdimir’s new WordPress Plugin book, celebrity WordPressers, Twestivals, and more WordPress news and tips.

WordPress Weekly Podcast: Episode 42 - How Could WordPress Die? covered a look at the future, and demise, of WordPress, WordPress Tips, Themes, and trivia. Next week the WordPress Weekly podcast team will be off and it will resume February 27th. WordPress Weekly covered David Peralty is joining as co-host of the WordPress Weekly podcast with Jeff Chandler. The WordPress Weekly is sponsored by Weblog Tools Collection and hosted on TalkShoe.

Talking WordPress Plugins: The WordPress Plugins Podcast is a new podcast covering WordPress Plugins with Angelo Mandato. Each week, he aims to bring you a variety of interesting WordPress Plugins and interviews with Plugin authors and developers. Recent podcasts include:

Plugins 005 - Google XML Sitemaps Classic Image Button plugin Now Available Plugins 006 - All In One SEO Pack Plugin Plugins 007 - Special Guest Peter Keung author of Peter’s Custom Anti-SPAM plugin Plugins 008 - WP-DB-Backup plugin

WP Engineer: WP Engineer has tips and techniques for using WordPress, including this week’s batch:

Secure Your Mail With WordPress Antispambot Function WordCamp in Germany and WordCamp in Dallas - What’s different?

WPRecipes: The WPRecipes site offers a daily batch of tips and techniques for using WordPress, and recent posts include:

How to: Automatically provide tinyurls for your WordPress blog posts How to: Display allowed tags in comments How to: Display post based on custom fields with a custom query How to: Display your average comments per posts How to: get rid of links in your comments How to: Integrate your Twitter signature on your WordPress blog How to: Manually reset your WordPress password How to: Suggest your visitors to leave comments in your rss feed

WPTavern: The recent news from the WPTavern blog and forum includes:

100 Forum Members, New Design And More WordPress Plugins and Themes News

Localizing WordPress Plugins: In “echo __(’I Hate Localizing My Plugins. How About Something Different?’);,” Ozh makes light and then gets serious about how time consuming the process of localizing WordPress Plugins for translation and makes some recommendations on creating and updating .pot template files. Localization applies to Themes as well, so if you are WordPress Plugin or Theme author, you might want in on the conversation.

Getting WordPress Widgets Out of the Sidebar: New Name: Justin Tadlock is talking to the WordPress development community about breaking WordPress Widgets out of the sidebar by either renaming the sidebar.php or coming up with a new name for labeling WordPress Widgets based upon usage and location.

WordPress Video Solution Framework for WordPressMU: Last year, Automattic released the WordPress Video Solution Framework, a Plugin only for WordPressMU blogs for handling and transcoding uploaded videos. For more information and feedback on how this is working for those using it, see the discussion on the WordPressMU forums. It includes tips for installation, tips, and recommendations.

Pasting a Lot of Code? Just like tiny, shortcut URLs are now the fad, did you know you could do the same with code? If you are posting a lot of code on your WordPress blog, on the WordPress forums, or elsewhere, you can use a code paste bin such as Paste Bin to store your code for free and just link to it. It’s a must resource for the WordPresss support forums, so why not try it with social media?

WordPress 2.8 News and Development: The lated in news for WordPress 2.8 development by Andrew Ozz on the WordPress Developer Blog covers Script loader updates, looking at how WordPress will be enhancing and optimizing the loading of external JavaScript and CSS files. The most important change, he reports, is how scripts can be queued for loading in the footer in controlled sequence with new actions. Other articles worth noting on WordPress 2.8 development include:

Change your WordPress Theme on … WordPress 2.8 body_class, automatic_feed_links What a body!

Plugin and Theme Authors Tips: With the incredible growth in WordPress Plugin and Theme development and authoring, I’m starting a specific tips list for articles covering those subjects. If you have a tip on WordPress Plugin and Theme development, let me know and it might be included. These are developer specific, not user oriented, so expect a wide range of topics involving PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and non-WordPress specific but related tips and techniques.

Westi - PHPdocumenter - Documentation Links W-Shadow - Make Your Plugin Faster With Conditional Tags 30 Most Wanted WordPress Comments Page Hacks

Interesting WordPress Plugins:

Subscribe To Comments allows readers to get email notification of comments from a specific post. Shadowbox JS is a media viewer similar to Lightbox and Thickbox and supports multimedia. Highlight Author Comments styles blog post author’s comments differently from the rest of the comments. Comment Quicktags Reloaded adds a quicktag button toolbar for WordPress blog comments. Pods is a CMS for WordPress YARPP Yet Another Related Posts Plugin displays a list of related blog posts based upon an algorithm that includes titles, post content, tags, and categories, and includes feed support. Manga+Press is for web comics to help manage posts, Pages, and categories to track comic posts.

Finding WordPress Plugins: For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, the WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection Plugin and Theme announcements.

WordPress Jobs: WordPress Jobs is a WordPress Job service hosted by Weblog Tools Collection. I thought I’d highlight some of the WordPress work and job requests that come into their service. If you are looking for a WordPress-related job to hire or for hire, check out the Automattic WordPress Consultants List, WordPress Jobs, and the WP-Pro mailing list.

Migrate blog from Typepad Redesign site and convert to WordPress WordPress Template/Integration Need to code entire website already designed (WP & Ruby) Site upgrade from 2.0.x to 2.7.1 WordPressMU 2.7 Photoblog Theme Development WordpressTheme based on Thesis Database help needed Interesting new WordPress project & plugin WordPress Plugin customizations and site design WordPress Blogger WP + CSS wiz wanted for 2 gigs WordPress.com News

New Theme on WordPress.com: WordPress.com announced the Vigilance WordPress Theme has been added to the collection which includes customizable colors, alert boxes that appear at the top of the page for announcements, hidden pages from the main menu, custom image header, and special sidebar WordPress Widget functions.

Comment Threading on WordPress.com: WordPress.com announced comment threading and other cool comment features for their free blog hosting service. All WordPress Themes are now set up to enable threaded comments (Settings > Discussion > Other Comment Settings), breaking comments into pages, and changing the comment order from the oldest comments on top to the newest comments at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom of the list. Comment threads are allowed up to ten levels.

WordPress.com Gets New Data Center: Barry Abrahamson reports that WordPress.com brought a new data center online at the end of 2008 to serve the more than 5.5 million blogs hosted by WordPress.com. They now have data centers in three locations in the United States and have decommissioned their Dallas, Texas, facility. He offers a video of a WordPress data center installation and provides some information on the hardware that runs WordPress.com.

Blog Design Contest on WordPress.com: The first blogging design contest has been announced for WordPress.com called “I show less...