A Brand New WordPress Plugin from WPMU DEV: YouTube Featured Video

We’re happy to announce that WPMU DEV has released a brand new plugin – the YouTube Featured Video plugin.

This simple, flexible widget lets you select videos from a YouTube channel and then feature them in your sidebar. If you look over to the bottom of the right hand sidebar here on wpmu.org, you’ll see it action.

We wanted this for ourselves, and so we thought a number of you might like it too.

How This Plugin Can Help You

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Quickly Organize Sticky Posts in the WordPress Dashboard

Sticky Posts are a handy feature introduced in WordPress 2.7. When a post is marked as sticky in the editor screen, it will be shown at the top of the front page of posts.

Quick Sticky is a new plugin that makes it easy to assign and organize your sticky posts. It adds a new column for marking sticky posts when browsing the posts listing screen. This is much more convenient than having to go into each post and to mark them individually.

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Why WordPress.com for education (and portfolios, restaurants & musicians) is a big fat fail

Talking of big fat things, I’ll start with a hefty disclaimer, I’m the founder and CEO of Edublogs – the largest education blog provider (and also based on WordPress) on the web.

So, having got that out of the way let me tell you why I’m profoundly unconcerned by the announcement today that WordPress.com is venturing into the ‘education vertical’ and why I don’t think it should scare of any other niche site builders out there.

tl;dr – it’s shallow, insincere, cynical, lacking in focus and flimsy.

Here’s why…
Almost too shallow for words

It's got an apple on it, thus it must be for teachers

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How to Set Up a Curated News Aggregation Site with WordPress

WPMU DEV’s Autoblog plugin is a powerful tool that pulls in RSS feeds and publishes them to your site. Many may think that just means it’s a device for splogs (spam blogs).

While a tool like Autoblog could be used for that, there’s isn’t much point in it. Search engines learned long ago that those types of sites don’t add much, and so they’ve devalued them into near oblivion.

For most tools, their value is only fully realized in the right hands. And that’s the case for Autoblog.

The Autoblog plugin as a splog creator is pretty much worthless.

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14 CDN Providers to Make WordPress Blazing Fast

If you are running a website that has a lot of images and similar content, a Content Delivery Network might be useful for you as it can help in reducing page load times.

In this article, I shall be taking a look at various CDN options available for WordPress users and making some recommendations at the end. However, before going any further, let us first take a look at the advantages of using a CDN.

Advantages of Using a CDN

Choosing A CDN Provider: Getting A Blazing Fast WP Website

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What You Need to Know Before Buying a WordPress Theme

Free is great, right? Who doesn’t like free stuff?

But when it comes to free WordPress themes, ‘free’ doesn’t always equal ‘great’. In fact, sometimes free sucks.

Why? Because sometimes you need more than most free themes can deliver. You need complex functionality, kick-ass design, and rock-solid support.

This is where premium themes come in to play.

There are various free and paid WordPress themes out there, each meant for a specific purpose. In this article, I shall be discussing six points that you should keep in mind when choosing a premium WordPress theme. 

 
1. The Seller

Buying WordPress Themes: Points You Should Consider

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Get A Curated List of BuddyPress Plugins In Your Dashboard

BuddyPress now has 468 plugins listed as extensions for the platform. How would you ever know which ones are quality and which are no good if you’re a new to BuddyPress? You could spend hours researching all the options, reviews, support forums, installing and testing. Or, you could get some advice.
Get A Curated List of The Best BuddyPress Plugins From WordPress.org

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