One of the most annoying features ever in WordPress is the “feature” to convert smilies into images of smileys, MSN style. Where lots of stuff like this is dismissed these days as “plugin territory”, this annoying feature has been in WP since 0.71… Anyway, sometimes you’ll want to disable this feature from within your theme,…
On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free.
So, we’ve finally got an official word on this, the one sentence summary by Matt reads: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required. Ok, so that’s the final truth, because the Software Freedom Law Center (who are of course absolutely NOT partial in this, even though…
StudioPress and Yoast kick it off together
This is quite big news for me, and for OrangeValley Projects, the development side of OrangeValley that we’ve been starting up over the last few months. In short: Brian Gardner, of StudioPress and Revolution fame, and myself, have decided to partner up, to provide better SEO’d themes to StudioPress customers. Brian is the one who…
Optimizing WordPress database performance
I’ve been working with a plugin that was mentioned on the wp-hackers list last week, called debug queries, to optimize the performance on some of my sites, including this one. The plugin was pretty easy to use, and I’ve improved a bit on it. I’ve sent the patch to Frank, who authored the original plugin,…
New design (and submitting for a contest)!
For all your lurkers in the RSS feed who haven’t come out in the last week, and I know there’s quite a few of you, there’s a new design waiting for you if you click the link! I’m also, with this post, submitting this design to the WP WebHost Best WordPress Design Award contest in…
WordPress SEO Video
Note: this video is rather old. While a lot of what I cover is still true, I have since released a WordPress SEO plugin and a Video SEO plugin that you might want to check out. I spoke at A4UExpo London last year and will be speaking at the upcoming A4UExpo Amsterdam. One of the…
New layout, coming soon!
So in between all the work on Tweetbacks, the new design for yoast.com is shaping up nicely. It’s extremely funny, and I love it even when working with a bit longer. It’s a whole lot lighter than the current one, which is a bit dark to my liking, and it’s a lot more me. I’ve…
FeedBurner subscription show-off revisited
A couple of months back I blogged about how to show off your FeedBurner subscribers. In the comments then, a couple of people told me the code didn’t work for them. After a few back and forths I found out those people were on FeedBurner’s new servers, the Google ones. This new server actually has…
Styling the intro paragraph
A few weeks back (actually 18 days), @karelgeenen asked me on Twitter how he could bold the text above the <!–more–> tag in WordPress, like the Dutch site Marketingfacts (which is actually built in Expression Engine). I didn’t know back then and this afternoon I decided to try and solve it for him. It turned…
WP 2.7 fun: complete hcards
WordPress 2.7 has an awesome new thing: it turns the comments into hCards by default. An hCard is the microformat version of a vcard, which, with microformat extensions for your browser, you can then save the data of those commenters in your address book. For instance, with the Safari microformats plugin, this looks like this:…
