What’s New With WordPress News and WordCamp WordPress Conference

After over four months on the road almost non-stop, traveling by air, motor home, car, truck, SUV, bus, and foot, covering over 18,000 miles across 24 states, repeating some of them more than once (which total to 30 states, I think, but whose counting?), it’s time to play a little catch up with what is going on around WordPress. I’m sure I’m overlooking some news, so if you know of some WordPress news we need to know about, please let me know.

WordPress Camp

Nothing like being late to the party. And the party is August 5th, 2006 in San Francisco, California. WordPress is hosting a WordCamp conference and party for all WordPress fans. You can learn more about it on Photo Matt’s post and the “official” WordCamp site. If you are interested, sign up.

Me? We are in the final stages of negotiating a new project which may take us overseas again (where is still a good question), so I’ll be packing or traveling to the new location. If only I’d known earlier. I’m always late to the party. And the party invites. Sigh.

More WordPress Widgets

Ruff Code has put together a list of WordPress Widgets for you to explore and play with. Some look like fun and some will work with WordPress.com blogs.

The official WordPress Widgets site is at WordPress.com Gadgets.

For more information on WordPress Widgets, which I call sidebar accessories or blog accessories, check out:

• Playing with WordPress.com New Sidebar Widgets
• WordPress.com Widgets – Customizing Your WordPress.com Theme Sidebar
• Customizing RSS Feed Links for WordPress.com and WordPress Sidebar Widgets
• WordPress Sidebar Widgets Goes Full Version WordPress Plugin
• The Blog Widget Competition Begins
• Designing a Theme to Include WordPress Widgets

New Bells and Whistles for WordPress.com

Here is a quick list of some of the new bells and whistles available for WordPress.com users:

• Mini WordPress.com Gadget: WordPress.com developers have created a miniature “clone of WordPress.com” which is a very simplified version of your WordPress Administration Panels. It has three main areas: Stats, New Post, and New Bookmark. If you want to try managing WordPress.com in the miniature, try it out.
• WordPress.com Goes Mobile: Want to blog from the road? From your cell phone or handheld computer? Or connected to the web via a slow dial-up connection? Then check out the new Mobile WordPress.com. Based upon the new Mini WordPress.com Gadget, you can access your WordPress.com blog from your cell or anywhere.
• Post Videos From Grouper: If you are into sharing videos online, you can now share your videos from Grouper with your WordPress.com blog fans.
• Some WordPress.com Themes Now Have Custom Headers: New features are being added to existing WordPress.com Themes and new WordPress.com Themes are being added as fast as possible, so you now have a lot more choices. Among those older Themes getting new features are Ambiru, Benevolence, Blix, Contempt, Neat, Rubric, and Sapphire, you can change now change the header. Since I use Rubric, I’ll have to debate about changing the header art. Hmmm. Still, I’d rather have other things fixed on the Theme than play with the header art.
• Volunteers Wanted to Help Translate WordPress: You can now blog in WordPress.com (and the full version of WordPress) in dozens of different and distinct languages. Yet, there is still work to be done to add more translation features and Matt and the WordPress team have come up with a neat program that invites you to help translate different bits and pieces of WordPress. If you are fluent in English (and WordPress terminology) and another language, please give a few minutes of your time to help this valuable project.
• Testing Ads on WordPress.com: With a warning “not to freak out”, Matt has announced that WordPress.com is beginning to test contextual adsense ads on WordPress.com. It’s only a week long test, and he claims “you’ll probably never see one”, it’s an attempt to find more funding to keep WordPress.com going. I expect that you will see more experiments in the future to help raise the money to keep WordPress.com’s “lights on”. This has always been talked about, so it will be interesting to see what ends up being the money-making vehicle for all these free blogs.
• WordPress “Guest User Registration” Security Flaw Alert: For full version WordPress users, there is a security warning going out you need to be aware of. Hopefully, we will have new news and information on this soon. The evil just keeps hacking and the WordPress developers hack back at them, often faster than they can hack. We are so lucky to have such an amazingly talented group backing WordPress.
• Developing a WordPress Blog – Specifically a Genealogy Blog: I’ve started a series that will last for several months on the step-by-step process of developing a WordPress blog. While it is specifically a genealogy blog, there is a lot to learn about the process, including creating a plan, issues with adding users, legal and privacy concerns, integrating non-WordPress technology and tools into a WordPress blog, and so much more.

That’s a lot of news and a lot of fun things to play with. Got any more good news about WordPress and the WordPress Community?

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