The Custom Google Search Plugin Enhances Your WordPress Search Results

by Siobhan McKeown December 22^nd, 2011 7 Responses

If you are a WordPress user then at some point in your career you will have used the WordPress built-in search. To say that it’s #lame is an understatement. But then WordPress isn’t an organization that’s particularly known for its search functionality.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could get a search specialist to create a search engine for your WordPress website? If you were really rich you could head over to Google Towers and see if you could get Larry and Sergey to create a personalized search for you.

Miscellaneous

WordPress 3.3: Hot or Not?

by Siobhan McKeown December 21^st, 2011 11 Responses

At WPMU.org we always like to ask the important questions, and really, there is only one burning question at the minute: WordPress 3.3: Hot or Not?

It’s been a week since WordPress 3.3 was released and I’ve been keeping on top of the buzz to find out with the WordPress Community thinks is:

Hot
Lukewarm
Not hot

Sick of listening to me already? Skip to the poll at the end!
Hot!
Drag and Drop Media Uploader

Miscellaneous

WordPress 3.3 Passes 1 Million Downloads

by Siobhan McKeown December 16^th, 2011 3 Responses

Our favorite piece of open source software has passed 1 milli on downloads – that’s since Monday! If you aren’t quite so nerdly as me you weren’t glued to the WordPress download counter. But so I could share the moment with you all I made a video of it. Enjoy!

Miscellaneous

9 Fun Web Tools You can Embed in Your WordPress Blog

by Siobhan McKeown December 14^th, 2011 3 Responses

Embedding is a great way to increase the flexibility of your blog. Pretty much all of us have embedded a YouTube video or Google Map, you might have embedded a Slide share presentation or a tweet. But there are embeddable tools and applications out there that are beyond the day-to-day standards. They can improve your blog by improving the way that content is displayed or increasing interactivity. I’ve been playing around with a few of them. Here are ten of my favourites.

Answer Garden

Miscellaneous

Time to Upgrade: Welcome to WordPress 3.3 “Sonny”

by Siobhan McKeown December 12^th, 2011 19 Responses

It’s late here in the UK but I couldn’t drag my carcass to bed without letting you all know that WordPress 3.3 has dropped which means it’s time for you to put your upgrade hats on, get out your FTP program, flex your clicking finger, and turn your WordPress into 3.3.

WordPress 3.3 has been named after saxophonist Sonny Stitt. Check out the video from wp.org:

Miscellaneous

The Manage WP Interview: Vladimir Prelovac

by Siobhan McKeown December 12^th, 2011 21 Responses

You’ve probably been hiding under a rock somewhere if you haven’t heard about Manage WP. It’s a service set up by Vladimir Prelovac which you can use to manage your WordPress websites. If you’re like me you’ve got loads of WordPress websites that you’ve got to look after. Sometimes they’re scattered around different servers belonging to different clients, and it’s hard to both keep track of and manage them. Manage WP makes it easy – a really useful service that saves you time (and time is money!) But Vladimir can tell you much better me so here’s what he’s got to say about Manage WP.

Miscellaneous

HACKED! Is Your WordPress Site Being Turned into a Cheap Luxury Store?

by Siobhan McKeown December 7^th, 2011 36 Responses

One of the Incsub team was very upset yesterday to discover that his WordPress site had been hacked. Somehow, a brand new WordPress install had been set up within his WordPress installation. Here’s what the website looks like:

Shiny Shiny Louis Vuitton bags! Who wouldn’t want to be selling those on their websites? They’re so damned popular that people are flocking to sell them. Personal blogs, delicious food websites, computer websites, book websites, tech websites, chat websites, shoe websites, just about everyone is getting on the bandwagon. Check it out on Google.

Or wait…. yeah, I guess they’ve been hacked too:

Plugins

New WordPress Plugin Makes WordPress Theming Easy

by Siobhan McKeown December 6^th, 2011 5 Responses

A new commercial plugin has just hit the WordPress scene, aimed specifically at people who want to make complex WordPress themes but just don’t have awesome PHP coding skillz. Actually, it’s two plugins WP Types & Views (one free, one commercial). Types is your usual Custom Post Type plugin that creates Custom Post Types (duh!). It’s also pretty nice for creating groups of custom fields and attaching them to content Types.

Miscellaneous

Looking for WordPress Hosting? Check out WPShout’s Hosting Review

by Siobhan McKeown December 5^th, 2011 12 Responses

Way back in March, Alex at WP Shout was asking for WordPress users to review their hosting provider. He received 252 responses and has posted a breakdown of hosting providers that received more than three reviews. 252 responses is pretty good for a survey like this and it’s resulted in a useful resource that you can use to help you make a decision on your WordPress hosting. I wish I’d know about it when I went through three different hosting providers earlier this year.

Plugins, WPMU DEV

Google+ Plugin now with BuddyPress and Post Format Support

by Siobhan McKeown November 28^th, 2011 2 Responses

Yes, that’s right, you did read the title of that post correctly – the WPMU DEV Google+ plugin now supports Post Formats and BuddyPress. I know that sounds awesome, but what does it mean?
Post Format Support
A few weeks back we announced that our Google+ plugin would now be integrated with Google Pages. Since then, followers of me on Google+ have noticed me posting some random posts to test our plugin. These included hashtags. Everyone thought I’d figured out some crafty way of posting from WordPress to G+ (no kids, that’s still not possible).