If you post the sites your working on so that your clients can show of your progress, no doubt you are password protecting it with .htpasswd. There is one drawback to this approach, the Flash Uploader will throw an HTTP Error when HTTP Basic Authentication is used. Put the following snippet in your VirtualHost file to fix that error.
<Files async-upload.php>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
Satisfy Any
</Files>
In all the fervor surrounding today’s launch of the seventh major release of Drupal, I ran across a post pitting Drupal 7 vs. WordPress 3.0 in a basic comparison of features.
The post was not published recently or anything, but the underlying tone of the article is summed up in a couple of Tweets quoted near the bottom of the post:
RT @chx1975: WordPress is now approximately where Drupal was around Drupal 5 w/ content types. See you in 2015.
RT @newoceans_en: @Dries Drupal 7 will hopefully be where WordPress was around 5 years ago regarding UX.
I get it. Its all great fun to get into a pissing match with a friendly rival, at least until somebody gets wet, but to me this smacks of the ‘Editor War‘ between vi and emacs; forever the flame that lights the nooks and crannies of hacker culture.
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Eric Barker, Cory Miller, and I were recently interviewed by 435 Digital, Tribune’s online marketing division, about why businesses should use WordPress. The consensus? Its free, its flexible, its SEO-friendly — all while being easy to use, update and customize.
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Ever since about WordPress v2.6 or so, images you uploaded and inserted into a WordPress post were created as attachments, a sub-post type that belongs to the post or page they are attached to. These attachment posts can be given their own template, and indeed they look for one when you visit the attachment’s permalink. The K2 theme ships with image and attachment templates (named image.php and attachment.php in the theme template hierachy) and displays the file along with some meta data and, if the image is a part of a gallery (or there is more than one attachment on the post), navigation aids to move from one attachment to the next. For many sites this is ideal, but if you want to just give people the file, and avoid having to create these attachment templates, then here’s a neat trick I cooked up on a recent project.
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It has never been a more exciting time to be a developer. Numerous open platforms exist in which to ply your trade and make a good living doing it. A platform’s user base grows as it matures, and inevitably gives birth to a thriving developer ecosystem supporting that platform, selling services into it, and when the platform is any good that ecosystem will turn into a marketplace. There has been an explosion of these ecosystems as evidenced by the success of the Apple App Store, Facebook, Twitter, Sales Force and Google Apps. In the last few years, WordPress has come into its own and has generated its own cottage industry for themes, plugins, and other add-on services.
What makes WordPress unique is that the platform itself is open sourced under the GNU General Public License v2. This license imposes itself on derivative works by insisting that they in turn be licensed under the GPLv2 if and when they are distributed to others. Generally, this poses no issues, and everyone releasing plugins and themes on the WordPress.org Extensions db has chosen to release their code under the GPL.
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Today I had the pleasure of getting a new WordPress plugin cleaned up and released. This is a simple fix for users of the WordPress.com Stats plugin. WordPress.com links an external JavaScript to your site to count visitors and page views. Almost all of the Web Analytics do this. However, I found that when the WordPress site had HTTPS turned on for some of its pages, the WordPress.com Stats plugin did not change the link to be HTTPS (even though WordPress.com does support HTTPS). This plugin fixes this issue and helps you to avoid browser alerts warning users that the connection is only ‘partially encrypted’.
I plan on submitting a patch so that the original plugin just handles this out-of-the-box, but until its fixed, this plugin will fill the gap for you.
This plugin may already be obsolete by the time you read this, but I found a couple of functions that weren’t provided by the default WordPress-MU API that you may find useful in your own WordPress-MU development.
Jane Wells posted some new guidelines for WordCamp organizers and its raised quite a kerfuffle in the community.
Before I get into this, let me offer up a bit of background on my own involvement with conferences and events of all shapes. I’ve attended multiple WordCamps, both as a speaker and a participant. I’ve also helped organize BarCampOrlando, was involved with the first DrupalCamp Florida, and attended a number of other BarCamps and unconferences all over the country. I even booked and promoted concerts in a past life.
Let’s just say I’ve got a bit more Event Planning experience than your average bear, and have half a clue about what goes into making a good event great.
Here’s what I took away from the recent guidelines and along the way I’ll offer up a few assumptions of what I think are the motivations behind them, and what my interpretation of the guidelines are. This is by no means exhaustive nor is it intended to address anyone’s concerns directly.
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** Update** Skip to the comments. One Assumption on my part led to a lot more work than is needed. This guide does work, but as Ron (@wpmuguru) pointed out, I went around the block to just go next door. Even smart people are dumb sometimes 
The WordPress 3.0 betas are kicking around and for projects still in development, upgrading now will save you the trouble later after the site is in production. Upgrading Single Site WordPress installs to 3.0.x is as easy as ever, but now that WordPress ยต has been rolled into the main WordPress code base it takes a bit more work to “cross-grade” to the new WordPress 3.0 Multi-Site features.
This is a rough guide to upgrading WordPress MU 2.9.x to WordPress 3.0 Multi-Site. That means that I’m largely pulling this from recent memory and may skip a step or state something inaccurately. Feel free to heckle correct me in the comments.
If you’ve implemented the Shared Users Table trick you know that there is a side effect: Users on one blog are not immediately given privileges on the others. To resolve this I wrote a little plugin, WP-Orphanage, that will promote these ‘orphan’users to a role of your choosing.
WP-Orphanage v1.2 has been released. It addresses a nasty bug where only the first 50 users were promoted. I have refactored the code to iterate over the full list of users. This action only takes place when an Admin visits the User page. Users that login to a blog where they have no privileges will continue to be given a role “just-in-time”, when they login, but if you’re looking to upgrade all your users in one go, the plugin will now oblige. This is a recommended upgrade for all users. Thanks to everyone who reported this issue!