I’ve been playing around with Mozilla’s Persona a bit lately, so I was thrilled to find a WordPress plugin that makes integrating it ridiculously easy.
Category: WordPress
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Poster
Normally, I ignore iOS based WordPress post editors, but I was tipped off to Poster while listening to this week’s episode of Systematic and it actually looks crazy nice. Besides being easy on the eyes, it’s got Dropbox integration, Markdown support, custom fields, post format selection and even slug editing.
Slug editing! From a 3rd party WordPress client for iOS!
Hrmph. Maybe I should be getting more excited about the Markdown and Dropbox support. I mean, those things will have more impact on my workflow than slug editing ever will. Still, this is a total steal at $3.99, right?
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Ooooh, Columns!
I couldn’t agree more with Justin Tadlock’s feelings about the prevalence of
[column]shortcodes. They’ve been getting baked into a ton of new WordPress themes and there’s no standard for how they’re implemented. Besides:Users lose this functionality when they switch to a theme that doesn’t support their previous theme’s shortcodes, leaving bracketed words in their content.
It’s just a big bag of hurt. So I love what he’s doing to address it…
His Grid Columns plugin allows folks to drop their post or page content into readymade columns, inside of existing themes, by using a fairly simple, straightforward shortcode. The documentation is a bit sparse right now — and I’m sure that’ll improve before this gets thrown into the official WordPress plugin repository — but I’m totally hoping this gets picked up by the theme community at large.
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Developers
Say, man, do you use the Developer plugin for WordPress? No? Well, it’d be a lot cooler if you did…
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Socialite
I normally have a pretty strong dislike for social sharing buttons — mainly because of the overall load time they add to a site — however, Socialite.js (and its WordPress-ready counterpart) may have softened my opinion on them.
By loading the social sharing buttons asynchronously, it can cut the amount of initial page requests down considerably. So if you have a site that depends on those annoying little chiclets, check it out.
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The Auditor
Interconnect IT’s The Auditor looks like a really nice audit log plugin for WordPress. But it retails for $249. That means that I’m not going to get to play with it any time soon.
I wonder if I can get away with expensing it…
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Cache Rules Everything Around Me
When it comes to speed, one of the easiest things someone hosting their own WordPress install can do is enable expires headers. Expires headers basically tell the browsers visiting your site to cache the static stuff — like images and scripts — so they don’t have to be downloaded every time one of your pages needs them.
To do this, I’ve been using some fairly straightforward .htaccess rules that I adapted from the ones in HTML5 Boilerplate. But since version 4.0 of Boilerplate came out about a week ago, I went in and cleaned things up a bit. And now that everything is looking good, I figured that I should probably share them.
So here are the new & improved rules I’m using:
All you need to do to benefit from this is add the code above to your site’s .htaccess file. Just make sure you don’t have any rules pertaining to expires hanging around from an old plugin or something else and you should be golden.
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Feature Request: Tracking Plugin Updates
You know what I’d kill for? A plugin that takes this info from a WordPress plugin page:
And drops it into place here:
Because keeping track of that sort of thing is becoming increasingly important for anyone who gives half a shit about keeping their site and its plugins up to date.
So, uhm, does anyone have the free time to do something like this? Because I don’t right now — but I’ll gladly buy a nice bottle of something alcoholic for the person who does…
Update: Request fulfilled by the exceedingly wonderful Pete Mall!
Here’s what it looks like in action:
Thanks Pete! I’ll have a bottle of whiskey for you at WordCamp SF.