WPGarage.com

Hail all WordPress plugin creators – Reuters will pay you $5000 for a plugin

Reuters OpenCalais project is looking for a plugin developer who can create a plugin or application for WordPress that can do the following:

1. Offer automatic blog content scanning
2. Support rich meta-tagging
3. Create and maintain a Semantic tag cloud for each blogger to post
4. Embed the related Calais URI.

The price? A measly $5000. I bet that’s the most anyone’s ever offered or will be paid so far for developing a WordPress plugin.

So if you’ve got the brains and the time, this seems like it’s worth checking out. As for me – well, I believe I’m lacking in both qualities for this particular project, so I’ll have to pass.

1 Comment | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: unique

How to add a tabbed interface to your WordPress blog

Headsetoptions has a great review of the types of tabbed interfaces available, and a tutorial on how to add one to your WordPress blog.

A tabbed interface is one of those boxes that you often see in the sidebar of a lot of premium themes where you click on tabs at the top, and it shows you different types of information in the same space. The main benefit of tabbed interfaces is that it helps save real estate on your blog, which can be pretty limited. Here’s an example from Solostream’s Premium WordPress Magazine Theme:

Solostream also has a tabbed interface for the feature article section in some of his other premium themes.

Basically, there are three tabbed interfaces available: DOMtab, Tabber, and Tabs. The main difference between the tabbed interfaces are ease of use, and whether you can use them for commercial purposes.

Update Jan. 26, 2007: Another tabbing method that wasn’t mentioned on Headsetoptions is Yahoo! UI Library: TabView.

Check out the full post for the whole shebang: Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme – Part 2: DOMTab, Tabber, more

2 Comments | Posted in » Tips | Tags: navigation, sidebar

Socialize Me! WordPress Plugin helps your blog interact with leading social networks

With the proliferation of social media networks, blogs have become only one tool in creating our online identity. The question is: how do we integrate all of the facets of our online identity so that we can actually have a life too? blah blah tech’s Socialize Me WordPress plugin is another step in this direction.

The Socialize Me WordPress plugin gives you another way to interact with visitors to your site who have come via other social networks:

Imagine one of your articles has been submitted to StumbleUpon. You’re getting a steady stream of visitors to your ‘blog. You could really connect with some of these guys — if you knew who they were.

Well here’s the thing, with Socialize Me! those visitors to your ‘blog will see a simple message when they arrive: “Hi, thanks for the visit! [I'm] on StumbleUpon, too!” with a link to your profile.

With the Socialize Me! Plugin for WordPress you can connect with people on services like: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Pownce, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and many, many more.

StumbleUpon is a great example of how the plugin can be used, since StumbleUpon can be a pretty good source of traffic, but the visitors are always unknown, and seem to just pass on through. This plugin can hopefully create a stronger connection with them and get them to stick around.

WordPress Plugin: Socialize Me!

1 Comment | Posted in » Plugins | Tags: facebook, social, StumbleUpon

WordPress WP-Forum plugin security vulnerability

Heads up to any users of the WP-Forum WordPress plugin: Secunia has reported that it can be exploited by malicious people to conduct SQL injection attacks. Too bad – just when I was looking for a simple forum solution for a WordPress blog.

2 Comments | Posted in » Shorties | Tags: security

Consumer evangelists vs. lawyers: using “WordPress” in domain names

Michael over at WPCandy brought up the question recently of whether it’s ok to use the word “WordPress” in the domain name of sites about WordPress that are not affiliated with Automattic. I came across this issue about a month ago thanks to Lorelle, who actually mentions this repeatedly in her WordPress Wednesday posts on the Blog Herald. Lorelle states that you need to get permission to use the word WordPress in your blog’s name and domain, so I immediately contacted someone over at Automattic to see what they had to say on the matter. He pointed me to this page: http://wordpress.org/about/domains/.

Of course, if I had known about this policy before I started WordPress Garage, I would never have used the current domain name. But here we are, almost a year later, and the question remains: do I need to change my domain name? And do all blogs that use the word WordPress in their names need to change that too?

I think there are two issues at hand here:

1. Trademark dilution
2. Consumer evangelism

Trademark Dilution, i.e. “I WordPressed so much today on my WordPress”

Based on my modest understanding of trademarks (I worked a bit in the field), the reason Automattic doesn’t want anyone using WordPress in their domain name is because they (or their lawyers) are concerned about “trademark dilution.” Trademark dilution is when a brand name becomes so tied to the product that it becomes the general name of the product, and even a verb. Some good examples of this are the use of the word “Xerox” instead of “photocopy,” “Kleenex” instead of “tissue,” and “Saran Wrap” instead of “plastic wrap.” While this may seem like great success since the brand name became so widely known that people just call the product by the brand name, it is problematic for companies because it makes it more difficult for them to protect their trademarks against infringements.

So, in the case of WordPress, their trademark would become diluted if people started to call blogs “WordPresses,” or would use the word “WordPress” as a verb, i.e. “I have to take a break from WordPressing while I go on vacation.”

I’m no intellectual property expert, but this seems unlikely to happen. Blogs will be blogs.

Consumer Evangelism, i.e. “I love WordPress so much that I’m actually going to write hordes of posts about it and create themes and plugins – all for free”

Which company is the king of consumer evangelism? I’ll give you a hint: their name rhymes with Snapple. Yes, Steve Jobs and the folks at Apple have succeeded in creating products that people LOVE. Their customers love their products so much that they talk about them, write about them, tell their friends to buy them, etc. They have armies of consumer evangelists all over the globe hugging their iPods, and coveting the iPhone (the iPhone still hasn’t come to many countries).

Now, Apple is a pretty big company, so you’d think their lawyers would be freaking out over trademark dilution issues. Well, here are a few examples of blogs and sites that are not affiliated with Apple that write about Apple products and use the word Apple or iPhone in their domain and blog name:

The Apple Blog

Apple iPhone

Apple Fun

Apple Are

Apple iPhone Blog

Apple Matters

I don’t know if Apple encourages this, but as far as I know they aren’t publicizing any policies related to the use of their trademarks in domain and blog names. Maybe they understand that this type of marketing is gold – people who aren’t on the company payroll, and are therefore “objective,” who are willing to dedicate time and money to promoting their products for them. Now THAT is a marketers dream!

Let’s do a quick comparison with the overweight, slightly-balding company to see how they’re managing with consumer evangelists. Here are the Microsoft fan sites that I found:

http://scoble.weblogs.com/ – doesn’t use Microsoft in the domain, but is now dead.

Microsoft’s not exactly about to go under, but I would say that Apple’s position is pretty envious.

Back to WordPress

WordPress has consumer evangelists (me!). Dozens of bloggers are posting about WordPress every day in order to share their knowledge with the WordPress community. And thousands of readers read these blogs every day to quench their thirst for more knowledge about the WordPress platform. In my opinion, this is all part of the Open Source spirit, where people learn from the community, and then want to give back to the community in whatever way they can.

Here are some examples of blogs totally or almost totally dedicated to WordPress (I apologize if I’ve left you out – feel free to leave URLs in the comments):

WPCandy

Hack WordPress

Darren Hoyt

Weblog Tools Collection

Solostream

Lorelle on WordPress

Check out WP Themes Gallery’s list of the top 40 WordPress blogs to get an idea of how many there are out there.

Now let’s take a look at what I would say is a major WordPress competitor: Movable Type. I did a quick search, and while I found a lot of individual posts about using Movable Type, I didn’t find many blogs dedicated to the topic. I actually only found one, and while it is really good, it is written by Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type.

So who’s in better shape: the company with the dozens of bloggers who blog about them daily but use their trademark in their domain and blog name; or the company that doesn’t have anyone blogging about them and also don’t have anyone using their trademark anywhere?

The lawyers say company #2. The figures say company #1.

Conclusion

In my very humble and not-worth-much opinion, WordPress should be careful about taking action that may appear as an attack on their community. Their domain policy is understandable, but it may cause more harm than good. They should remember that a consumer evangelist is worth a lot more than the best marketing or ad campaign.

A good compromise could be for bloggers to add a disclaimer on their site that says that they are not affiliated with WordPress or Automattic. WordPress Training’s About page has a really good example which says the following:

WordPressTraining.com is not affiliated with or sponsored by Automattic, Inc. or the WordPress ® Open Source project.

WordPress ® is a trademark of Automattic, Inc.

And that, my friends, is all I have to say about that.

27 Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: Automattic

Display your web identity with the ShowYourself Widget

The challenge is coordinating all of the places that we appear on the web. Previously we discussed possible ways to combine your blog with facebook. You could also use add the ShowYourself Widget to your blog sidebar, which allows you to collect and display your online identities on various community sites in one place. Here’s a sample:

ShowYourself Widget

No Comments | Posted in » Tips | Tags: social, widgets

Allow users to use OpenID to interact with your blog with OpenID WordPress plugin

The WordPress OpenID plugin lets visitors to a Wordpress blog quickly register, login, and leave comments using their OpenID Identity. Says it’s designed for WP 2.0.3 to 2.1, but may work with 2.3.

Wordpress OpenID Plugin

2 Comments | Posted in » Shorties | Tags: comments, OpenID, social

WordPress Publisher Blog launches

The folks at Automattic have launched their WordPress Publisher Blog, which will:

“cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress.”

So far the blog has three posts (one of which is sticky – which plugin are you using Raanan?). It’s hard to tell from three posts, but it seems like this blog aims to achieve what a lot of us WordPress bloggers are already doing.

So, are we going to become redundant, or will the WordPress Publisher Blog just join the club? It seems that this is another move by Automattic to take control of the WordPress user community, similar to their creation of the WordPress plugin directory. With the plugin directory, WordPress became the hub for the plugin community, and now they want news and reports on WordPress to come from them too. Makes sense, and I guess they could catch up pretty quickly since they are WordPress.

Anyways, it will be interesting to see how their blog pans out. If they do a good job, I think there might not be much of a point in continuing to invest time and energy in this kind of blog.

WordPress Publisher Blog

10 Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: Automattic

Thank you to my readers!

As many of you may know, writing a blog on a regular basis can be challenging. On the one hand, the stats and feed statistics tell you that people are reading, but on the other hand, you can sometimes feel like you’re shouting out into the darkness, and you’re not sure that anyone is really listening.

Commenters and people who write to say thank you help me know that you are indeed out there reading. So first of all, thank you to my commenters, and a special thanks to Ryan Hellyer, who is by far the most prolific commenter on this site. Getting feedback on posts helps me keep going, because I know that someone is paying attention, and that it’s helping them.

Also, every once in a while I get a letter via the site’s contact form thanking me for the blog. I just got a great letter from a guy who told me he spent two hours (!) scrolling through and reading each of my posts! He says he found the site via StumbleUpon, so thank you to those of you who felt posts here were Stumble-worthy, and are helping others find this blog. Thanks Mike!

Why I write WordPressGarage.com

I write this blog for two reasons: 1. To help me and my company keep track of the many WordPress developments so that we can hopefully build the best WordPress sites and blogs possible for our clients; 2. To give back to the WordPress community. I still haven’t written any plugins, but I hope that this blog can be my contribution to the vibrant WordPress Open Source community.

The content on this site is free, as it should be. But if you want to compensate me in some way, just leave a comment, or write to me to tell me what you think. Getting concrete feedback is the best way to help me keep going. Basically what I’m saying is: a simple thank you is worth a million!

So thank you all for reading, and I hope that this blog will continue to grow and help WordPress users around the world!

Miriam

3 Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: silly stuff

Now you can add a favicon to your WordPress admin with a plugin

About two weeks ago, I wrote about a tip I came across at Simply Basic about how to add a favicon to your WordPress admin by adding a snippet of code to wp-admin/admin-header.php. As you probably have noticed, the WordPress admin doesn’t display a favicon on the address bar, which can be a bit inconvenient when you are working with many open tabs, and you want to quickly see which is which. But hacking the admin means you need to remember to add the code again every time you upgrade.  I hinted that a WordPress plugin would be in order here to avoid that inconvenience.

Will, John at Simply Basic took the hint and created the Admin Favicon WordPress plugin that allows you to easily place the favicon of your choice in the WordPress admin!

Thanks John! People like you are what makes WordPress so great.

Admin Favicon Wordpress Plugin

2 Comments | Posted in » Plugins | Tags: favicon