Welcome to the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers. You can also follow the mailing list via the Google Group front-end here.

This could be an idea if you wanted to make a new plugin: Eduardo Zulian needed a way to show a huge amount of categories in the write post admin area. Could be really useful for sites using WP as a CMS with a lot of different categories in play.

Here’s a good discussion on WordPress’ accessibility issue. And related with that discussion, Lynne Pope requested the creation of the wp-accessibility mailing list to further discuss and implement better accessibility into WordPress. Quite obviously a great idea. Let’s hope this comes into reality real soon.

Welcome to the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers. You can also follow the mailing list via the Google Group front-end here.

So there was a post on the WP dev blog asking folks for ideas and tweaks to the Dashboard design.  Jane Wells linked to the related WordPress forum thread if you want to contribute or just follow the discussion. The 2.8 navigation design guidelines are available here.

Mike Walsh asked for plugins that can handle forms to be included with sign-up activity. TDO Mini Forms and MM Forms were recommended. A bunch of non-WordPress solutions were also suggested.

Here’s Ptah Dunbar with a code snippet on how to automatically activate certain widgets.

There’s also an on-going discussion started by Michael Toppa on how to make a plugin that loads certain CSS only on pages that use that plugin. No definitive solution so far. Any takers?

Welcome to the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers. You can also follow the mailing list via the Google Group front-end here.

Did you know the WordPress 24-Hours Has-Patch Marathon a few days before? Here’s a little inside story of what happened in wp-hackers. Some wanted to help but couldn’t because there’s no news posted at the mailing list, and the two days prior announcement post at the WP development blog were simply too short.

Stephen Rider suggested that it is better to revert from using the word “Appearance” back to “Design” inside the Dashboard. The change to “Appearance” happened within the 2.7 redesign, which changed all the menus from verbs to nouns. “Design” is also a noun, he said, and it encompassed the content underneath that menu better: Widgets, for example, are not just appearances but also part of the design of the site. Demetris suggested using the word “Layout” instead. What do you think?

Here’s a discussion on using the WP_Query() to display posts with a certain search term.

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!

This is the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers.

Chris Jean questioned whether it’s possible to hide the parent of a child theme in the Manage Themes dashboard area. While this is potentially useful to avoid user confusion (so that they don’t activate the parent theme when they should be activating the child one), I don’t think this is a particularly necessary issue. Users might not even understand what a parent/child theme is: just tell them precisely what theme to activate, and that’s it.

Joost de Valk offered a small fix so that /wp-includes/link-template.php uses less database query. Nice catch.

Ptah Dunbar asked whether there’s a WordPress UI guidelines somewhere. Apparently there is one, except that it’s written in German. Anyone interested to do an English version?

Mike Schinkel found out that WordPress always run a query for posts regardless of whether you need it or not (say, if you’re using a custom query). The discussion that follows talked about ways to disable the query_posts() function.

This is the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers.

Joost de Valk warned that he’d been restoring a bunch of 2.7.1 WordPress blogs from hack attempts lately. Symptomps were

iframes being added to the end of all index.php files in the blogs, in the footer. In some cases they were written with javascript, in other cases they were pure iframes.

Lynne Pope also reported another hacked 2.7.1. So far there’s no clear answer how and what this hack does. There’s a possibility that the attack originated from improperly configured shared-hosting issue, instead of a WP specific hack, but it’s mostly a guess now.

Joost also announced his latest plugin that adds a new WP Dashboard widget displaying plugin download statistics from WordPress.org. The current download page is here.

John Biddle started a discussion on WP’s front end performance.

John Sessford found a single page on a WP install that made about 275 database queries, making it very slow to load. Mark Jaquith gave a small how-to on displaying the details of all queries on a WP install. It could also be done with a plugin, Frank Bueltge added.

This is the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers.

Dave Jaggy asked about custom taxonomies, which seems to be coming in 2.8. In the meanwhile, there’s Brian Krausz‘s plugin to do the job.

Alex Polite asked about ways to use a certain language inside the admin interface, and another language on the blog.

Jennifer Hodgdon had a problem following the Codex’s article on internationalizing plugin’s metadata. Turned out the article is somewhat outdated with missing instructions and files. You might want to read the thread if you’re having the same issue.

Jennifer also tried to dig deeper on registering plugin options. There seemed to be a lack of info on this right now.

Also, this is somewhat nice. Jeremy Visser found an old WordPress 1.5 inside his file server, dated in 2005, the day he first downloaded WP. He then wrote a heartfelt note to the WordPress community.