Tony Scott recently took it upon himself to start discussions on the possibility of a Word Camp UK, in the last month it seems to have gaged a lot of interest from fellow UK WordPresser’s, a date is now being considered for 19-20 July, although location is still not clear.

If your interested in attending/organising/sponsoring join the WordCamp UK Mailing List

Hopefully a list of speakers and location will be announced soon. As soon as I find out I’ll update WP Core with the full details. I could also be willing to ‘car share’ with any local Bristolians wishing to go but have no transport.

I’ll be doing a mini interview with Matthew Mullenweg founding developer of WordPress soon, and decided to open it up to wpcore readers, so if you have any specific questions you would like me to ask Matt, either leave a comment with your question or email the question you would like me to ask to contact[at]wpcore[dot com].

I’ll be accepting questions for 7-14 Days from this post before interviewing Matt so get your questions in

Here are some great firefox extensions for increasing productivity for WordPress users and developers:

Codex Search addon
Adds a codex search option in firefox for quick searching

OneClick Installer for Wordpress
OneClick is a companion extension for the OneClick plugin for WordPress. It allows you to install any wordpress theme or plugin from the context menu of firefox.

WordPress Post
This extension lets you post the text you select in your browser directly to your WordPress blog.

WordPress Helper
The Firefox extension WordPress Helper helps you working with WordPress by providing useful help and tools.

Firebug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…

YSlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites.

IE View
Adds a tab for quickly switching a tab to use internet explorer, great for cross browser testing.

Did I miss any other useful extensions? Let me know if there is any others you think should be added to the list

Theres several options for tracking how many visitors you have on your blog from server side apps such as Awstats and Webalizer, to stand alone apps such as haveamint (for a $30 premium), aswell as integrated stats from google analytics. Down to plugins such as Wass Up.

On most of my sites I use a combination of Awstats, Mint and Google Analytics. Currently on WP Core I only use the Wass Up plugin.

I just got wind of a new stats app called Woopra Apparently debut at the recent WordCamp dallas. Just from checking the screenshot and demo’s this looks like a fantastic application and a possible mint killer?

At the moment it’s in beta and invite only. If anyone is in the beta program and would be kind enough to send me an invite to contact [at] wpcore [dot com] So I could give it a more thourough review that would be greatly appreciated.

Geekbrief.tv have a nice video review up of Woopra:

http://www.geekbrief.tv/introducing-woopra-youre-gonna-want-it

We recently had the need to limit the length of Posts, titles in a WordPress Theme, this is what we came up with:

Replace:

From within your loop with the following:

 "40" )
	{
		echo substr($the_title, 0, 40) . "...";
	} else
	{
		echo $the_title;
	}
?>

Full example

The first part will check for titles with a length of 40 characters and more, and the second part will limit any titles to 40 chars with “…” at the end.

So if you wanted to limit titles to 20 characters change the two instances of 40 to 20.

Stating the obvious here, but as you can see I just switched to a custom Design for WP Core. This theme is actually a filler while another design is being worked on. I’ll probably release this one for free once that one is ready

This is a small announcement to say I’ll be working on a new PasteBin WP Dump. What has that got to do with the title? Honestly nothing, but it’s not far from alot of peoples reactions when another Pastebin pops up. Without revealing to much I plan on integrating it more so with WordPress to hopefully make it that little bit more useful for WordPress developers.

WP Dump is currently powered by a python/Django backend with an extjs front end. The plan at the moment is porting the frontend over to a new php backend then working on some plugins.

I want to thank trbs for letting me use his code from Ext Paste for the project.

I also want to thank Nick, from Palmnet for offering to help with the project.

Hopefully this will become a useful resource for WordPress developers and not just “another” Pastebin =)

I decided to move this blog from bluehost to a more developer friendly host WebFaction and in the process switch to using the latest trunk from the wordpress svn. Updating WordPress is now a breeze via SSH, it’s simply a matter of typing ’svn-update’ from the main wpcore directory (Currently running 2.5-RC1.1 Trunk Revision 7502 =)

I recently announced I’m working on several new projects, one of those being the recently put online wpsource.com. Interestingly enough just yesterday adii posted about a similar concept and Jeffro2pt0 posted about them both
I personally love a bit of “friendly” competition and will consider all feedback received. The fact wpsource is already up gives me a slight edge. Changing the layout’s and adding features is pretty trivial.

An interesting point Jeffro made was about consolidating several feeds into one. I thought about this but decided against it as a lot of blogs like to use feedburner to keep track of there RSS Subscriber count and probably wouldn’t be very happy if they saw a significant dip in direct RSS readers and it also plays a factor in a blogs worth if and when it comes to selling up.

So at the moment this is the area I would most like to gage site owners feedback. I’ll also be adding favicons shortly but I have another project I plan on announcing later that needs some tweaking before I publish the URL

Everytime I install a copy of WordPress on a site I have set of tasks I always complete before I start writing posts, I’ll be talking you through those with a quick 5 minute guide to optimize a fresh install of WordPress:

1) First things first update the Permalinks so there seo friendly:

login to your wp-admin -> Settings -> Permalinks

Select ‘Custom Structure’ and enter:
/%category%/%postname%/

More info on permalinks here

2) Next let’s update the ping list:

Why? This will help get various search engines to crawl your site as soon as you have created a new post and Index it quicker.
go to Settings -> Writing and at the bottom in the text area under “Update Services” replace it with the list from this post: Pinging update services

3) Next were going to add a google sitemap

head over here download site sitemap plugin, upload it to wp-content/plugins via ftp and activate in wp-admin -> plugins

4) Finally were going to create a Feedburner account.

So head over and sign up, once you have created your account and burnt your feed we need to redirect our WordPress feeds to our new feedburner feed, do this with the Feedsmith Feedburner plugin, again upload it to your plugin folder and activate in the wp-admin.

All you need now is a theme, theres thousands of free ones, but a great place to start is looking through this list on smashing magazine

Now your all ready to post. Theres alot more you can do once your blogs running to improve seo and such. This was just a basic guide for fresh installs, if you found this post useful consider subscribing to our RSS Feed

Update: This post was indexed by google within 20 minutes of being published