Hackers Highlight 12 April 2009

Wow, last weekend was quite a hectic one for me, and so this particular article goes out of schedule a bit. Anyways, as usually, this is the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers.

First, I found out that the Google Groups frontend version of wp-hackers is a much pleasant version to read and link to, so I’m going to use that from now on.

Liraz Siri was working on including WordPress inside TurnKey Linux and then asked what plugins needs to be included with it. And so a bunch of WP hackers recommend their own list of good plugins to have when starting a new WP blog.

Shane A. Froebel released the wireframe document for the new Media Management System for WordPress 2.9.x. Sounds great. It’s on his blog, and also available as a PDF file (direct link, this one).

Here’s a nice and short discussion on best practices for using wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style, started by Michael Toppa.

Joost de Valk asked about some information on the syntax of WXR. Surprisingly, there is no such definitive resource anywhere!

Latest Links More →

Custom Shortlinks for WordPress

Have your own short domain name for the purpose of shortlinking? Here’s an easy way to combine that with your WordPress install.

The Quick Start Guide to Using Google Webmaster Tools With WordPress

GWT is a great, frequently updated features like showing you search queries volume, malware and crawl error diagnostics and links to your site. If you don’t use it yet, you probably need to. This will help you get started.

WordPress & jQuery Contact Form without a Plugin

I would recommend this either if you want more flexibility or to learn how to code a contact form.

Understanding and cleaning the pharma (spam) hack on WordPress

How to fix that hack:

This attack is very interesting because it is not visible to the normal user and the spam (generally about Viagra, Nexium, Cialis, etc) only shows up if the user agent is from Google’s crawler (googlebot). Also, the infection is a bit tricky to remove and if not done properly will keep reappearing.

Web Safe Fonts Cheat Sheet

An updated (written in April 2010), well researched, CC-licensed Web safe fonts cheat sheet, available both in low-res PNG and high-rest PDF. Even the article is useful as well.

The Nicest 2010 Child Theme You’ll See Today

The Timaru Mental Health Support Trust website, made for charity by Team USA (comprised by web superstars like Jason Santa Maria, Dan Mall, Liz Danzico and Automattic’s John Ford) during the FullCodePress competition, is actually a clever child theme of 2010.

More recap by JSM, Daniel Mall, and Liz Danzico.

WordPress 3.0 Theme Tip: The Comment Form

The simpler way to code comment form (once you understand how hooks and filters work).

Showing and hiding content with pure CSS3

I like it, I think it’s short and easy to understand.