Hey Everyone,

Here’s what I found to be interesting in the world of WordPress this week:

Planet WordPress Canada
To showcase Canada’s variety of knowledgeable and enthusiastic WordPress bloggers and developers, Peter Keung has launched Planet WordPress Canada, which is an aggregation of posts from various blogs (this one included) on the topic of WP and all things related.

Draft Posts Widget
How cool is this? Website developers and bloggers are always looking for ways to keep their audiences anticipating for more. With the Draft Posts Widget, you can do just that. It will show a list of your draft posts so that people can see what’s coming up on your blog and they can anticipate your upcoming writings. I really like this idea and will start using it on a few sites I own.

WordPress Security Issues
According to TechCrunch, WordPress has a tonne of vulnerabilities and has been the object of attack by numerous hackers, especially in the last few weeks. Some people have responded in the comments that the current (2.5+) version is not affected, but still something to be checked out for those rocking the old versions.

BuddyPress Theme Previews
BuddyPress is the upcoming social network platform based on WordPress Mu. Developer Andy Peatling has provided a preview of how it will look on his website. I’m really excited about this product because it will integrate WordPress blogs, BuddyPress discussion forum, and social networking.

WordPress Essential Training
For those of you who are new to WordPress and would like to start a blog on WordPress.com, you can take advantage of new WordPress.com blog tutorials on Lynda.com. There are a few preview tutorials, but in order to view the whole collection you have to be a member.

ComicPress - WordPress theme for Artists, Cartoonists, etc.
A great new theme has been released by Tyler Martin called Comic Press, which, combined with the ComicPress Manager plugin, allows you to maintain a WordPress blog that exclusively showcases your comics, artwork, or any other type of images. It is a very nice tool for people who want to have a blog along with a daily illustration or comic.

God FTW!
Apparently, God (the Christian version at least) has a blog, and S/he’s using WordPress.

That’s all for now - have a great weekend :D

-k.s.

Hi Everyone,

I’d encourage you to do this on your blog if you’ve got some wishes for Wordpress. They have a section on the Wordpress site called Ideas, and the community ranks them. The Automattic team works on the highest ranked ideas, but for the programmers out there who love a challenge, you can check out some of the brilliant ideas and work on them as projects for plugins. So the things below are both a wish-list and a to-do list. These can be done by a programmer and WP professional, but the product would be more solid if the community and Automattic worked on them together. Here’s my list:

1) Importing & Exporting not just by author, but by category, or time range, or tag. Today there was a an interesting post by Jeff Chandler on the long way to export by category. However, a simple plugin would be awesome. This one’s obvious and it’s already on the list… and someday it WILL be a part of WP.

2) Really custom write panel. A write panel that works like NetVibes, PageFlakes, and iGoogle. There is a plugin called Custom Write Panel, and other similar ones, but none that goes the distance (without some modifying of your own). If you could, out of the box, define templates for types of posts you write, such as Post, Announcement, Review, Update, etc. Then based on those defined templates, you can define custom form fields that you would like to fill out for each type of post. I mean this can be done with modifications, but if it came ready to go out of the box, that would rock. (Clarification: this is not the same as a page template, which defines the markup/code/design of the page. This is about the input fields and the write panel).

3) BuddyPress. This wish is coming true some day. I can’t wait. Basically it will allow you to use WP Mu with some plugins and modifications to launch a social network. It can be (and has been) done with your own mods, but BuddyPress will probably have the checks and balances someone couldn’t achieve on their own.

4) WP linked to BBPress via comments. Basic functionality: you make a post, it is posted in your BBPress-powered forum (the first post will just have the title and link to avoid duplicate content). Then, all comments on the post are made as replies to that thread in your forum. People have been working on many WP bridges with VBulletin, phpBB, IPB, SMF, etc. but you’d think the easiest to bridge would be another Automattic product. This is more on the to-do list than the wishlist because I think it’s not that complicated, just need time to do it.

5) Post Macros. Maybe there is a plugin for this I haven’t found, but basically being able to set up posting of certain content at certain intervals; being able to schedule posts; and being able to perform specific actions on posts at certain times.

What is your wishlist? :)

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.