Wordpress Theme Directory

WP has finally offered an alternative to the long-dead and kinda crappy Theme Viewer.

With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Thank goodness. Now there is an official place for everyone to upload their themes, and just like with the plugins directory you can see when the latest update was (along with other relevant information). The directory is sparse right now, but I expect it to get much bigger quickly.

Wordpress Plugin Competition 2.5

Another WP plugin competition is running from May 10th until July 10th, and I’m excited. The last one featured several plugins that I used on SS!AB for quite a while (still using one), before the features were rolled into the WP core in WP 2.5.

Updated to Wordpress 2.3 Beta 3

I got overly excited about tags, and so on a whim I upgraded to a beta. Nothing looks different, except that there is a single line below the post area for tags. While I am glad that the page didn’t blow up and that the theme didn’t break, I guess I will have to wait for some tag management plugins to take advantage of the hooks and such that have been added on the backend.

Edit: Haha, of course after I go to publish this post, I get SQL errors from the ELA plugin. Oh well, I haven’t even enabled it on this site yet, and have been kinda disappointed by their slow update cycle. I mean, the categories can’t even be sorted alphabetically…

Plugin Winners

Forgot to mention, but the plugin winners were announced for this summer’s Wordpress Plugin Competition.

I may try out the Who Sees Ads plugin on the anime page. This was a really awesome feature of the K2 theme, where I could display various items on the sidebar depending on which page the reader was on. This plugin is supposed to give even more control, although only for ads. I’d like to see a plugin that lets you modify which widgets your sidebar displays based on which page your reader is browsing (e.g. show full link list only on the home page but not on archive pages).

My Dashboard also sounds promising, especially since you don’t have to hack any core files to change your dashboard. One thing many users have complained about is the feeds in the dashboard. They are laid out rather badly (stupid rectangles on the bottom), and they take forever to load. I want my dashboard to load quickly, and I’ll read RSS feeds in my reader, thank you very much. While RSS feeds that give you urgent update information or updates on new themes and plugins are nice, about half of the feed entries are stupid things from the creator’s personal blog. For instance, I do not give a damn that Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress Creator) has been using IE7. Even if I did care, I wouldn’t want it cluttering up and slowing down my dashboard.

The automatic updaters seem nice too, but I am a bit wary of them. Wordpress has been getting better and better about offering features that don’t require hacking core files, and on KOLAAP, I think I run a default install (only the kses.php is hacked to allow the spoilers plugin).