A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

Yesterday on the Wordpress blog, Matt Mullenweg created quite a stir amongst the wordpress developer community with his post Themes are GPL, too. Matt called in the help of the Software Freedom Law Center, experts on the GPL, to analyze the Wordpress software and it’s relationship to components and they responded with this…

PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

That’s a hefty blow to commercial Wordpress plugin developers because the inclusive nature of the GPL in relationship to Wordpress as a core software prevents developers from commercially licensing their work. For those who have been developing Wordpress hacks and plugins as “open source” to benefit the community without personal profit, it’s business as usual.

As with the Linux OS, lines are drawn between commercial and open source developers. Some bloggers like Jon Stahl and Hacker Visions agree with Wordpress and Mullenweg’s stance while others such as Jeffery McManus and Sadish Balla feel Wordpress should have some sort of framework in place to support commercial developers.

The folks at ThemLab made light that the Commercial WordPress Theme Directory Launches and provided a link to the directory where the following blurb can be found :

While our directory is full of fantastic themes, sometimes people want to use something that they know has support behind it, and don’t mind paying for that. Contrary to popular belief, GPL doesn’t say that everything must be zero-cost, just that when you receive the software or theme that it not restrict your freedoms in how you use it.

That statement does rub me the wrong way because it essentially reduces developers to support staff over licensing issues, particularly GPL vs. commercial. However, as far as Wordpress is concerned, I would never bother to write commercial add-ons for any GPL software in the first place. Free software is meant to be free.

That’s just my opinion - What’s yours ?

         

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Everybody loves Wordpress plugins. After all, that’s what makes Wordpress such a great choice for blogging or CMS needs. Considering the tremendous appeal for the latest and greatest plugins it seemed like a good idea to post some of them every Sunday as a regular feature of this blog.

Today we have a handful of interesting new extensions for your Wordpress installation from creative minds who have given their time freely into the Wordpress community. Without further ado, here are today’s latest and greatest plugins.

Avatars for Comment Feeds - A new Wordpress plugin that adds avatars to your comment RSS feed. The plugin works off Gravatars using the bulit-in functionality added as of WordPress 2.5 release. The plugin lets you set the size of the avatar, between 10 and 96 pixels and it will even add a snapshot from websnapr.com to the pingbacks and trackbacks you receive on your blog.

G4B Photo Gallery Plugin - Created by Gavin Vickery, this plugin provides a minimalistic method to include a complete photo gallery anywhere on your blog. You can adjust thumbnail and photo size in settings page and the plugin crops or resizes photos proportionally to your settings. G4B Photo Gallery Plugin currently supports Wordpress 2.2 - 2.6.2 installs.

DashboardZone Plugin - This is a very creative plugin which aims to help you effectively track your blogging goals. Goals you can set to be tracked are total number of posts, average comments per post and posts per month. Tracking these facets of your blog can help you convert your blog visitors into regular readers which is the ultimate goal of any blogger.

Wordpress Help Desk - Although this plugin is currently in beta mode, it offers a comprehensive integrated help desk and trouble ticketing system that helps you support your blog visitors and resolve issues quickly. This plugin could be extremely helpful for any businesses using Wordpress as a CMS system.

Well, that’s it for this weeks plugins. Be sure to check back next week for more great Wordpress plugins or subscribe to our RSS feed to be alerted when we post another batch next Sunday !!

Happy Publishing,
Dave

         

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  Yahoo has officially launched their new beta social news service called Yahoo Buzz. While it’s nothing new in that it’s a Digg style social news site where members are allowed to submit and vote on popular articles, the one thing that separates Yahoo Buzz from all the other Digg clones is that if an article gets popular enough, it will actually hit the front page of Yahoo. Yes, you read that correctly, the most popular articles will actually hit the Yahoo homepage.

Some guy posted an article detailing how to add a Yahoo Buzz button to your blog posts the hard way but for those of you who don’t mind popping open your favorite PHP editor and tinkering with your Wordpress theme, here’s an automated way to add a Yahoo Buzz button to every post on your blog.

First, you’ll need to visit this page and get the code for one of the Yahoo Buzz buttons. The code I chose, that you can see at the bottom of each article post looks like this…

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js" badgetype="square">
ARTICLEURL
</script>


You can see the ARTICLEURL tag which is where we will need to insert the url of our story to be added to Yahoo Buzz. This is simple using Wordpress built-in function the_permalink() which simply echoes out the article permalink when called within “the loop”.

To add it to your blog, open your theme’s index.php file and find the spot in the loop where you want to add the button and simple paste this code in that spot…

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js" badgetype="square">
<?Php the_permalink(); ?>
</script>


If you’re unfamiliar with the Wordpress loop, it is usually the code inside the open and close sections, symbolized by “….” as shown below…

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
….
<?php endwhile; else: ?>


Additionally, Yahoo Buzz allows other data about an article such as the headline and a summary of the article. If you wish to send a headline or an article title, you can experiment with the Wordpress functions get_the_title() and get_the_content() to pass those values on to the script.

If you have any questions about how to implement this, please feel free to use the comments for this article and I’ll be happy to assist you in any way possible to add the Yahoo Buzz button to your site.

Oh, and if you found this article useful, please don’t forget to Buzz it by clicking the button below.

         

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It seems like only yesterday Wordpress 2.5 was released but time marches forward and today Matt Mullenweg announced the release of the latest, greatest version of Wordpress. Version 2.6 looks to be an amazing advancement in the development of the world’s most widely used blogging software and there are several long anticipated features such as Post Revisions, Theme Previewing, Word Count and full SSL support. Here’s what Matt had to say…

I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Here are some of the highlights of Wordpress 2.6 :

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

For more information on this release, please visit The Official Wordpress Blog

         

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