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plugins

Are You a Plugin Author? .org Needs Your Opinion!

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Konstantin Obenland just posted an update about the plugin directory redesign. Basically, if you haven’t looked at the new proposed design yet, now is the time if you want to have any say in the choices being made. Do note, however:

Please keep in mind that it is by far not a finished product. There is still a lot of work to be done, mainly around front-end technology, search, and developer facing interfaces. Every decision that has been made so far is up for discussion, which is the purpose of this post.

So, log in with your WordPress.org credentials here and check out the new admin interface as well the new plugin page. Check out the open tickets before you create a ticket, but by all means, create tickets and start discussing.

Support the Development of Anthologize

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BuddyPress core developer, Boone Gorges, has set up an Indiegogo campaign to fund him to spend time working on the Anthologize WordPress plugin. Anthologize lets you turn your WordPress website into an ebook. It was developed via the One Week | One Tool project, a summer institute for humanities scholarships, during which they had to build a tool in just a week.

Anthologize encompasses two loves of my life: the humanities and web technology, so I’d encourage you all to check out Boone’s proposal and support him. He’s only costing his time at $75 per hour, which seems like a bargain for one of the select few of BuddyPress core developers. You can read more about it on Boone’s blog, or go straight to Indiegogo to sponsor him.

Interconnect/IT Launch the Auditor

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The Auditor has been in beta for some time and was finally launched yesterday by Interconnect/IT. The plugin, as the title implies, creates an audit trail of all of the actions that have been carried out on a WordPress website, bringing a new level of ease to debugging client sites. From the website:

One day, a client of ours changed a WordPress setting. An important one. He didn’t tell us. He just told us his site was broken and it needed fixing, urgently. We were only able to guess at what had happened.

We realised that we weren’t the only people with this problem – if you administer WordPress sites, you need to know what other people are doing when they’re logged in. You need to know when something’s been changed.

After six months of development and testing, The Auditor was born.

The plugin lets you: [Read more…] about Interconnect/IT Launch the Auditor

Michael Kimb Jones Launches WOWPlugins.com

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WOW Plugins is a staple of WordCamp UK. Each year Michael Kimb Jones gives a rundown of plugins that he’s using that he finds useful and wants to share. It’s always a really popular presentation, partly because of the content and partly because Kimb is so good at presenting it. Kimb has just announced that he’s launching WOW Plugins, which will be an archive of all of the plugins he has covered each year (and will in the future I assume). I covered Kimb’s WOW Plugins talk on WPMU.org, but now you can follow them all on wowplugins.com. ∞

My Take on BuddyPress

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Over the last few years I have had the chance to work on a many BuddyPress projects. This fantastic tool has an incredible potential, which is often only limited by your imagination. Even if you often meet clients who believe that the only way to create a successful social network is to make a Facebook clone, other times you are challenged by more original clients, who are open to  finding great and innovative ways of creating a strong community around their website.

I have seen how BuddyPress has made huge advances to become what it is now: the best open source tool for creating a social network. Of course, there is still has a lot of work to be done, and I have my personal opinions about BuddyPress’s weak and strong points. This is my first post for WP Realm and, because I love to work with BuddyPress, I am eager to talk about its strengths and potential. But I also want to see it getting better and evolve, and so I will begin by presenting some weaker areas that I’ve encountered and areas to be improved.
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Writing Plugins: Is It Always Worth It?

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Writing code can be boring sometimes, whether you need some new features, but don’t like them or the process itself has somehow become tedious. You cannot focus and you are at a dead-end. The only thing you want is to get this thing working and finish it already. Sometimes what you need to get done is so simple that two lines in your theme’s functions.php file would probably do the trick, and the code for the header of a plugin alone is 10 lines. Why bother coding a plugin at all?

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This Week in The Realm: Week #25

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Events

WordCamp Curitiba 2012 — 2 days of intensive discussions, presentations and networking, among Brazilian WordPress enthusiasts. The event happened last week-end and the organizers have already submitted an event report, which we will expand and publish next week, right here on WP Realm.

WordPress meetup in Normandy — the french WordPress community is currently discussing a possible meetup in either Rouen or Caen, so if you are in the area, make sure to attend.

Is your community planning meetups or other events? Let us know!

Plugins

bbPress 2.1 Beta 1 — The forums plugin has reached Beta 1, and includes many enhancements and fixes (here’s the list of closed tickets for this release).  The development team is aiming to release bbPress 2.1 by the end of June, based on how the beta period goes. The more help they get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner the final version ships. If you want to help with the translation, it’s right here.
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