If you are using any WordPress plugin that connects with Twitter, you should update to the latest version that supports OAuth. Otherwise the plugins are not going to work. I personally use “Twitter Tools” plugin on my client’s Blogs and in some of my sites and I updated to version 2.4 for full compatibility with OAuth. You need to register each of your sites using this plugin in Twitter. (see picture above). The great news is that you can use your site’s name where it says: “about 10 minutes ago via WpThemesPlanet in reply to WordPress”. Instead of “BlackBerry” or “TweetDeck” You can see your own site’s name.

With this new feature, you still individually approve each application before using it, and you can revoke access at any time. To see which applications you have authorized or to revoke access, just go to the Connections section under Settings.

In order for Twitter applications to access your account, developers have been able to choose one of two authentication methods: Basic Authentication or OAuth. Both require your permission, but there is an important difference. With Basic Auth, you provide your username and password for the app to access Twitter, and the application has to store and send this information over the Internet each time you use the app. With OAuth, this isn’t the case. Instead, you approve an application to access Twitter, and the application doesn’t store your password.

Besides Twitter WordPress plugins, many other apps, including Echofon, TweetDeck, Twitterrific, Seesmic, and Twitter for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry, are already using OAuth. The same feature explained above, applies for all these other applications.

I tried the following HTACCESS and it fixed all these problems with broken or missing images:

#Wordpress Multi site
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
 
# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
#END WordPress Multi Site

If you are using The Donncha Domain mapping plugin to allow users to use domain names, make sure to update to the latest version that is compatible with WordPress 3.0.x. Otherwise you could see this message when a blog user tries to login:

“You don’t have permission to view this site. Please contact the system administrator.”

To update to the latest version of Donncha’s domain mapping plugin:

WordPress 3.0 Domain Mapping 0.5.2

If you notice any other issues after updating to WordPress Multisite, let me know and I will see if there is any fix.

As you may know, Akismet is another great plugin and I use it on WpThemesPlanet. It blocks most of the spam comments. However, it is always interesting to have an alternative in hand. I have tried TypePad on another blog for the last 3 months and it works wonders. It blocked 100% of the spam.

The service is free to anyone who wants to use it for both personal and business sites, regardless of how many comments you receive. As with Akismet, you also need an API key for it to work. You can get a free API key in the link below. The great news about TypePad AntiSpam Plugin is that it can be used for WordPress MU too. This is the difference with Akismet, which needs a special license for WPMU. That’s why most WordPress WPMU Webmasters are using TypePad Antispam plugin lately.

Download the plugin here.

Register for a free TypePad API Key here.

The TypePad AntiSpam plugin for WordPress is derived from WP-Akismet by Matt Mullenweg. All subsequent modifications are copyright 2008, Six Apart Ltd.

Enjoy!

When you check a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-down menu. If there has been feedback about this WordPress and plugin version combination, you will see what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible and how many marked it as incompatible. Then you can decide if you want to upgrade or not.

Also, if you log in in the directory, you will be able to help the community to gather information! Just select a WordPress version and plugin version combination and click the “Works” or the “Broken” button. Please note that this shouldn’t be used to report minor issues with a plugin. You should mark a plugin as “Broken” only if its core functionality is really broken when run on the selected WordPress version.

Right now the feature is in information gathering mode. So get out there and vote! Don’t just vote on broken plugins, but cast a “Works” vote for every plugin that works on the version of WordPress you are using. This can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our data and prevent a few mistaken “Broken” votes from weighing too heavily.

For developers, they are now including this data in the API. The plugin_information action now returns a “compatibility” member with the multidimensional array format:

array( {WP version} => array( {plugin version} => array( {% of reporters who say it works}, {# responses} ) ) )

If the API knows which version of WordPress you are using (for example, if you are making this query using the plugins_api() function from with WordPress), the API will only return compatibility information for your version of WordPress.

Eventually, they want to gather this compatibility feedback from within WordPress, allowing you to vote directly from your plugins admin screen. The ultimate goal is to use this information to inform you of plugin incompatibilities with a new version of WordPress during the upgrade process. For that to be useful they need a large set of high quality compatibility data. Start voting now!

More information here.

You can also head over to the Trac ticketing system and either create tickets for any bugs you find or use some of the useful searches to look for patches that need testing. During the beta test phase they are going to focus on the stabilization of the new added features (since 2.8.4) and the removal of possible bugs. During this process they are not going to add any more enhancements so as to ensure that the focus is on making the 2.9 final release as bug-free as possible.

To make it as easy as possible for you to get a beta testing install up and running they have put together a small WordPress plugin which makes it really easy to convert a test install of the latest release version of WordPress into a beta test install of the next up and coming release. The plugin is called WordPress Beta Tester and is available to download from WordPress Extend or can be installed using the built-in plugin installer. Please make sure you to only install this plugin on a test site, as they don’t recommend running beta versions on your normal live sites, just in case anything goes wrong.

You can read more about the plugin in “Making it easy to be a WordPress Tester”. They want to release the first beta version of WordPress 2.9 around the end of October, once they finish implementing the new features, and then they switch to full on beta testing mode and your help and feedback will be very much appreciated. The final release of WordPress 2.9 will be available in either late November or early December.

You can download it here. This WordPress plugin will create a compliant sitemap in the format supported by most Search Engines, including the most popular ones, Google, Yahoo and Bing. Like I said above, Sitemaps are very useful because they give valuable information to the search engines.

They will know how often to scan your site, which pages are more important, which have a lower priority, etc. The advantage of using Sitemaps is that you are able to view reports on crawl results and statistics. You’ll also see the most used search queries to find your site and the search queries that get the most clicks.

First, I recommend to build your Sitemap and then submit it to Google Webmaster Tools here. Make sure you verify it following the steps on that page. Make sure to identify yourself as the owner of the site and to validate your submission.You can also submit it to Yahoo here. For both services you need a Google and Yahoo accounts. If you don’t have one yet, make sure you sign-up. It takes only 5 minutes.

You can check the Wp Themes Planet Sitemap Here.

Many WordPress Themes include a changelog in the readme.txt file, however it is always easier for the theme users to access this information directly when they browse for new WordPress templates. I hope they can implement this feature in the Theme Directory. As for the Plugin Directory, the changelog information is displayed as a separate tab and also in the dashboard of your WordPress blog when you view the details on a new version of a plugin. Click the link below for more information about this topic.

Changelogs in WordPress Plugins