A WordPress site that’s overrun with spam users is something like a den of cockroaches, especially if you’re running BuddyPress. Spam updates flood your activity stream and the dashboard slows to a crawl. The spammers’ prime objective is to seize control of your WordPress site and drain your server of resources in order to illegally promote products. As soon as you notice this happening you’ll need to find a way to quickly delete all of these spam users.
In order for a WordPress site to be successful, it must have a mobile presence. Many people search for sites through their mobile phones, and they are quickly becoming a resource for those who are on the go.
In order to reach this audience, a WordPress site must be optimized for mobile devices. Unfortunately, this can be a daunting task, but there are several plugins that are designed to make this task much easier for web developers, both individuals and small agencies.
Summary
1. iThemes Mobile
WordPress.com has been given a tall, dark and handsome makeover. Well, maybe not the tall bit.
Automattic designer Matt Thomas yesterday announced the dashboard’s redesign, which features better contrast, the “oh-so-lovely” Open Sans as the default typeface… and is pretty much the (top secret!) MP6 plugin many of us were expecting would be part of WordPress 3.6.
The revamp also includes redrawn icons and spacing in the dashboard has been opened up.
Thomas said he had a handful of goals for the redesign, which included:
A simply, uncluttered design; free of excessive decoration and focused on your content.
Automattic has added to its growing stable of acquisitions, buying out WordPress blog editor Poster.
The app’s creator Tom Witkin announced the news in a short statement on his blog, saying he, along with his software, had been snatched up by the WordPress.com parent company. He didn’t disclose how much money changed hands.
Witkin will be joining Automattic’s mobile team as a designer and coder.
It’s not very often that I come across a WordPress admin theme that doesn’t make me want to poke my eyes out, but this one caught my attention.
Our very own @aristath has created a plugin that brings Twitter Bootstrap styles into your WordPress dashboard. Bootstrap Admin is a clean, minimalist administration theme that totally changes the look of your dashboard with new icons, colors and Bootstrap as the backbone.
After you install and activate Bootstrap Admin, your WordPress dashboard will be transformed to look something like this:
So far Bootstrap Admin includes:
General styling of the WordPress admin area
WordPress does a lot of cool things. But if you’re like me, you often find yourself saying, “I wish it could do that cool thing over here instead of over there.”
That seems to happen a lot with widgets. There are all sorts of wicked widgets out there, but with a lot of them, they’re limited to the sidebar area.
Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could pull those nice widgets off the sidebar and stick them right in the middle of a post or page?
In case you missed it, the first beta of BuddyPress 1.8 was released this week. BuddyPress 1.7 introduced theme compatiblity and a host of other exciting features. Although 1.8 has had a shorter release cycle, it’s still packed with some very cool new features and improvements.
Here’s a little bit of what you can expect from BuddyPress 1.8:
BP_Group_Extension Rewritten
Many BuddyPress plugins interface with the groups component. The BP_Group_Extension has been rewritten to make it faster for plugins that depend on it. The new changes will make writing group extension plugins much easier than before.
Improvements to Group Administration Panels
It’s Friday, and what better way to look back over the week in WordPress and get ready for the weekend ahead than using animated GIFs!
Is it JIF or GIF?
I’m gonna keep saying GIF with a hard “G”. End of story, as the file format’s creator Steve Wilhite likes to say.
P.S. This is a Friday Funny so chillax :)
Not updating vulnerable plugins is one of the biggest mistakes anyone running WordPress can make. And it seems some of the world’s most visited sites are making that exact mistake. … Are you?
A number of weeks ago, perhaps the two most popular caching plugins, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache, both updated their code to patch a security vulnerability. HackerTarget.com reports that a quick check of the top 100,000 sites reveals that less than 50% of those sites that run W3 Total Cache have updated their plugins to the latest secure version.
There’s no money in starting a WordPress-centric news website, according to Jeff Chandler, who has one piece of advice for anyone thinking about giving it a go: don’t bother.
The Tavern Keeper over at WPTavern opens up about selling his site to Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg for $14,000, almost selling WPTavern to Joost de Valk and how WPCandy was interested in buying the site’s domain name in an insightful interview on the latest episode of the DradCast.
