WordPress.org

According to a study by Pingdom, WordPress is now responsible for powering 48 of the top 100 blogs!

We already know that WordPress powers about 19% of the web, but now we know just how well it fares as a blogging platform in general. Pretty well, that is! Out of the top 100 blogs surveyed, WordPress is just 1 of 12 platforms used, and it’s powering 48 of the them! As a comparison, the next highest result were the 12 blogs running on a custom platform, followed by 8 who declined to comment, and finally 7 running Movable Type.

Yes, you read that right. Of the mainstream blogging platforms used by the top 100, WordPress comes in first with 48, followed by Movable Type with 7. That’s quite a substantial lead!

Matt Mullenweg expects an even higher adoption rate for WordPress next year, and with these numbers, it’s hard to dispute that.

Users use the same passwords for multiple services. It’s a fact of life, it’s just so easy to that most people end up having 2-3 passwords they use everywhere, including one “hard” one for financial sites, etc. The downside is your password is only strong as the weakest link of where you’ve used it — when something like the Gawker hack happens there is a huge wave of compromised accounts that follow.

You can ask users not to use the same password, you can even encourage things like 1password (too expensive for many people I recommend it to), but what if there was a way to enforce that people registering for your site hadn’t used the same password elsewhere?

It actually wouldn’t be too hard, if you’re registering with 123@gmail.com and the password “abc” when you register and the site hasn’t encrypted and stored the password yet it could try to log into your Gmail account with those details, and if it works force you to choose a different password. There’s no reason this has to be limited to email logins, you could put it against the APIs of WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, any number of other services that expose simple authentication APIs and see where it works. Any successful logins, tell the user they need to pick something else.

Of course all that work and they’ll probably just put a 1 at the end of it.

BirdTIPS is a flexible three-column blog theme.

Lyric is a simple, soft, professional, yet lightly colorful theme.

Target is a very neat and clean black and white business theme.

VaultPress is a cool security service by Automattic, but if you take a look at the pricing and plans, some may think that this is the luxury line of data safekeeping. However, tons of people that have had to utilize the restoration feature of VaultPress say it’s worth every penny. Boles University.com has a non-profit WordPress multi-site installation with about 14 sub-domains under its belt. VaultPress supports multi-site but if the subscription is for the main site, only the main sites files and data will be backed up, sub-sites will be ignored. In order to backup everything, each site within the multi-site installation needs their own individual subscription. As you can imagine, it wouldn’t take long for that to be expensive. As David W Boles points out in his article, it would be nice to see VaultPress come up with some sort of plan that allows non-profits the ability to backup their main site along with their satellite sites for a much more affordable price. I’m not sure how VaultPress would be able to verify whether a multi-site installation is non-profit or not without paperwork validation but it certainly seems like this is a missed oppurtunity market segment for VaultPress.

This is the world of WordPress which means there are alternatives when it comes to safekeeping your data. A relatively new service called BackupPress performs many of the same functions as VaultPress but at a much more affordable price. In fact, taking a look at their comparison page, they support WordPress multi-site at just 25$ per year. At the time of publishing this article, I couldn’t locate any specific text that states restrictions similar to VaultPress in that each sub-domain within a multi-site network would need it’s own subscription. Hopefully, a representative from the service will stop by the comments section and fill us in on the details.

Related posts:

1. VaultPress Now Supports WordPress Multisite
2. VaultPress Issues First Set Of Invites

Good advice on decoupling WordPress Custom Post Type implementation from your themes. How to notify a user that some functionality of the theme might depend on a plugin that defines the CPTs. How to override theme template selection from a plugin.

Theme-ready Custom Post Types in WordPress – Jumping Duck Media

Original Article: Theme-ready Custom Post Types in WordPress – Jumping Duck Media Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings - WordPress, web development, and world domination.

WordPress 3.4 Beta 2 has been released. Since the first beta, there have been over 60 bug fixes and adjustments based on testing a feedback.

As before, this is not yet meant for live sites, but please do take a few swings at it on a test installation, especially if you are a plugin or theme developer. If you find any bugs, please report them, and contact the support forums if you need any help.

I loved this comment on Hacker News, especially the last paragraph which I’ll quote here:

Howdy, folks! Another week, another beta. Since we released Beta 1 last week, we’ve committed more than 60 bug fixes and feature adjustments based on testing and feedback. If you’ve been testing Beta 1, please update to Beta 2 to make sure things are still working for you. If you are a theme or plugin author and have not yet started testing your code against the 3.4 beta, now’s the perfect time to start. And as always, if you find any bugs, let us know! Full details on testing and bug reporting can be found in last week’s Beta 1 post.

Download WordPress 3.4 Beta 2

Pingdom writes WordPress completely dominates top 100 blogs. I’m quoted in the article saying that the 49% marketshare we have among top blogs will continue to grow, and I’d like to expand on that a bit because it’s a strong statement.

Typepad and Blogsmith, the two platforms that dropped the most over the past 3 years, are going to disappear either through blogs still using them losing relevance, or their active blogs switching away. Movable Type will likely follow suit, unless its now Japanese-led development makes a pretty drastic change in its product direction. (Consultants focused on Movable Type and Typepad have already started shifting focus to switching their clients to modern platforms to avoid losing the relationship.)

The other big shift will come from the ~22% on custom platforms — this is going to become as niche as writing your own web server instead of using Apache or Nginx. Some organizations like Huffington Post might continue to make the necessary investments of over 40 engineers to maintain a platform at scale, the rest will find better return investing those resources in editorial. Great stories find an audience regardless of their platform.

WordPress’ biggest challenge over the next two years, and where we’re focusing core development, will be around evolving our dashboard to be faster and more accessible, especially on touch devices. Many of our founding assumptions about how, where, and why people publish are shifting, but the flexibility of WordPress as a platform and the tens of thousands of plugins and themes available are hard to match. We might not always be the platform people start with, but we want to be what the best graduate to.

New plugins

Sharexy is a powerful social sharing, bookmarking, and blog monetization tool.

WP Social Feedback allows your users to submit feedback, view what other users have submitted and vote on other feedback submissions.

WP Visited Countries allows you to easily create and publish a map of the countries you have visited and lived in.

Updated plugins

Bulk Delete lets you to delete posts in bulk from selected categories, tags, or custom taxonomies.

Posts 2 Posts allows you to create many-to-many connections between posts of all kinds.

WordPress has a reputation of being very portable but after reading a recent article on WPGarage.com, there is a certain condition in which the data in WordPress can become non-portable. It has to do with the serialization of data. However, they offer up a few different ways in which to deal with the problem so that you don’t lose data via a database dump.

No related posts.

Paul Ford on Facebook and Instagram, hilarious and insightful.

Yesterday on Twitter, I was informed of a new WordPress code snippets library that sprang up called WPFunction.me. The site has an easy to use interface for grabbing code snippets. While at first, it seems as though you need to perform a lot of scrolling to select code snippets and get the code, you can alleviate the scrolling by clicking on the preview link.

However, if you decide that this snippets website is not your cup of tea, check out the list of WordPress Code Snippet repositories put together by CatsWhoCode.com.

Related posts:

1. Code Snippet To Reduce Memory Usage
2. WP-Snippets Launches Newly Designed Site
3. Plugin Code Repository Bookmarklet

You’ve heard of the placebo effect, how people can get better from a fake treatment, but did you know there’s also a nocebo effect? It’s just as strong: “More than two-thirds of 34 college students developed headaches when told that a non-existent electrical current passing through their heads could produce a headache.” (From Skeptic’s Dictionary.) Alexis Madrigal did a very readable feature about it for the Atlantic called The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills. I found out about it from Olivia Fox Cabane’s new book The Charisma Myth. What you don’t know can hurt you.

The TimThumb vulnerability is still in the wild as another major site fell victim to it just yesterday. As sad as this situation may be, it just goes to show that some sites may still be running the infected script even after news of the vulnerability broke over six months ago.

Like the old saying, there’s no time like the present, and now is the perfect time to install and run the TimThumb Vulnerability Scanner and Exploit Scanner plugins. If you are at all confused by the results of either of these scanners, the kind folks at the WordPress Support Forums will be more than happy to help you.

In mid-January Mark Zuckerberg added me as a friend on Instagram (we’re also connected on Facebook), I grabbed this screenshot a few weeks later because I thought it might be interesting at some point:

Today the awesome news, for both Facebook and Instagram, comes that the Instagram team and product is being acquired. This is one of the first acquisitions (if not the first?) Facebook has made where they don’t plan to shut down the service, and it’s a testament to what Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger and his team have built. (Friendfeed is still running, but that doesn’t count.) It’s good to see old Pier 38 neighbors doing well.

Shade is a simple theme with a charcoal gray background and an accent color that is available in four color variations: blue, red, green and yellow.

Universal Web is a universal, modern, and very functional theme with optimized/light code.

For the second time in two years, Dan Tynans website, eSarcasm.com has been hacked, this time with code that redirected referrals from Google, Yahoo and other search engines to Viagra ad sites. After conducting a thorough security review with Code Garage.com, an online security scanning website similar to Securi, they discovered that the point of entry was with the zero-day Timthumb vulnerability discovered back in August of 2011.

Last August, a zero-day vulnerability affected TimThumb that allowed hackers to execute their PHP code on any site that was running it. As it turns out, the WordPress theme we bought for the site employs pieces of TimThumb code — including the flaws that were exploited.

Now we have to wait for the spammy search results to evaporate from Google’s cache before everything returns to normal.

Be sure to read the tips that Dan and his security adviser provides on protecting your site. Despite the vulnerability being patched soon after its discovery, sites are still becoming compromised. Because of the long tail effect and so many websites using WordPress these days, who knows when this point of entry will stop being taken advantage of.

No related posts.

Make Waves is on its way to enlist 500 people to give back to WordPress in 2012, and if you’re curious about how you can be a part of that, don’t miss How to Give Back to WordPress from Automattic‘s own Jane Wells on Tuesday, April 10 from 2 to 3 PM CDT.

The webinar will cover ways for any WordPress user to help make WordPress the greatest blogging platform of all time. This isn’t just for developers. Even if you only blog with WordPress, there are plenty of ways that you could give back to WordPress, and Jane Wells will cover them all.

If you’re ready to give back to WordPress, take the Make Waves 2012 Pledge now!

New plugins

Google Authenticator gives you two-factor authentication using the Google Authenticator app for Android/iPhone/Blackberry.

WordPress Password Expiry expires a user’s access to the site after a specified number of days.

Updated plugins

Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps is the first WordPress XML Sitemap plugin that comes with comprehensive support for Sitemapindex, Multi-site and Google News sitemap.

BFT Autoresponder allows scheduling of automated autoresponder messages and managing a mailing list.

Image Widget uses a native WordPress upload thickbox to add image widgets to your site.

Jetpack supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

In the upcoming WordPress 3.4 update, adding support for custom backgrounds and headers to a theme will be easier than ever. All of the capabilities of the old functions and constants (which will be deprecated) are being rolled into one simple add_theme_support() call.

Updating Custom Backgrounds and Custom Headers for WordPress 3.4 « Make WordPress Themes

Original Article: Updating Custom Backgrounds and Custom Headers for WordPress 3.4 « Make WordPress Themes Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings - WordPress, web development, and world domination.

A good example showcasing the is_plugin_active conditional statement that saved Peter from a whole lot of donkey work. All it took was 12 lines of code.

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DynamicWP has put together a list of 11 plugins that are especially helpful for writers using WordPress. One of the nifty plugins from that list that I discovered is AP Style Dates And Times. This plugin automatically abbreviates times and months according to the AP Style guide.

The second resource that you should keep handy if you’re the journalist type is a post written by Ryan Imel on WPCandy.com that lists a number of different services and plugins that Ryan has used to keep WPCandy readers up to date on everything happening within the world of WordPress.

Related posts:

1. Can WordPress Be A Project Management App?
2. Great List Of WordPress Resources
3. WPCandy Is Back In Business

WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 has been released. As always, this is still in development and not meant for use on live sites, but the team is planning for a final release in May if all goes as planned.

This beta includes a few notable additions over the current stable release, including a new theme customizer and previewer, the ability to select header and background images from the library, support for flexible custom header image sizes, and a much improved theme browser with the ability to install child themes from the official directory.

This is not yet meant for live sites, but please do take a few swings at it on a test installation. If you find any bugs, please report them, and contact the support forums if you need any help.

In what seems like forever since the last major release of WordPress, 3.4 Beta 1 has been released. You should know the routine by now. Don’t run beta software in a production environment. Instead, set up a local install or a mirrored copy somewhere else for testing. If you encounter a situation that you think is a bug, you can use the methods described within this Codex article to report it.

If you decide to give WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 a whirl, here are a couple of things to take a closer look at.

• Theme Customizer with Previewer
• Flexible Custom Header Sizes
• Selecting Custom Header and Background Images from Media Library
• Better experience searching for and choosing a theme

If you noticed that these all appear to be improvements around themes, there is a reason for that. Back in early January when the scope for WordPress 3.4 was being discussed, the overall theme (pardon the pun) for this release centered around the sites appearance.

The idea is that a combination of front-end features, dashboard features, and under-the-hood improvements all tied to managing your site’s appearance will be the focus of 3.4. It will also include smaller things that don’t live in the appearance section but are related to the overarching goal, such as making it possible to have links in image captions.

Speaking of links within image captions, this functionality should be in 3.4 beta 1 and is something I, and many others have wanted within WordPress for a long time. This little addition will make it a breeze to add attribution to images when performing an image only post. There are under the hood improvements as well but what I’ve covered here should be a good start.

No related posts.

Ascetica is a simple portfolio and blog theme with a responsive layout, sticky posts slider, and a widget for presenting your work.

Reno has a color scheme usually associated with building trades and a leather texture background.

WordPress 3.4 is ready for beta testers!

As always, this is software still in development and we don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it.

If all goes well, we hope to release WordPress 3.4 in May. The more help we get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner we will be able to release the final version. If you want to be a beta tester, you should check out the Codex article on how to report bugs.

Here’s some of what’s new:

• Theme Customizer with Previewer
• Flexible Custom Header Sizes
• Selecting Custom Header and Background Images from Media Library
• Better experience searching for and choosing a theme

And some of the under-the-hood changes:

• New XML-RPC API for external and mobile applications
• New API for registering theme support for custom headers and backgrounds
• Performance improvements to WP_Query by splitting the query (Please test!)
• Internationalization improvements (improved performance and locale support)
• Performance and API improvements when working with lists of installed themes
• Support for installing child themes from the WordPress Themes Directory

Remember, if you find something you think is a bug, report it! You can bring it up in the alpha/beta forum, you can email it to the wp-testers list, or if you’ve confirmed that other people are experiencing the same bug, you can report it on the WordPress Core Trac. (We recommend starting in the forum or on the mailing list.)

Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 3.4 development cycle, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with the newest version of WordPress.

Download WordPress 3.4 Beta 1

WordCamp San Francisco 2012 will be on August 4, 2012. The location is the same as the last few years, the Mission Bay Conference Center.