WebHelperMagazine.com

Welcome to WebHelperMagazine.com. Please consider signing up for our RSS feed. Check out our job board, and be sure to leave comments -- we post your name and a link to your site as a way to thank you for joining the WHMag conversation.

by Scott Frangos, Managing Editor - WebHelperMagazine.com

Welcome to our monthly round-up of helpful WordPress tidbits for all you enterprising WordPress BlogMasters out there. It’s been a great month.

Theme Designers Can Win $1,000, or an iPhone…

That’s right… but there’s only about 18 days left to get your entry in to the WordPress Theme Design Competition by DesignVitality.com (ends Nov. 30th). You could win $1,000, an iPhone, a Nintendo Wii, or free hosting — 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes will be awarded. You can jump over and read the rules — work up your theme and submit it.

I noticed that the rules specify, “The theme for this design is to focus on a WordPress blog” as one requirement. Hmmm… what about WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System)?

WPCandy & LiquidCity release a WordPress Helpsheet

If you like cheatsheets (and what BlogMaster couldn’t use alittle help remembering all of the coding, CMS, SEO, etc. things we have to learn?), then a big thanks are in order to the folks at WPCandy, whom along with LiquidCity have released their “WordPress Help Sheet“, now available in English, Romanian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The sheet gives a list of the common template files, and some helpful snippets of PHP code you might add to your files.

Have you upgraded yet to 2.3.1?

Don’t hang back… just go ahead and do it — heck, WordPress won Best Open-Source Social Networking CMS in the Packt Publishing competition, so you know the upgrade is worth it (that’s right, it’s a Content Management System… in fact, I can’t even find the blog in WordPress at some sites). The tagging features alone (think SEO to the max) in version 2.3 should be enough to convice you to make the move… and 2.3.1 fixes a number of bugs.

TIP: I’ve had great success in upgrading three WordPress CMS websites I manage using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. Remember to do as this excellent plugin advises, and backup, backup, backup first. And, of course, show the love to author Keith Dsouza of Techie-Buzz.com with a donation for all the time it will save you. Got it?

Here comes the WordPress Themes Marketplace…

Matt Mullenweg, of Auttomatic.com (the folks behind WordPress), announced the intention to develop a theme marketplace for WordPress.com. WordPress.com is the hosted solution for bloggers who don’t want to install WordPress on their own hosting platform, and currently sports 1.7 million blogs there, and counting. The announcement was greeting with both Kudos, and opposition. Mullenweg stressed that the marketplace formation ideas were not bound in stone, and are up for discussion by the WordPress Community.

The major components of the plan are, (with some comments from me) are:

• 50/50 split on pricing of themes (set by designer/market). I think once the marketplace is up and running, that 60% to the Designer who does the creative and coding work, and holds the intellectual property rights to their themes is fair. Why? The marketplace will be on “auttomatic” (pun intended) after initial programming, while all the creative work will be done by designers.
• Designers must make their themes GPL available (free) at WordPress.org. This bridge concept which seeks to respect Open Source principles — an admirable goal — opens up some concerns for designers. I wonder if it is even legal to force creators to release their intellectual property for free, in return for the right to sell it elsewhere? Maybe if the two markets were completely separate. But, nothing would prevent unethical theme builders from taking your GPL version, reworking it, then offering it for sale on WordPress.com. There’s probably a win-win here, but I suspect it will involve some variation/rewriting of the GPL. Maybe “extended” versions of a theme (with page and post variations, etc.) could be offered as a “premium version”, while the duplicate version of that offered on WordPress.com would remain free at WordPress.org.
• Payout to Designers every 1-3 months. Why? Why not every 2-weeks? PayPal is instantaneous.

The bottom line? Kudos to Matt and crew for coming up with this offering. Double Kudos to their proactive discussion and call for ideas. Obviously, the finer points need some work. Thumbs down to the winers out there who seem incapable of constructive criticism.

Watch out for Link Scam Themes…

Weblog Tools Collection has reported that some sites offering free theme downloads, have maliciously inserted a variety of linking codes into these themes, and specifically warns against those distributed at BlogsTheme.com, and TemplatesBrowser.com. According to Weblog Tools Collection, “The footers are also tainted with sponsored links that the original authors did not put there.” So, I took a look at a theme by Brian Veloso, called “Chaotic Soul” (a very nice design). Sure enough, I found obtrusive links in the footer.php file (hilighted below):

Note that the footer does link to the theme author, but also includes links back to the theme marketplace, and to a company called “BestDebtServices.” I’m with those that think this is sneaky, and unwanted. The best way to avoid this problem is to download a theme directly from the theme authors’ site, or at the WordPress Theme Viewer.

Roundup of Plugin Roundups

Most WordPress BlogMasters are always on the lookout for valuable plugins… and each month the WordPress community obliges with posts carrying lists, overview and reviews. Here are some we found helpful:

• Check out our own WordPress CMS Help section here for some reviews on Newsletter & SEO plugins. You can Get the RSS Feed for this section, exclusively (just click).
• Manage a Photo Blog, Cache your Blog in a Super Way, and “Supra-theme” your styles are just a few new things you can do with plugins listed on this post at Weblog Tools Collection.
• Lorelle VanFossen does a through job in her WordPress Wednesday News of detailing some new plugins (and many other things of interest to BlogMasters)
• Worried about SPAM? Defensio your WordPress blog. It’s a new competitor to Akismet spam blocker plugin with some new features. You can read a comparison article at TechCrunch.com.
• And finally… an online Plugin Generator from Andrew Rickman — an excellent online PHP code framework generator that should save Plugin developers some time.