I was reading an article by OZH about ‘Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins‘ and besides that I’m doing some stuff terribly wrong, I also stumbled upon the follow paragraph:
Compatibility maintained with deprecated versions of WordPress
I’ve seen code comments mentioning stuff like “// we’re doing this for people using WP 2.5″. This one is more a personal choice, but I think maintaining compatibility with older versions is a terrible idea.
Terrible for you: fixing bugs and implementing new features is quite a task already, don’t add to the burden with more deprecated code.
Terrible for the users: it’s nice that your plugin is going to run fine on their obsolete, insecure and already hacked blog, but it really does not motivate them to upgrade, which is vital.
I know I’ve dropped backward compat with my plugins a long time ago, and always code for the latest release available. It makes life so much easier :)
I totally agree that it is a big mistake running an outdated blog and will drop support for all older versions of Wordpress immediately. Sorry folks running version 2.5, please upload the latest version and do the upgrade! Or let me do it for you ;)
f»dforward is a widget based recommendation network that increases readership of blogs by more interested and relevant readers. f»dforward lets you connect with new blogs based on similar content and incorporates social elements like the “follow me” tools of Twitter, where they will follow content around the web instead of following conversations. f»dforward lets you grow your own blog network in a natural way by bringing you related and recommended articles connected to what you just published. f»dforward lets the blogger see who has been reading and makes recommendations visible and viral for their readers. In addition, f»dforward can help publishers improve reach and revenue through the analysis of what people are reading on and off their sites, which helps publishers like Het Parool and ILSE Media to create better content and make better connections with it.
More information about f»dforward can be found on getfeedforward.com.
Of course there is also a Wordpress plugin available to ease the integration. See the f»dforward recommendation network page for more info about the plugin.
Prezi offers a new way of using presentation software. Prezi presentations are slide-less and make use of moving and zooming into an infinate workspace. Unfortunatly they are a bit hard to embed. You could of course use an iframe tag, but everytime you edit your post or page, that iframe tag gets filtered out.
So I’ve written a small plugin to embed Prezi into your posts and pages. Just put [ prezi] and [ /prezi] (without the spaces) around your Prezi URL and your done! The plugin also adds a custom button to the Visual Editor so you don’t have to remember these codes and just insert your URL.
More info is available on the Prezi Shortcude plugin page.
JanRain RPX is a hosted service that makes it simple to enable OpenID (Google, MySpace, MS Live, Yahoo!, AOL, ….) , Facebook Connect and even Twitter Connect on your blog. Visitors don’t have to register on your blog and remember another username and password, but are still able to use all the features on your blog. At the same time, you as the blog owner receive valuable information about your users. Profile information, email addresses, avatars and even friends lists can be passed on to your blog when someone logs in through RPX.
RPX offers a single API and works as a proxy between your website and the identity providers, and is transparent to the end user. Adding RPX to your website doesn’t require any changes to your database and is the ideal solution for Wordpress. With their Wordpress plugin it’s really just plug and play.
Lees de rest van ‘Achieve higher registration rates on your blog with RPX’
With the Twitter Publisher plugin you can send automated tweets out when you publish a new post. It will add Google Campaign variables to the URL using the new URL shortener Awe.sm or Bit.ly. For larger blogs, with multiple authors, you can include the author’s Twitter name in the tweet and individual author’s can send Tweets from their account at the same time the main account is sending them.
You can download the plugin at Wordpress.org.
Always wanted to know where your traffic really came from? Did it come from Twitter? Or maybe from your RSS feeds? It’s now possible to track your incoming traffic with Google Analytics by using one of my plugins.
Add Google Campaign variables to your RSS feeds with my RSSLinktagger plugin.
