WordPress for webOS Brings You a New Way to Blog on the Go

by Sarah Gooding July 1^st, 2011 3 Responses

WordPress announced a new free app today for HP TouchPad owners. WordPress for webOS offers a totally new blogging experience with sliding panels, a full featured WYSIWYG editor, localization, and support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs.

The sliding panels make it easy to write blogs on the go, while switching between creating, editing and managing your content. Essentially, you’re not “stuck” on one page while writing your blog or managing comments.

WordPress for webOS currently only works with the HP TouchPad, but support for other webOS devices will be offered in the future.

Community, Development, News, Themes

Max Foundry Enters the Commercial Theme Market with Liftoff Launching Theme

by Sarah Gooding June 29^th, 2011 Leave a comment

The WordPress commercial theme market has a new player. Max Foundry is jumping in with their new Liftoff site launching theme.

Liftoff comes with 12 high-resolution backgrounds, 14 Twitter and Facebook icons, in 3 different sizes, and many built-in options for adding MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Aweber, analytics, favicon, logo, a customizable countdown timer, and custom styles.

Community, Development, News, Plugins

Magic Zoom Uses Fancy Javascript to Zoom Images on Your WordPress Site

by Sarah Gooding June 29^th, 2011 1 Response

The smooth Javascript image zooming that you’ve seen on many high-end store websites is now available as an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress users. If you’re one of the many people who has suffered lightbox fatigue, then you’ll want to check out Magic Zoom.

Magic Zoom displays images in greater detail when you hover over the image. Current features include:

Zoom
Smoothing
Cross fade
Fade in/out
Internal zoom
Multiple images
Reverse opacity
Titles above/below image
Position top/left/bottom/right
Borders/colors/cursors and other CSS options

Magic Zoom Dashboard Options:

Community, Development, News, Plugins

WP-phpmyadmin Plugin Poses a Huge Security Risk

by Sarah Gooding June 28^th, 2011 2 Responses

Big surprise, right? Why in the world anybody would be using a plugin called WP-phpmyadmin is beyond me, but reports are our that many sites are being hacked through it. Formerly housed at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-phpmyadmin/, this plugin has already been pulled from the WordPress repository. If for some reason you’re using this plugin, delete it now.

Community, Development, Plugins

WordPress Plugins: How to Know if You Have Too Many

by Sarah Gooding June 27^th, 2011 10 Responses

Do I have too many plugins on my WordPress site? Unfortunately, this is not really a yes or no question. In fact, it’s not even the right question. The question you want to ask yourself is, “Am I using high quality plugins?”

Your WordPress site’s plugin health depends largely on the quality of the plugins you are using.

Determining the quality of a plugin may seem difficult for the average WordPress users. After all, most of us don’t know how to understand what a plugin does besides reading the plain description on the plugin’s page.

Community, Development, Freebies, News, Themes

Trending: A New Free WordPress Theme for the Hybrid Core Framework

by Sarah Gooding June 23^rd, 2011 1 Response

Expert theme developer Justin Tadlock has just released a new free theme for his Hybrid Core Framework, which is also completely free and open source.

Trending is a parent theme for Hybrid, but it also comes with a sample child theme to help you get started.

Awesome built-in features include, but are not limited to:

Cool sticky post design with a custom image size.
Multiple nav menus.
Per-post/page layouts (one-column, two-column, and three-column layouts).
Art direction (the ability to add custom, per-post stylesheets).
Custom widgets (overwrites the default WordPress widgets with better alternatives).
Several sidebars (you can add widgets in several places).

Community, Development, News, Plugins

Beef Up WordPress Security with Multifactor Authentication from Google

by Sarah Gooding June 23^rd, 2011 21 Responses

As many of you know, the recent security breach at wordpress.org caused millions of users to have to reset their passwords. If wordpress.org can be hacked into, you’re dreaming if you think that your WordPress site is impenetrable.

WordPress’ single factor authentication requires only a username and a password for entry into a site. If you want to get serious about WordPress security, you should strongly consider adding multifactor authentication to your login process.

What is multifactor authentication?

Development, Plugins

What to Do if a Plugin Kills Your WordPress Site

by Sarah Gooding June 22^nd, 2011 2 Responses

Here’s a quick emergency tip for those rare times when you install a new WordPress plugin or upgrade an existing plugin and it breaks your site: Rename the plugin folder.

Community, Development, News, Plugins

How to Create a WordPress Site for Local Pet Adoptions

by Sarah Gooding June 22^nd, 2011 34 Responses

If you are a friend of the furries, a fanimal of animals and a do-gooder to boot, then you’ll probably want to help homeless critters in your community find good homes. You may even have taken stray animals into your own home until you could find their owners or get them adoptions with loving families.

The new WP ADA plugin makes it easy to create a WordPress site that will bring more people and pets together.