The WordPress community took a big step forward today when Matt announced that Automattic has donated the WordPress trademark to the non-profit WordPress Foundation. Moving forward, the Foundation will be responsible for safeguarding the trademarked name and logo from misuse toward the end of protecting WordPress and preventing confusion among people trying to figure out if a resource is “official” or not.

After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, we’re releasing WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:

This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.

Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

Note: If you downloaded 3.0.1 in the first 20 minutes of release (before 2200 UTC), you’ll want to reinstall it, which you can do right from your Updates screen. Our bad.

Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!

First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

The numbers are now, finally, strongly in favor of this move. Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2. Many of them are on hosts who support PHP 5.2 — users merely need to change a setting in their hosting control panel to activate it. We believe that percentage will only go down over the rest of the year as hosting providers realize that to support the newest versions of WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), they’re going to have to pull the trigger.

In less exciting news, we are also going to be dropping support for MySQL 4 after WordPress 3.1. Fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4. The new required MySQL version for WordPress 3.2 will be 5.0.15.

WordPress users will not be able to upgrade to WordPress 3.2 if their hosting environment does not meet these requirements (the built-in updater will prevent it). In order to determine which versions your host provides, we’ve created the Health Check plugin. You can download it manually, or use this handy plugin installation tool I whipped up. Right now, Health Check will only tell you if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2. In a future release it will provide all sorts of useful information about your server and your WordPress install, so hang on to it!

In summary: WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4 and MySQL 4. WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, will require PHP 5.2 or higher, and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher. Install the Health Check plugin to see if you’re ready!

WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads yesterday, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads.

The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind:

We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins.

We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and the plugin directory. We’re going to focus on ensuring seamless upgrades by making the best possible determinations about compatibility, and offer continual improvements to the plugin installer. And we also want to give you a better developer tool set like SVN notifications and improvements to the bug tracker.

We’re also going to experiment with other great ideas to help the community help plugin authors. We want it to be easy for you to offer comments to plugin authors and the community, including user reviews and better feedback. We may experiment with an adoption process for abandoned plugins as a way to revitalize hidden gems in the directory. I’m not sure there is a better way to show how extendable WordPress is and how awesome this community is at the same time.

As Matt said in the 3.0 release announcement, our goal isn’t to make everything perfect all at once. But we think incremental improvements can provide us with a great base for 3.1 and beyond, and for the tens of millions of users, and hundreds of millions of plugin downloads to come.

It’s been summer for about a week now. Whether you’re on vacation or burning the midnight oil, attending a local/nearby WordCamp is a great way to spend a weekend. Meet other WordPress users, developers, designers & consultants, learn a little something, maybe share a little of your own experience and knowledge, and break bread (or raise a toast) with new friends and collaborators. Here are the WordCamps scheduled for this summer, along with what I know about them.

July 3: WordCamp Germany – Berlin, Germany. I love it that they’re using BuddyPress for their event site. They have multiple tracks, and what looks to be a nice variety of sessions. It’s only a few days away, so if you’re thinking of going, get your tickets now!

July 10: WordCamp Boulder – Boulder, Colorado, USA. This was WordCamp Denver last year, but the organizers have decided to mix it up and go back and forth between Denver and Boulder, which also has a thriving tech community. This year the venue is the Boulder Theater (so pretty!), and there will sessions for bloggers and devs alike, plus a Genius Bar to help people get their WordPress sites all fixed up. The speaker lineup looks good, and I hear they’re pumping up the wifi this year. I’ll be there, likely hunched over a notebook with Lisa Sabin-Wilson (author of WordPress for Dummies and BuddyPress for Dummies) to talk about the WordPress User Handbook project, and/or hunched over a sketchbook with Kevin Conboy (designed the new lighter “on” state for admin menus in WordPress 3.0) to work out a new default WordCamp.org theme (using BuddyPress). You can still get tickets!

July 17–18: WordCamp UK- Manchester, England, UK. The roving WordCamp UK will be in Manchester this year, and is probably the closest to BarCamp style of all the WordCamps, using a wiki to plan some speakers/sessions and organizing the rest ad-hoc on the first day of the event. I’ll be attending this one as well, and am looking forward to seeing WordPress lead developer Peter Westwood again. I’m also looking forward to meeting some core contributors for the first time in person, like Simon Wheatley and John O’Nolan. Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, is on the organizing team of WordCamp UK. Tickets on sale now!

July 24: WordCamp Nigeria – Lagos, Nigeria. Their site seems to have a virus, so no link from here, but if you’re in Nigeria and interested in attending/getting involved, a quick Google search will get you to the organizers.

August 7: WordCamp Houston – Houston, TX, USA. Houston, Texas, birthplace of WordPress! Fittingly, Matt Mullenweg will be there to give the keynote. WordCamp Houston is running three tracks — Business, Blogger and Developer — in recognition of the fact that people who are interested in using WordPress for their business may not actually be bloggers or developers themselves. This used to get labeled as a “CMS” track at previous WordCamps (including NYC 2009), but with WordPress 3.0 supporting CMS functionality out of the box, “Business” is a much more appropriate label. Who wants to bet on if there will be BBQ for lunch?

August 7 : WordCamp Iowa – Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Another placeholder page. Happening, not happening? I’ve emailed the organizer and will update this post once I know more.

August 7–8: WordCamp New Zealand – Auckland, New Zealand. They haven’t announced this year’s speakers or topics, but they’ve been running polls to get community input into the program. Of note: in 2011 WordCamp New Zealand will be shifting seasons and will be in February instead, when the weather is nicer.

August 20–22: WordCamp Savannah – Savannah, Georgia, USA. Disclaimer: I am completely biased about Savannah, since I’m one of the organizers. This will be the first WordCamp in Savannah, and it’s being held at the Savannah College of Art and Design River Club, an awesome venue that used to be a cotton warehouse or something like that. Since Savannah doesn’t really have a cohesive WordPress community yet (though a fair number of people from Savannah attended WordCamp Atlanta earlier this year), this WordCamp is aimed squarely at building a local community. We’ll have a local meet-and-greet, regular sessions with visiting speakers (lots of core contributors coming to this one, plus Matt), and on Sunday it will be combination unconference/genius bar/collaborative workspace. Oh, and a potluck! We’ll also be running a pre-WordCamp workshop for people who have never used WordPress but want to get started, so that they’ll be able to follow the presentations and conversations littered with WordPress-specific vocabulary over the weekend. Ticket sales just opened, so get your tickets now.

Arm your vuvuzelas: WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click, and blah blah blah just watch the video. $\':)\'$ (In HD, if you can, so you can catch the Easter eggs.)

If you’d like to embed the WordPress 3.0 video tour in your blog, copy and paste this code for the high quality version:

For a more comprehensive look at everything that has improved in 3.0 check out 3.0′s Codex page or the long list of issues in Trac. (We’re trying to keep these announcement posts shorter.) Whew! That’s a lot packed into one release. I can’t think of a better way to kick off the 3.X cycle we’ll be in for the next two and a half years.

The Future

Normally this is where I’d say we’re about to start work on 3.1, but we’re actually not. We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress. The growth of the community has been breathtaking, including over 10.3 million downloads of version 2.9, but so much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else. Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless. The goal of the teams isn’t going to be to make things perfect all at once, just better than they are today. We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.

It Takes a Village

I’m proud to acknowledge the contributions of the following 218 people to the 3.0 release cycle. These are the folks that make WordPress what it is, whose collaboration and hard work enable us to build something greater than the sum of our parts. In alphabetical order, of course.

Bonus

If you’ve made it this far, check out my 2010 State of the Word speech at WordCamp San Francisco, it’s jam-packed with information on the growth of WordPress, 3.0, what we’re planning for the future, and the philosophy of WordPress.

When I was a kid my dad used to practice his typing skills (on a real typewriter no less) with the phrase:

For some reason that has stuck with me all these years. Today I’m going to rephrase and re-purpose that line:

The theme directory has been chugging along for more than a year now. During that time we’ve tinkered with the review process and some of the management tools, but haven’t really opened it up as much as we’d like. It’s time to rip off the band-aid and take some action; to that end, we’re looking for community members to help with the process of reviewing themes for the directory.

Right now this is a bit like a New Year’s resolution to exercise every day: it’s what we need to do, but we’re still figuring out exactly how it will all work. That’s part of the community involvement as well — we expect that those who pitch in will also help shape the process.

What’s involved in reviewing themes for the directory? There are some obvious things, such as being familiar with PHP and WordPress theme code (and the theme development checklist), with an eye for security issues. You would also need to have the ability to set up a separate install of the latest version of WordPress for testing theme submissions.

Hopefully a few talented theme developers are reading this right now and saying to themselves, “I’d love to help! How do I get started?” Just join the new theme reviewers mailing list and we’ll get you up to speed on this new opportunity to come to the aid of your community.

As Matt teased earlier, the first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.0 is now available. What’s an RC? An RC comes after beta and before the final launch. It means we think we’ve got everything done: all features finished, all bugs squashed, and all potential issues addressed. But, then, with over 20 million people using WordPress with a wide variety of configurations and hosting setups, it’s entirely possible that we’ve missed something. So! For the brave of heart, please download the RC and test it out (but not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous). Some things to know:

We hope you enjoy playing with the 3.0 RC as much as we’ve enjoyed making it for you. Enjoy!

Has it really been seven years since the first release of WordPress? It seems like just yesterday we were fresh to the world, a new entrant to a market everyone said was already saturated. (As a side note, if the common perception is that a market is finished and that everything interesting has been done already, it’s probably a really good time to enter it.)

The growth over the past year has blown me away. Since our last birthday we’ve doubled theme downloads to over 10 million, and doubled plugin downloads to 60 million. Most importantly, we continued to grow the development community to 1,528 people active on Trac and 13 committers, both numbers the highest in the history of WordPress.

That’s 1,528 people pouring their hearts and souls into GPL software we all own, we all build on, we can use as we please, we can all make better. We’ve evolved from a simple script to a web platform.

We’re on the cusp of version 3.0, with a release candidate coming out any minute now.

If you’d like to celebrate WordPress’s birthday with us — tell a friend! Help them upgrade their blog or find the perfect theme. Talk about how WordPress is built by and for a community. Drop in to help test 3.0, including all the plugins you use. Write something to take advantage of the new 3.0 features, or teach your friends how to. If you buy any themes or plugins, make sure they’re GPL or compatible just like WordPress. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, it’s important that we not forget that Open Source got us this far, and is the only way we’re going to get to the next level. The whole of what we can build together is far greater than the sum of our parts. Spread the good word. $\':)\'$

Six Apart is closing the doors on Vox, a blogging service they launched three and a half years ago. You have until September 30th to export your content from Vox, or you’ll lose access to it. Yikes!

They helpfully included a link to WordPress.com’s importer help page. WordPress.com has a Vox importer. What isn’t immediately obvious is that you can use WordPress.com as an intermediary on your way to a final destination. That is, you can import your Vox blog to a temporary WordPress.com blog, and then do an export from WordPress.com. Now you’ll have gold: a WordPress export file. You can take this file and import it into a standalone WordPress site, or a plethora of other blogging tools or services.

I recommend that everyone who has Vox content they want to save do this. Mark your WordPress.com blog as private if you don’t want that to be its final destination — just do it (and soon!) so that you have a copy of your site in a useful and portable format.

BlogTimes is an old school Newspaper style WordPress Theme, based on a three column fluid layout, enabled with cufon fonts with beautiful typography for the headlines, options panel, and a custom front page slider.

Dark Tuts is a very clean WordPress theme that has been designed with blogs in mind. This theme has an HTML5 doctype, clean and valid code, 3 color schemes (blue, green, red), 3 different ways to add post thumbnails, the ability to change thumbnail sizes via the theme panel, 1 advertisement spot and tons more features.

Semanu is powered by the 960.gs css framework with multiple widgets and a 3 column layout.

Syailendra is an adsense (advertising) ready theme with multiple widget positions, threaded comments, theme options, drop-down menus, and custom menus.

WP Perfect is a two column SEO optimized WordPress 3.0 ready theme. The theme has a jQuery-based options page that lets you change basic settings easily.

This is why I love going to WordCamps. Silly stuff like this that you can laugh about later.

$\"\"$ Last night around 10:15 decided to head out for dinner, and somewhat randomly picked the Cuban restaurant Guantanamera because it was nearby. Sat down in a booth near the bar, facing the band, and ordered some mojitos. Over the din of the other diners I thought “hey this house band isn’t half bad.”

Within a few minutes of listening it became very apparent that beyond “not half bad” they were actually really remarkable. What a treat! Ordered a steak and sank in, letting the music (and mojito) flow over me. A half hour later a lady from one of the front tables got up to sing with the band — which isn’t always a good thing. They started on The Man I Love and it was sublime. The song started out as a ballad but then they kicked it up to a fast afro-Cuban beat, and the singer scatted over the beats for a good 4-5 minutes. It turns out it was Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer! I felt particularly fortunate as I had been bummed to miss the Manhattan Transfer show at the Montréal Jazz Festival in June, but here, of all the most random places, was one of my favorite members performing at a small family joint in Midtown West.

Janis sat down after one song but a string of similarly talented musicians came in and out of the band until the restaurant started to close down. I didn’t recognize any of them but the music was so good. $\":)\"$

There was a recording device above the band that was collected by a fellow who I caught up with outside the restaurant as he was hailing a taxi. His name was Paul Siegel and he’s the co-president of Hudson Music which is a music education group (with a website powered by WordPress). I learned the percussionist leader of the house band was Pedro Martínez and Paul follows and records him several times a week at different venues. Apparently Guantanamera is a long-time musician hang-out where even folks like Eric Clapton sat in with the band.

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

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.

On September 8th, I’ll be at the Tampa Bay WordPress meetup to talk about WordPress custom post types. If you’re a WordPress developer or themer in the area, you should stop by! The meetup is at 7pm at CDB’s Southside in South Tampa.

WordCamp Portland is on September 18th and 19th at Webtrends. My talk is called “Swan Dive! …into the Best WordPress of your Life,” and it’s all about using WordPress to its fullest. Everything from hosting to scaling and everything from upgrades to insider ninja moves will be covered.

Since last year when we wrote about “WordPress in Demand on Elance“, WordPress has surged into the top ten, and now is the sixth most in demand skill on Elance!

Online publishing dominates this list. It’s exciting that the ever evolving WordPress, built on it’s PHP, MySQL, and CSS stack, continues to be the web development platform in demand.

I really enjoyed attending WordCamps in Houston, Savannah, and Salt Lake City the past few weeks. You can always find upcoming WordCamps here, and I’m currently planning on attending Jerusalem (this Sunday), Portland (September 18-19), and Philippines (October 2). I’m looking forward to meeting more of the WordPress community and also answering your questions in the Town Hall sessions.

Around the time of the Thesis GPL debates, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg made an offer to send people free t-shirts. When I talked to him at WordCamp Savannah, he said that he had gotten about 300 requests. I got my care package right after I returned from the WordCamp. In addition to the shirt, it included some Gravatar and WordPress stickers, and a nice certificate, proclaiming that I am “One of the Three Most Important People in WordPress”. Of course, so are the other 300 people who got a certificate in their care packages. Awesomesauce. $\":)\"$ \n $\"WordPress$ \n $\"WordPress$ \n $\"WordPress$ \n

New plugins

Facebook Like for Tags converts a standard Facebook Like button from a one-time sharing feature to a one-on-one relationship for ongoing updates and sharing based on tags (keywords) or categories defined by you, the blogger/author.

LBAK Google Checkout is aimed mainly at small projects that just want to sell a few things on their blog through Google Checkout and don’t want too much else apart from ease of use.

Pingdom Status lets you display your Pingdom monitoring data on your WordPress site, essentially creating a status page for whatever it is you are monitoring.

WP Tweetbox adds a highly customizable Tweetbox at the end of blog posts and pages.

Updated plugins

Relevanssi replaces the basic WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance.

WP-reCAPTCHA integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection.

WP-SimpleViewer allows you to easily create SimpleViewer galleries with WordPress.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

$\"Liz$ Liz Strauss gave a masterclass tonight; at least, that’s how it felt to both Frederick and myself. We talked about communicating with your audience, and Liz shared some experiences about open comment nights. We discussed positioning yourself and your blog, and how important personal branding can be.

She told us about feedback loops, and how to use them to listen to your users / clients / audience. She tought us to build our network before we need it, and why and how you should be treating your blog like a business, even if it’s just a hobby. Aren’t you curious yet? Start listening then. You’ll be a wiser man or woman for it at the end of this.

There’s no word yet on an update to the iOS mobile app, but the team still has its eyes set on making this one a major bug-fixing release.

These recent updates would not have been possible without your feedback and beta testing skills, so keep doing whatever you can to make each release better than the last!

Do you use any of the WordPress mobile apps? I use the iOS mobile app and can honestly say that it has certainly simplified my life when it comes to moderating comments and making last-minute post corrections. How about you? Have the WordPress mobile apps added to or detracted from your WordPress blogging experience?

Bombax is a nicely crafted theme with 5 different color schemes and configurable options such as right or left or holy grail or no sidebar, magazine style or traditional style, custom header, and custom background.

Modernist is a beautifully built yet transparent theme. It was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content.

Us and Them is a modern, clean, blog-style, 960 – 1200 px grid-based, smooth WordPress theme and features some cool jQuery plugins just out of the box as some neat tool-tips and accordions.

A short hike up to Cecret Lake and along Sugarloaf peak in Little Cottonwood Canyon near Alta, UT. The Wasatch Mountains are a great place to be outdoors. Guest photographer: Sheri Bigelow.

Remember the old days when your computer would crash because you were running too many applications simultaneously? Well, you might be surprised to know that WordPress can fall victim to the very same thing.

You see, your server may be packed with 4 GB of RAM, but that doesn’t mean that all 4 GB have been allocated to PHP on your account. In fact, most decent hosting providers only allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account. Now, most WordPress installations with a good amount of plugins will run fine under 32 MB, but there’s always a chance that one more plugin or one seemingly innocent admin panel task (like exporting or importing posts) may put you over the edge, and you’ll see either a blank screen or the infamous error which starts off something like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted.”

Update: Thanks to Big Dave Zatz for reminding me that if you see this error either suddenly (no specific task was done to cause the error) or frequently, try deactivating all plugins to rule-out a plugin-specific issue and try switching themes to rule-out a theme-specific issue.

If you see the infamous fatal memory error, there are three things that you can do before asking your hosting provider for assistance. Which method you use depends entirely on your server configuration. If one method doesn’t work, try the next. Keep in mind that most hosting providers closely monitor memory overrides and don’t take too kindly to frequent use.

1. If you’re using WordPress 2.9.2 or lower, try adding define(\'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT\', \'256M\'); to your wp-config.php file. If you’re using WordPress 3.0 or higher, WordPress automatically does this for a variety of tasks, so there’s really no reason to try it in this case.

2. If you can edit or override the system php.ini file, increase the memory limit. For example, memory_limit = 256M

3. If you cannot edit or override the system php.ini file, add php_value memory_limit 256M to your .htaccess file.

If neither of these work, it’s time to ask your hosting provider to temporarily increase PHP’s memory allocation on your account. Keep in mind that most decent hosting providers allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account, and most decent hosting providers allow users to temporarily increase the memory allocation. If your hosting provider won’t accommodate you, perhaps it’s time to find a new hosting provider.

As always, if you need further assistance, the volunteers in the WordPress Support Forums will be more than happy to help you.

New plugins

Custom sidebars allows you to create your own widgetized areas and custom sidebars, and select what sidebars to use for each post or page.

Simple SEO lets you optimize your web site or blog by changing the title and menu output for any page or post.

Updated plugins

The AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.

User Avatar provides a thumbnail area in Your Profile, for users to upload and crop new images in an overlay to be saved and stored to their profile.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices.

You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Think about it, you probably have hundreds of articles that you wrote years ago and when those same articles appear on Google search engine results, the dates appear next to the description. You might think that this is great, users searching the web should be able to see when an article originally published, but research shows that users discriminate against older content just because it is old. An article that may be valuable despite its age would be subject to a user completely ignoring it and would click on the newer article, just because it was newer.

As you can see in the image above, the search results page lists the post date for the article followed by the description.

Do not confuse the intent here, if you are running a news site or writing about topics whose value is short lived then the adequate thing to do is to continue using dates. However if your traffic from search engines is suffering from users who refuse to visit an old article (and your topics are timeless) then you might want to consider removing the post date from your articles.

So how would you go about removing dates in WordPress?

Google is smart about locating dates on posts so you have to be aware of all the dates present on your WordPress site. Based on discussions on the web it appears that Google uses the post date when listed on a page and when the post date is missing, Google uses dates in comments and even within the post itself. So removing dates will take some cunning.

In order to remove the post date from the posts on your WordPress site you will have to remove the post date from your theme’s template file. In terms of indexing the post date, it appears that Google uses the post date from the single post and not the archive, so for the sake of users and simplicity we are only going to remove the post date from the “single.php” template file.

WARNING! Before proceeding with the modification of any template files, please make sure that you back up your files.

1. Open the single.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the <?php the_time within the single.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

In order to make sure that Google cannot find a date on your blog post we will also need to remove the dates associated with comments. This can be a bit frustrating for users who want to follow a comment thread so it is entirely up to you.

1. Open the comments.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the <?php the_time within the comments.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

When removing these PHP functions make sure that you take into account the formatting of your posts and comments to ensure that the removal of this element doesn’t interfere with your theme’s design or break the code.

After these changes are made you will need to wait a couple of hours or days in order for Google’s index to reflect those changes. The variance in time is due to your site’s crawl rate so if your site is very popular and is crawled frequently you may see the update in hours. If your site still appears in the search results with the date, make sure you visit the page and search for the date, remember even dates within the content (originally published on [date]) will be used by Google to stamp a date on the site.

If you use a commenting system like Disqus or IntenseDebate that is based on JavaScript then there is no concern for the removal of the date from the comments template. If you are using an older version of WordPress or you feel a bit adventurous you could download the Date Exclusion SEO Plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, just keep in mind that the plugin hasn’t been updated in over 500 days and it’s officially compatible up to 2.71.

Will You Remove Dates from Your Posts?

I’ve mentioned some of the Pro’s related to removal of post and comment dates on your blog:

If the content on your blog is timeless and you could increase the amount of traffic coming to your blog from search engines, would you remove the post and comment dates?

The SXSW staff wants to hear your feedback on the proposed panels for SXSW 2011. Your votes on the proposed panels will account for 30% of the final vote, so start voting today!

Currently, there are ten WordPress-related panel proposals awaiting your feedback:

Are you planning to attend SXSW 2011? Which panel proposals captured your interest?

It’s that time of year to promote your SxSW panels. I’m slated for two WordPress panels I’d like you to consider voting for.

Both of these have great groups of panelists/moderators and I think they’d be great events at SxSWi for WordPress developers, consultants and users.

Albizia is a dark theme with 5 different color schemes and configurable options such as right or left or holy grail or no sidebar, magazine style or traditional style, custom header, and custom background.

Columbus comes with a very clean and elegant design and some really great premium-like features.

Modern Wood features a beautiful dark layout with a wooden background and some amazing CSS3 features.

Third Style is based on the theme Twenty Ten, comes with 11 new header backgrounds, and supports six widgetized areas (two in the sidebar, four in the footer).

TL Tweets is a free WordPress theme, designed to be used as an archive for your tweets, while automatically creating new posts from your Twitter feed.

Webmagazine is a WordPress magazine theme built on the Twenty Ten default WordPress theme.

WordPress is a powerful blogging platform with a large community volunteering its time to provide support to users in the WordPress Support Forums.

Last week, the WordPress Support Forums mailing list presented nominations for the top active support forum volunteers. These volunteers were nominated for being active on the support forums within the last month and for helping multiple users almost every day on their own free time. The nominees were then organized by the number of topics they have been involved in since joining the forums to find this year’s top fifteen.

If you stopped by the WordPress Support Forums this year, you were probably helped by one of these fifteen volunteers, or you at least got the chance to see them in action.

Without further delay, here are the top fifteen active WordPress Support Forum volunteers:

Mel “esmi” Pedley: Professional web developer since 2001 with a special interest in CSS, web accessibility and, more recently, all things WordPress. Spent a number of years in a previous life running IT support in the public sector. Old habits die hard. [forum profile]

Samuel “samboll” Bollinger: I am a landscape architect by trade and am an avid golfer and camper. I originally started using WordPress back in the 1.5.x series for a business site. I became active in the forums when version 2.0 came out. Can’t remember exactly when I became a mod, but just came to forums one day and saw I was…thought that was a weird way to do it at the time, but years later and I’m still here. I use and support WordPress because of the community and transparency of all levels of the WordPress hierarchy. [forum profile]

Chris “Chris_K” Kasten (fka HandySolo): I’m Director of Technical Operations by day, an independent consultant by night and experienced in a wide range of technologies. I got involved with WordPress support back in 2005 when I had some questions, found the forum and realized I could answer others’ questions while waiting on my own answers. Volunteered to help clean up mangled forum posts shortly afterward and have been a mod ever since. [forum profile]

James “MacManX” Huff: When I started using WordPress six years ago, I had no clue what a “server” was, I though PHP was pronounced ffp, and I think I killed my blog eight times during the first hour. I would never have made it as far as I did without the WordPress Support Forums. Now, I’m happy to donate my time to help others, just like the forum volunteers from years ago helped me. [forum profile]

Otto: I live in Memphis, TN, and make beer in my spare time. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for about 5 years, and recently got hired by Matt as his “Tech Ninja”. So I’m actually paid to help people out now. [forum profile]

Michael “alchymyth” Stolze: I am a senior scientist, with interests in logic and computing since the early days of “fortran” and “assembler”. I began using WordPress and visiting the support forum while I was remodeling a website for a friend; and now I am part-time building web sites and WordPress themes. My life’s motto: “I am here to help.” [forum profile]

James “Rev. Voodoo” Yeo: I’ve tried to make my own website since 1993 when I got my first email account in university. I’ve hand coded, and I’ve tried just about every package out there. WordPress finally made it fun! [forum profile]

mercime: My first WP site was a WPMU 1.2.1 install in 2007 to consolidate all blogs I set up with Greymatter (CGI) in 2002 and self-hosted Blogger sites set up in 2003 under one admin for a church. I believe in the power of giving and giving back. Even though I am neither a coder or programmer, I go to the WP/BP forums and try to help others out where I can. For it is in giving that we receive … more than we even hope for. [forum profile]

Clayton “ClaytonJames” James: My involvement with WordPress started after a year-long trial of installing, evaluating and then discarding more than a dozen other blogging and content management systems that just didn’t live up to my expectations. After only a month with WordPress I knew I had found the right solution. Being involved with support in the forums has taught me almost as much about myself as it has about WordPress. It’s a pleasure belonging to a support community that’s always so willing to share its collective patience and knowledge with others. [forum profile]

Mark “t31os” Duncan: In my spare time I write hacks, plugins or provide support in the forums for WordPress (it’s great fun – generally) and it’s also nice sharing back what I know about code with the community, there’s also the satisfying feeling you get when you’ve helped someone troubleshoot a problem, create a custom hack or add some special functionality to their site (I think we all know that feeling). [forum profile]

Roy: I used to have an html website, but in April/May 2007 I switched to WordPress. Being unfamiliar with CSS, PHP, XHTML, etc. (and still!) I frequently used the forums to clear things up. After a while I could answer other user’s more basic questions myself and this is still the case. I just check every once in a while if there are questions that I can answer, because I think it would be a shame if a new user with a simple question would get stuck early in his/her WordPress experience on something (relatively) simple. Also I check the forums frequently because it is usually the first place to learn about large or small hacks, hiccups in the software, etc. [forum profile]

Mika A. Epstein: I work for “the man” at a large, multi-national bank, but I help with WordPress because the Communist/Socialist in me thinks that if we make the code better, we help make the world better. WordPress has caused me to master all sorts of bizarre talents I never would have thought possible. It’s even helped me to be better at my “real job” because of the coding ideas I’ve come across in the WP community. No one thinks better sideways than the WordPress Devs! [forum profile]

Mark “songdogtech” Ratledge: I got involved helping out in the WordPress.org forums after I found lots of help there myself. I’ve been developing WordPress sites for individuals and non-profits for a few years now. As well as working in IT and being a technology journalist, I’ve been a carpenter, mechanic and have taught university-level English and literature. [forum profile]

mrmist: I got into WordPress a few years ago after switching when MoveableType were having something of an identity crisis. Since then I have been getting more involved with the community, picking up bits of knowledge here and there. These days I am mostly active around the forums and Codex, and I try my best to submit simple patches to the code base. [forum profile]

Andrea “andrea_r” Rennick: I became a user of WordPress MU a good three years ago – when it was in pre-beta stage. I was just your typical mom at home, teaching my kids, and I wanted to create a community for other homeschoolers to have blogs all in one location, so we could find & support each other. It took me a month just to get everything running. I was spending so much time in the MU support forum finding answers, eventually I was helping others. [forum profile] (Note: Andrea was highly active in the WordPress MU Support Forums before they were closed a month ago.)

No support forum would be complete without moderators. The following moderators are currently active in the forums and deserve an extra round of applause. Not only are they tasked with keeping the forums organized and free of spam, but most of them are volunteers as well.

Obviously, this is just a small sampling of the volunteers providing help on the support forums. If you ever helped someone on the WordPress Support Forums, give yourself a pat on the back, and keep up the amazing work. You’re a part of something that makes WordPress one of the greatest open source blogging platforms.

If you have ever been helped by one of the volunteers on the WordPress Support Forums, let them know how much you appreciated their help.

$\"Collis$ Collis Ta’eed is a veteran blogger and co-founded the Envato network of educational sites and marketplaces covering niches like freelancing and web app’s and much much more. Collis’ network of sites reaches hundreds of thousands of readers monthly, his marketplaces are responsible for enormous amounts of income for developers the world over and his tutorial sites are the hallmark how-to repository for much of the web community.

Collis joined us today to share with us the mechanics of growing initial traffic to your blog, differentiating yourself in the market and monetizing your blog. Listen in to learn more about how to go from freelancer to business owner.

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.

Exploring Lisbon and Estoril with Automattic’s Happiness team, who had been having a meetup there.

A small update, I’m slowly working through the WP Super Cache admin page in an effort to make it better. You can in fact download the development version if you want to follow along.

What you see above is my first pass. An effort to make the first options section match the look and feel of the standard Settings pages in WordPress. It’s all likely to be mixed around and moved about before the next release, so please, dig in and lend a hand!

Huzzah! Today we’ve released a new spiffed-up WordPress for Android app, which not only runs better but also has a cool new comment notification feature. And as we toast our latest work, we must also give all of you a huge thanks — your feedback has been critical to helping us improve the app.

*update August 25th* – Turns out that the post view fix wasn’t working so well on non Froyo devices. We found the fix for that and released version 1.3.5 this morning.

$\"\"$ Now, when you get a new comment, you’ll see the actual text of the comment in the Android notification bar. Also, when you select the comment notification to moderate the comment, it will now be there instantly in the Comments view instead of requiring you to refresh.

So that’s about it. If you ever notice anything wonky in the app, feel free to submit a bug report to the WordPress for Android Trac, available here: android.trac.wordpress.org. Thank you and enjoy!

New plugins

Back List adds Whitelist and Blacklist options for Trackbacks and Pingbacks as well as the option to auto-accept Trackbacks from your own blog.

IP Ban returns ‘Page Not Found’ 404 error message for IP’s visiting your blog specified in the IP Ban option on the Discussion Options page.

Press This Reloaded provides the Press This bookmarklet with all the functionality of the regular Add New Post screen.

WP SimpleWeather allows you to quickly and easily display the current weather at any location you enter using the Yahoo! Weather API.

Updated plugins

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

DukaPress can be used to build online shops quickly and easily. It is built to be both simple and elegant yet powerful and scalable.

Job Manager allows you to manage job lists and job applications on your WordPress site.

By downloading the “Display Contact Photo” extension from Thunderbird, you can now view Gravatars, creating a personalized touch to all your email messages:

To set this up, first follow the download and installation directions found on the extension page above.

3. Go to the “General Settings” tab and in the “Choose a default photo” drop-down menu, select “Gravatar.” Click “OK.”

You’ve just spent countless hours on your latest and greatest WordPress plugin and theme, and you want the world to know about it. Well, we want to help! I’m sure that you’ve all noticed the plugin and theme digests published here every other day, and it’s not too difficult to be a part of them. Sure, we all recommend that you submit your work of art to the official plugin and theme directories, but it normally takes a few days for these directories to be updated. Why not announce it here as soon as you’re done? We’ve made it easy to do just that.

If you want to share your latest and greatest WordPress plugin and theme with us, stop by the New WordPress Plugins and New WordPress Themes forums and simply post a new topic via the form at the bottom of the page, or email submissions (at) wltc (dot) net with either “[New/Updated Plugin Submission] plugin name” or “[New/Updated Theme Submission] theme name” in the subject.

Before submitting, your plugin or theme must be available for free, licensed under the GPL, and free of sponsored links and advertisements. With all submissions, please include the name of the plugin or theme, the license, a link to a product info page (this could be a blog post, page, WordPress plugin/theme directory listing, etc), and a screenshot (if available). We hate having to turn down plugins and themes simply because they provide nothing more than a direct download link to a third-party file sharing/storage service, but we feel that our readers deserve a bit more than that.

For the benefit of our readers, all plugins and themes are confirmed to work with the latest version of WordPress and certified to be free of sponsored links and advertisements, viruses, and other common exploits before being accepted as part of the next digest.

We encourage you to share your latest and greatest plugins and themes with us, and we appreciate your cooperation!

Buzz Kill, where Leo Laporte describes the re-ignition of his love affair with blogging over micro-blogging.

BT Extended is a spruced newspaper style theme, with a clean sleek white look built on Thematic framework & grid system.

DocOut Black will improve your search engine results by giving your web pages a search engine friendly document outline.

Leather is a unique and texture rich design with featured images and a simple options page.

The Twin is a free WordPress theme with a tattoo style illustration and customizable background.

As I announced today at WordCamp Savannah, I’m releasing two of my old designs as themes for any WordPress blog. (See slides here.) If you’re one of the thousands of people who’ve asked me how I do my galleries here on this site, now you can look at the actual code in the Matala theme. (The talavera-looking design by Nicolò Volpato.) The second theme, Mazeld, is actually the last from-scratch original design I did here on Ma.tt (then photomatt.net) and is built as a 2010 child theme. Both themes are listed in the WordPress.org theme directory and available for download. This is just the first iteration, so expect some updates within the next few months as we iterate on the code and functionality.

October 15th is less than two months away and Change.org wants you to vote on this year’s Blog Action Day topic. Currently, the selection includes the following topics, but they will continue to take suggestions until the poll closes.

Last year, over 31,000 posts were made from across the globe on the topic of climate change, so vote for your favorite topic and plan to make yourself a part of this monumental event.

I was thrilled by the concept of a day for worldwide blog-powered reflection when the first Blog Action Day was announced in 2007, and I participated with Save the Environment for Free. Unfortunately, I missed the last two, but I’m already thinking of some great posts for all of the potential topics. Have you participated in any past Blog Action Days, and are you planning to participate in this year’s Blog Action Day?

New plugins

WordPress Post Tabs is a plugin for WordPress that will help you add as many tabs to your WordPress post or Page. So, say if you want to write some review, you can create various sections of the review post and display them in a tab view, i.e. separate tab for each section.

World Flags allows you to add country flags anywhere in your WordPress blog using simple shortcodes and/or widgets, or show visitor country flag and info based on their IP address.

WP Word Count is a plugin for WordPress that gives you word count statistics for your blog’s posts and pages. In addition to overall stats, WP Word Count also gives figures and details for the largest posts and pages of your blog as well as breakdowns for each of your blog’s authors.

yPHPlista integrates PHPlist, the famous open-source, free and powerful mailing list software, with WordPress smoothly.

Updated plugins

Google Analytics for WordPress is the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Of course, you could just copy the tracking code into your theme and be done with it, but then you’d miss a whole lot of features that this plugin has to offer you.

SEO Ultimate gives you control over title tags, noindex/nofollow, meta tags, rich snippets, slugs, canonical tags, autolinks, 404 errors, rich snippets, and much more.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all.

WP SlimStat is a simple but powerful real-time web analytics plugin for WordPress. It doesn’t require any subscription to external statistic services: all metrics are kept on your local server, private and accessible to your eyes only.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more.

When WordPress 3 launched on June 17th of 2010, the ability to run a multisite network from a single installation quickly became one of the most talked about features. Formerly known as WordPress MU, this entirely separate WordPress project was simultaneously upgraded and merged with the main WordPress branch. Many were expecting WordPress Multisite to carry with it the usual WordPress simplicity, but there’s quite a bit more to do after WordPress’ famous 5-minute installation when creating a multisite network, and the complexities of the network system have led to some confusion and questions along the way.

Andrea Rennick became a user of WordPress MU about three years ago, when it was still in a pre-beta stage. She was just your typical stay at home mom and teacher, and she wanted to create a community where other homeschoolers could have their own blogs all in one location, so they could find and support one another. It took her about a month just to get everything running, and she was spending so much time on the WordPress MU Support Forum finding answers, that she eventually began helping others. Soon after, she launched WPMU Tutorials as a resource for anyone to learn about WordPress MU and now WordPress Multisite.

We are very fortunate that Andrea has agreed to share with us her solutions to some of the most common WordPress Multisite problems. To avoid any interpretation issues, the rest is entirely in her own words.

Subdomain sites are managed on the server through the use of wildcards. This means that the server itself needs to have them set up in Apache, and will send any request for any subdomain, straight through to the WordPress network. Then WordPress will look it up on the database and serve the right content. You also need to have a wildcard subdomain record in your DNS records. It looks like this:
\nin A * yourdomain.com.

“My subfolder sites don’t work / have no styles / are not in folders on the server. What’s going on?”

Subfolder sites work on the same principle as pretty permalinks do. The URL is rewritten to give the appearance that it is in a folder on the server. So, mod_rewrite has to be working on the server, and actually reading the .htaccess file. It’s the .htaccess file that does the heavy lifting of “making” the subfolder site in this case.

For either kind:
\nThe blogs themselves are virtual. They do not exist on the server. I’ve answered a few threads about the blogs.dir folder that needs to be made on the server when you enable multisite. This folder does not hold the actual blogs. The only use it has is for media uploads from each site. If there is nothing in the folders under the blogs.dir directory, that has no relation to if the site itself shows up or not.

“There’s a /blog/ in my main blog. Why is it there and how do I remove it?”

Yes, this is done intentionally so any permalink off the main site does not interfere with any site name in a subfolder setup. You will not see this in a subdomain install.

You can remove it by editing the main site details under Super Admin -> Sites and editing the main site.

I actually like to use this to my advantage, and set up a home page for the whole network on the main site, and then use the /blog/ to be the “main” blog on the network.

“Help! my uploaded images don’t work! Also, they are going in one location but my blogs says they are somewhere else, why?”

This is how it is supposed to work. Images are physically located under the blogs.dir folder, in numbered folders from that correlating to each site’s blog-id#. these locations are then rewritten via the .htaccess file and served up to the “new” location. If it’s not working, then either something is missing from the .htaccess file, or the file just isn’t being read by mod_rewrite.

“Do I need a special theme? Why can’t I edit themes? How can I make changes?”

Most any theme for WordPress will work just fine when you are running a network. Super Admins are the only ones who can edit themes, and this is for security reasons. Also, themes are shared. If you set up a network with 10 sites and they all use TwentyTen, only one copy of TwentyTen is in use. This is why each site has its own admin area with their own widgets to manage.

As I touched on in the previous question, the main site’s theme is what controls the main page on the network. Getting familiar with the template hierarchy and using a static home page or the home.php template with various plugins to pull network-wide content will give many Super Admins exactly what they are looking for.

“How do I aggregate or gather all the posts from across all the sites onto the main page of my domain?”

This needs to go in the mu-plugins folder, and will run all the time. It puts new options on the Super Admin -> Options page, and you can set it to send all new posts to the main site in the network. When new posts are made, they will be copied over to the main blog, and will retain the originating site’s permalink, so there will be no duplicate content. The only thing it will not pull is comments and post thumbnails.

I’d like to thank Andrea Rennick for generously providing her solutions to these common problems both here and on the WordPress Support Forums. If you need any help beyond what was mentioned above, please feel free to ask in the Multisite section of the WordPress Support Forums where Andrea and the rest of the talented support forum volunteers are on-hand to help you at most hours of the day.

How long ago did you create your Twitter account? Hold on to that number…how long ago did you launch your blog? Something tells me that you’ve probably been running your blog much longer than you’ve had a Twitter account…am I right? If so this can only mean one thing, unless you’ve been actively tweeting older posts from your blog, your Twitter followers have no idea about the treasure trove of (older) content that is sitting on your site. Sure you are getting a ton of search engine traffic, but hasn’t traffic from social media also proven to be extremely lucrative as well? Why let that potential traffic go to waste?

This is where the Tweet Old Post plugin comes in. The Tweet Old Post plugin does one thing and it does it well, it allows you to automatically tweet about old posts using a specified Twitter account and it provides you with a set of options to make sure that tweet is right.

Before you go and install this free plugin make sure you read this in depth review to help you decide whether this plugin is the right tool for you.

You can download and install the Tweet Old Post plugin from the Plugins directory in WordPress within your WordPress installation or you can download the plugin directly from the WordPress by following this link.

To install from your WordPress installation simply click on Plugins in the Admin menu, Add New, and search for Tweet Old Post. When the plugin appears in the search results list, click on the Install button to download and install the plugin.

Once you’ve successfully installed and activated the plugin, follow the instructions below.

The plugin is fairly easy to configure all you need to do is enter the Twitter user name and password you wish to automatically tweet to. However if you wish to harness the power of this plugin you will need to delve in the additional options that are available.

As you can see from the screenshot above there are quite a bit of options that are available which allow you to customize how the tweets are delivered and when. We will go over each of these options in detail so that you understand each of the settings.

a. Twitter User Name and Twitter Password - As I mentioned before, you can simply enter your Twitter user name and password and start tweeting automatically right away. If you run into any issues with this plugin, most of them can be resolved by double checking that you entered the correct user name and password.

b. Tweet Prefix – If set, each tweet that is automatically generated will be prefixed with the information you enter in this box. Keep in mind the character limits and the fact that it will be used for every single tweet that is automatically generated.

c. Add post data to tweet – If set to Yes, the tweet will include additional information from the post, i.e. content. I would probably leave this set to No.

d. Fetch URL from Custom field – If checked the URL that will be used when tweeting will be from the custom field otherwise the plugin will use the shortened URL.

e. Use URL shortener and URL Shortener Service – If you decide to use a URL shortener service you can specify which one to use from the list of available services.

f. Default #hash tags for your tweets – Using this option you can specify a set of hash tags to be used with your tweets. Again, keep in mind that these tweets will be automated and the content tweeted will be random so make sure you use a hash tag that will apply to all of the content.

h. Categories to Omit from Tweets – If you’ve done a really good job of categorizing your posts you will find this option a lifesaver, specifically if you use specific hash tags for certain categories.

3. Once you are satisfied with the settings you will have two options; you can update the plugin settings or you can Tweet Now to make sure everything is working correctly.

The screenshot above is an example of a Tweet from an old post appearing on Twitter when the Tweet Now button was used.

As you can see by now, this plugin has a lot of options to offer and a lot of potential to drive traffic to all of those old posts on your blog. However there are some shortcomings that may make you reconsider.

Despite these shortcomings, this plugin makes should be on the top of everyone’s essential WordPress plugins list. It will help you promote older content and recycle more current content to new Twitter followers. I hope the developer is listening…If the features discussed above are added, I think that this would be a killer plugin, something I’d be willing to pay for.

What do you think? Are there other plugins with similar functions already out there? Please use the comments form below.

If you looked closely at the business card image in my previous post, you might have noticed that the URL on the card isn’t for this blog. I set up a separate portfolio site using the dougal.us domain that I’ve been sitting on for quite some time. I am currently using the SimpleFolio theme, found from Smashing Magazine, and created portfolio highlight posts for several projects I’ve been involved in. I’m still not sure if I’m going to stay with that theme, but it’s likely to stick around for at least a little while, until I have time to decide what I might want to do differently. The “logo” is temporary — I haven’t settled on an identity, yet — so that’s likely to change, as well.

This site will continue to host most of my WordPress-related posts, plugin information, and occasional personal posts, while the other site will cover other web site projects that I work on, speaking gigs, general web development topics, and tech news. There will be some overlap from time-to-time (in particular with information about WordPress projects, conferences, and presentations), but I’ll try to keep it minimal, mainly pointing from one site to the other, as appropriate.

Glossy Stylo is a colorful theme with nice transparency effects, 2-column layout, and a widget-ready sidebar.

Portfolio Theme uses custom post types for portfolio pages, takes advantage of the new menu navigation, and includes a ton of neat features.

Summ is a theme in blue and white, with widgets supported, and no plugins required.

$\"Matt$ In this second part of our interview with Matt (you have listened to the first part, right?), we discuss VaultPress; Automattic’s new backup system. Matt explains the features, pricing. Going from that we discussed hosting and their uptimes.

Then the discussion shifted to the community, and how that’s built. We discussed how to get core commit access, and how Matt’s multiple roles within the community could collide. We got talking about how WordPress got where it came, how good product development is also good marketing, WordCamps around the world, how giving support helps you make better products etc. etc. etc. Best quote: Matt & Automattic are happy plumbers of the web $\":)\"$

If you’re into WordPress, just listen to it live here, or download it to your iPod.

Nothing can be more unsettling than an obvious problem with absolutely no error or diagnostic message, and that’s exactly what the infamous white screen of death is. Imagine that you were changing a setting on your blog, installing or upgrading a plugin, upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, or simply returning to your blog at the start of a new day, and you see nothing but white.

Unfortunately, the white screen of death became all too well-known in the WordPress community when a few incompatible plugins began to cause the issue after users upgraded to WordPress 3. Today, most white screens of death are either caused by plugins or themes (theme functions can sometimes interfere with core WordPress functions). If you want to immediately attempt to find the culprit, you can enable debug mode, but even that can produce nothing more than a blank screen, so why not attack the problem head on?

We’ll start with your plugins. If you have access to your admin panel, try deactivating all plugins. If you don’t have access to your admin panel, try manually resetting your plugins. If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.

If your blog showed no signs of improvement after deactivating your plugins, then it’s time to move on to your currently active theme. If you have access to your admin panel, try switching to the Default theme (WordPress 1.5 – 2.9.2) or the Twenty Ten theme (WordPress 3.0 and higher). If you don’t have access to your admin panel, access your server via FTP or SFTP, navigate to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your currently active theme, which will force the Default theme (WordPress 1.5 – 2.9.2) or the Twenty Ten theme (WordPress 3.0 and higher) to activate. This will hopefully rule-out a theme-specific issue.

Though plugins and themes are the most common cause of the white screen of death, there are a few rare causes as well. If the above troubleshooting steps failed to resolve the issue, please contact the WordPress Support Forums.

As noted on the WCUT blog, Bluehost is sponsoring the lunch for WordCamp Utah 2010. James over at Bluehost was great, he wanted to make sure they played a big role in making this a successful event, and covering lunch definitely counts. Having great sponsors (check out the folks in the sidebar at http://2010.utah.wordcamp.org/) make this process so much easier.

Catering for lunch is from The SugarHouse BBQ Company, which makes me hungry just thinking about it. The lunch plans are based on the current estimates for the number of people attending, but we can adjust that if we need to, I’d be happy to order more food :-) .

New plugins

Custom Post Permalinks will set up custom post type permalinks for non-hierarchical permalinks which have the flexibility of blog post permalinks.

Dev Corner Badge places a highly visible marker in the upper corner of every post/page to denote a development site.

Favicon Rotator is a free plugin for WordPress that makes it incredibly simple to add a favicon to your site. Favicon Rotator uses WordPress’ own media management features to upload and add a favicon to your site so there is nothing new to learn.

Trigger Warning allows you to wrap content in quicktags to hide it. Readers can choose to read the trigger content by clicking on the “Show” button.

WP Tweet Button implements Twitter’s own Tweet Button on your blog or site. The tweet button can be positioned as you please and can be styled to your delight in the settings page.

Updated plugins

Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics.

Simple Twitter Connect is a series of plugins that lets you add any sort of Twitter functionality you like to a WordPress blog.

Twitter Goodies will show your twitter tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget) and Post and/or Pages.

Twitter Tools integrates your WordPress blog with your Twitter account allowing you to send new blog posts to Twitter as a tweet and vice versa.

WPBook enables you to pull recent blog posts from your blog in to Facebook, and allow Facebook users to enter comments. Their comments show up on your blog whether accessed directly or through Facebook, and regular blog comments will show up in Facebook as well.

Version 2.4 of my Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress is now available. Twitter Tools creates a full two-way integration between your WordPress site and Twitter. You can send your posts to Twitter, archive your tweets and create posts from them, and more.

This version has the following changes and is a must upgrade due to Twitter’s authentication changes:

The download and links to other resources are now available on the Crowd Favorite website.

WordCamp Houston at the Museum of Natural Science, after-party at Caroline Collective, after-after-party at Christine Tremoulet’s studio, after-after-after-party at Spanish Flowers.

Attention Apple-gadget-owning WordPress users! Have you been using the WordPress iOS app for iPhone and iPad? Or maybe you tried it a while back and thought it wasn’t for you? Either way, the new release — v2.6 — will knock your socks off. Why? A bunch of reasons:

There are also numerous bugfixes and performance enhancements in this release, so if you haven’t been using the app lately, you should consider giving it another try. I’m personally pretty excited to start using the iPhone version more often now that there are all these fixes and new features. Especially the video upload. You know, for those creative moments that make life fun. $\':)\'$

Not an iPhone user? We’ve still got your on-the-go back! Check out the WordPress apps for Android, Blackberry, and Nokia (beta). They’re all 100% GPL, of course, and we’re always looking for contributors to the development projects, so check the blogs if you have mobile dev skills and want to get involved.