The essence of plugins is giving to WordPress users more control over their blog, that is, most of the time, more options. Typically, a plugin adds a page under the Settings menu, where you can modify the options (see this article on register_setting() for best practices).

But if you think about multi user blogs, it can make sense to implement per user options instead of "global" settings. And guess what? It's dead easy.
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Christmas is around the corner, so how about a little giveaway? I feel like offering one of my readers a copy of The Smashing Book (313 pages, paperback, full-color images on coated paper, seems like a pretty book indeed). Drooling yet? Enter the giveaway!
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I've recently moved to WordPress an active community site which is run and moderated by several editors and administrators. Each post gets dozens of comments, and I wanted to highlight those made by staff members.

What not to do

If you've googled a bit for a solution on how to identify authors' or admins' comments, you've probably seen several explanations on how to implement this by comparing emails. Something like:

While this is sort of OK for a single author weblog, it's totally inconvenient and not scalable for a community site run by several editors and administrators: you would need to edit the template file whenever there's a new member in the staff, and nothing prevents an unlogged user from commenting using your well known email address.

So, what to do instead?
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A few months ago (yeah, that long) I was asked by Packt Publishing if I would like to review a copy of WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide by Vladimir Prelovac. Needless to say, I thought this could be fun and interesting, so I jumped on the occasion, and finally found some time to read the book and share my thoughts about it.
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By Joel Fisher in the wp-hackers mailing list:

I in fact choose to use a coffeemaker to boil vegetables. Why?
Because if I used something else that just makes coffee, my client would ask me "Can it boil vegetables?".
WordPress is a powerful and flexible tool. Period.

I love this :)

I've finally released the much awaited and long overdue YOURLS version 1.4. It's still not perfect but there are no more blocking issue that I know of. This version brings a much better installer, an upgrader from version 1.3 of course, lots of code improvements, and, yum yum, stats (example). Honestly, bit.ly and such, you're not better any longer :)

Please pay attention to the included readme file, especially if you're upgrading from version 1.3 (and if so, please backup your database before upgrading)

While I'm at it, I'm sending out warm thanks to anyone who have filed issues and feedback regarding bugs, especially to a guy from Das Literatur-Café for detailed, fast and frequent reports.

If you encounter unexpected behavior, the best thing to do is file an issue so I can keep track of them easier than in blog comments here (of course, before file it please search in older and closed one to make sure it's not already there). Have fun shrinking your URLs!

As you may know already (and if you don't, dude, follow me) I was one of the judges in the WordPress Plugin Competition held by Weblogtoolscollections.

The podium for this year's comp has been finally revealed so, as promised, I'm now publishing the 43 reviews of the 43 contestant plugins. Warning: this is going to be a long one.

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Every now and then, here and there, you've seen people asking for tips or articles explaining how you really can use "wordpress as a cms". I've read most of these articles, and they all fail and miss the point, honestly.

So, without further ado, I'll reveal The Definitive Guide To Using WordPress as a CMS.
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Lately I realized that I absolutely don't care any longer about trackbacks. At the beginning, it was fun to get a notice every time someone would link to my blog, and I would religiously check their site and probably discovered cool blogs this way. But now? While I value comments, I just don't see the point of trackbacks any more.

• I get too much of them to have the time to check them all
• They make ugly […]anchor links[…] in my comment moderation queue
• A third (on my blog at least) are spam (mostly caught by Akismet hopefully)
• And when they're not spam, 95% of the time they come from a website I can't understand because I don't speak that language

So, after several minutes of loud pondering, I've decided to simply turn them off on the whole site. For the record and if someone is wondering, besides turning the option off in Settings / Discussion, you need to send the following to MySQL:

Bye bye ping/track/whatever-backs!