When choosing WordPress plugins, you need to keep in mind that these are open source, therefore each plugin is maintained by someone for free, so some plugins are made by people that aren’t experienced coders (which may result in the plugin preventing your site from loading), or may not have time or resources to maintain the plugin to keep up with new WordPress releases.

This becomes especially important when considering the crucial and complex plugins that make your site work the way you need, as finding a replacement in the future may be prove to be much more laborious than doing a little due diligence beforehand. Imagine, for example, if your photo gallery stopped working when you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress!

Due to this, it’s important to take certain things into consideration when choosing a plugin, and if keep these in mind you’ll probably find that your selected plugins get updated with the new WP releases and are regularly improved. There’s lots of factors that you need to consider when choosing a plugin. Below are some of the major things to think about: (more…)

Matt posted a small bit regarding the recent alert NetworkSolutions put up claiming that there was a vulnerability (not giving a link either, undeserved). Turns out that the issue had nothing to do with wordpress, and more to do with their file permissions. His aptly titled post, Secure File Permissions Matter raises a good point about security in general…. your site is as secure as your server, which is actually as secure as where your server is kept. (more…)

I had a chance to install the recently released Wordpress 3 Beta 1 onto my PC and I thought I’d highlight some of the most notable (in my opinion at least) new features that you can expect. For a more comprehensive list of improvements, head on over the 3.0 features page on the  Wordpress Codex (more…)

Stops wordpress from grabbing a user avatar using their registration email.

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Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 2.8.6
Current Version : 1.0
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I found a little niggle in Wordpress when creating a custom form using shortcodes and plain PHP/HTML for processing. Turns out if your form uses $_POST['name'] in your form, WP does not like that and serves a Not Found (404) page. Changing that input field name to a different one, say surname, fixed the problem immediately. Took me a good 30 minutes to figure that out!

Uses the twitter goodies widgets API to create offical twitter widgets (profiles, lists, faves and search) straight from your control panel. Same opti

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Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 2.8.5
Current Version : 1.1
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I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having to play and experiment with syntax highlighting plugins for any code I’d like to post on here and other blogs. Unfortunately, there’s a ton of options to choose from and many just aren’t up to scratch.

What’s worse is that some have funny syntaxes such as using <pre class=”language”> tags which are easily broken by the wordpress WYSIWYG editor and your code gets mangled. Not only that, but changing over to a better plugin becomes a tedious task if you have to change all those pre tags to shorttags.

I’d like to recommend a plugin which works very well, called SyntaxHighliter Plus by Fred Wu and other contributors. In my opinion, it’s one of the easier plugins to use and makes posting code a breeze. (more…)

Developer plugin for those working off local server wordpress copies. Adds "local |" to your title if wordpress is running off a local serve

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Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 2.8.5
Current Version : 1.0
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Add smooth ajax login and registration effects to your blog and choose where users get redirected upon login/logout. Supports SSL, MU, and BuddyPress.

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Requires At Least : 2.8
Test Up To : 3.0
Current Version : 3.0b2
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Those that use BuddyPress along with their Wordpress MU installation may have found some limitations with the xprofiles. BuddyPress Devs have improvements listed as an upcoming feature, but in the meantime some things need to be fixed NOW!

One particular feature I needed to get round was the fact that you can’t change the default “Name” field. Whilst very common to have this as a field in most installations, we should at least be able to edit the field names the user sees, but unfortunately this is not so. (more…)