Whether progress in WordPress development continues at the same pace or not, the issue of the capability of a theme to display all new functions, template tags etc, is a live one.

Referred to as compatibility, this perhaps isn’t quite accurate - a theme will (should) work with a range of WordPress versions, (for various reasons, good and bad, we don’t all heed the so-named ‘required’ updates) - however, the question is whether a theme will supply all the functionality of an installed version of WordPress.
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Becoming fractionally tired of these Twitter API limits, which seem to lock everything down fairly early on the day and keep everything slow thereafter.

The canard, (and I’m sure it is only that), that Twitter is a bit wonky due to the Ruby becomes self-fulfilling publicity, simply due to the prominence and focus of the site… which is distinctly unfortunate.

It seems ‘official’ - poor honest WordPress Theme designers have a load more work in prospect to drag their themes into compatibility with the projected 2.7 version.

Where this all fits with the discussion about Intense Debate still isn’t elucidated - fair enough, this is a major issue and not going to be decided and promulgated in a week or so.
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WordPress has jQuery in it - it’s what makes the AJAX in the admin do its stuff and is there to be ‘re-used’ in any site customisations you fancy.

jQuery now announce that Nokia and Microsoft are including the into their official application development platform.
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Having tried out the most recent plugin I could find for getting a pdf from (just) a post, without bothering with categories - here - the results are mixed, to say the least, on PHP5, standard Red Hat etc. Continue reading »

WP MarkItUp is not bad at all… Runs on the standard MarkItUp code, driven by jQuery and is a WP plugin.

Tried it out by bodging in a Paypal “buy now” button to the editor, and it does ok, and would make putting in various extra functions of this sort a reasonably modular experience for the average programmer.

If you do know what you’re doing with javascript/AJAX, not sure it’s a necessary replacement, but it might provide a conduit for cleaning up the editor/quicktags functions, never-ending…

Many comments on the recent acquisition by Automattic of Intense Debate  - or just the comments system thereof - whichever being the case is slightly glossed depending on the source.

And, hey presto, many comments of the “it’s so kewl variety”

The assumption at present is, perhaps, that this is a wordpress.com deal, and not in the first instance a wordpress.org thing - some noises about a plugin… alternatively, it’s an integral part of 2.7 and arriving near you next month…  it’s wait and see.

A month ahead of schedule - which may or may not be a good thing - and coming complete with its own video for the youngsters.

What looks very good is the new plugin interface which  divides active and inactive plugins, felt by many to be overdue.

Apparently, and this is only horrible rumour at this stage - the medium-vaunted login system isn’t doing for Firefox 3.0…

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If you’re using WordPress as a CMS and doing some extra coding - for example picking something from an extra db table to display on a certain page, eg page_id=4

$pageVar = $wpdb->get_var(SELECT var FROM my_table WHERE something=’something_else’);

and then you also want to SEO the <title> a little, so in header.php you put:-

<?php if (is_page(’4′)) $extraTitle = ‘» ‘ . $pageVar; ?>

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?> <?php echo $extraTitle; ?></title>

It won’t work - $pageVar doesn’t have global scope, because of the method used to get the header on the page.

<?php get_header(); ?>

Instead, one way round this is to use:

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/header.php’); ?>

and it will work…
This has the nature of a hack - use sparingly and probably not in themes for general release. And stay away from $_GLOBALS

Maybe - another entrant to the small and select group of Firefox plugins that actually have some value….

Fireshot has a variety of editing tools that let users modify captured screen shots and add text and graphic notes.

Captured image can be saved to disk, copied to clipboard, emailed or opened in a new editor. File formats which are supported contains .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, .BMP, etc.

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