Tag: Wordpress

Whitewash – A Nice, Simple WordPress Theme

One of the things about WordPress is that most people don’t seem to think their install is complete until they have a theme with 50 columns, giant buttons, and ads everywhere. I had to laugh a few weeks ago when The Blog Herald ran a series of articles about reducing template clutter — seriously, go visit their site for what passes as on the simple side in the WordPress community (thank goodness for Google Reader).

On the other hand, this is my idea of a simple, no nonsense template that doesn’t make the visitor’s eyes bleed (demo this template here).

C’mon guys — sometimes less really is more.

Chess By Blog Plugin for WordPress

WordPressChess By Blog is a plugin for WordPress that — surprise — adds a number of chess-related features to WordPress. According to the developer’s list of features, that includes,

  • PGN (Portable Game Notation) inserted into your post body will be displayed as a graphical board, inline in the browser. The client side code was written using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), resulting in Javascript (no Java required) that has been tested in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Mozilla/Firefox, and Safari. The graphical look of the chessboard is controlled by themes, and can be easily controlled in the management panel for the plugin.
  • The board supports interactive play directly in the browser, in a mode which does not update the post body. All rules of chess are supported, include en passant, castling, and pawn promotion. This can be used to present chess problems for readers to work through.
  • Chess By Blog also supports a persistent game played between two players, hence the name of the plugin. Readers that have edit permissions on a post can take turns moving pieces, with the state of the board saving to the WordPress database between moves. The plugin uses WordPress and PHP security features to ensure that only moves that come from the client chessboard code can update the database.

The plugin is regularly updated and the developer notes it has been tested and works with WordPress 2.6.

bbPress 1.0 Alphas Coming Soon

There was finally some activity on the bbPress front the other day, with an announcement that bbPress 1.0 alphas would be coming over the next few weeks. WordPress 2.6 broke the account integration between WordPress and bbPress 0.9x, and hopefully the 1.0 version will restore that as well as put bbPress back on track.

Turn WordPress Into a Private Twitter Clone with the Prologue Theme

I really like the idea behind Twitter, but everytime I go to use Twitter it is down for one reason or another. I’d also like a little more control over my data and since I’m not interested in broadcasting my Twits to the world, there’s the Prologue Theme for WordPress.

As you can see, Prologue turns WordPress into a Twitter clone. I have a separate WordPress install on my server that is password protected where I update my status, etc. WordPress has a post-by-email option, so typically I just send an e-mail from my Blackberry the secret e-mail address I set up, and then those updates get propagated to my Twitter clone.

It works surprisingly well. The biggest pain is the eye rolling from my wife when she notices I’m updating my status again.

WordPress Private Only Plugin

The other day I was looking for a solution to make a WordPress site completely private. Private Only is a plugin that does exactly that — if you’re not logged in, you’re redirected to the login page. I installed it on a blog I use as a sort of private Twitter and it worked seamlessly.

I still maintain it is absurd that this sort of feature isn’t already built in to WordPress

Timestamp Plugin for WordPress

WordPress has a nice ability to set the post date on a blog entry to whatever the hell you want it to be. The only problem is, the default is that the timestamp field is hidden and the user has to click on a link to expand it. Which is a real pain in the ass if you use that feature a lot to schedule posts.

Mark Jaquith solves that problem with a one-line plugin that keeps the timestamp field open automatically.