The WordPress Category Posts plugin, version 2.0, has been released and is now available for download via the WordPress Extend Plugin Directory.  WordPress Category Posts is a plugin for WordPress that creates a linked list of the posts in a specific category.

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, development of the WordPress Spam Karma plugin has officially been discontinued and the current code has been released GPL Version 2.  While this isn’t a plugin we use ourselves, we do see it running on probably around 10% (+/-) of our clients’ blogs, thus the announcement has caught our attention.

To address what the future of Spam Karma may hold, we can only speculate from what we’ve seen in the past with other open source projects.  Here are some common scenarios:

• The project will just die. Since this is already “off the ground” we doubt that happens, at least not right away.
• An individual or a group of people will pick it up and run with it.  The majority of WordPress plugins fall under this category.
• A development firm will pick it up and take over development. This could be likely due to the high profile of the plugin as long as the development firm consistently has the time and resources to devote to the development and upkeep of the plugin.

So, with that said, we’ll keep our eyes open to see what happens.  In the meantime, Spam Karma 2.3 Release Candidate 1 seems to still work with WordPress 2.6.

As far as Dave’s reasoning for discontinuing Spam Karma, he says it’s two fold.  Life & WordPress.  While I can personally understand the life explanation (in general open source plugins in and of themselves are not money makers and are more of a hobby than anything AND they often take a lot of time to develop and maintain), I do have a few comments regarding Dave’s take on WordPress in general.

(WordPress’) upgrade rate makes it nearly impossible to keep up, in turn making it a constant security threat on my servers.

Taking a look at the historical list of WordPress release dates, I’d have to disagree.  Yes, there are cases in which security releases have been released very close together, but minor releases are typically done every 4-6 weeks with major releases taking place in the 4-6 month range.  Software is never really “done” nor “perfect” so that sort of consistent release schedule and promptness to fix any security issues puts my mind at ease a bit.

Each time I finally cave in and install one of those “mandatory security upgrade”, it also installs … other theme compatibility-breaking fluffy crap that I never asked for in the first place.

After each new release we typically perform numerous client upgrades and the vast majority of the time there are no issues with the theme.  Anything that “breaks” the theme is normally caused by issues with the theme(s) and/or plugin(s), which is typically easy to spot.

It’s become incredibly bloated and tedious to support.

While WordPress does have more features bundled with it now than it used to, I can’t think of any features that our clients don’t really need, use or at least want the option to use (and there are many other features that aren’t included that we get asked about all of the time).  Take the WYSIWYG editor for example.  We used to have clients ask what options there were and we usually installed one of the available plugins to add WYSIWYG editing (which was occasionally time consuming to setup depending upon the server).  Now that a WYSIWYG editor is included by default that inquiry is a thing of the past.

Support wise, WordPress is a whole lot easier to support than many other server-side software packages out there.  Granted WordPress is our specialty and I’ve personally used it for over four years now, but it is a solid, easy to use, customize and support system in my opinion.

The fact that a community-based open-source project (WordPress) is used to distribute a commercially licensed piece of software (Akismet) doesn’t make me particularly happy.

Honestly, this sounds like Dave’s bigger issue at hand with WordPress (tied with Dave’s plugin directory history) and I cannot fault Dave for these feelings as he does have valid points.

One thing that I’ve found since I’ve been involved in the open source community, and WordPress in particular, is that many people, especially individual users (i.e. not businesses with software budgets), are not interested in paying for plugins, themes, services, and/or even support…”free” is the nature of open source, right?  (That subject deserves a series of its own posts to address adequately without getting misunderstood too badly by the general population.)

Specifically regarding the inclusion of Akismet, I am glad that it is included for those who want to use it (its free for probably 99% of people running WordPress), but the fact that it really is a commercial product and is included in every WordPress install does invoke some sort of “that’s not right” feeling (though I do understand the business side of it).  I guess my main issue isn’t the self-promotion or the revenue potential (open source authors do deserve compensation for their work and donations are often few and far between), but more the fact that an average user would just assume that anything bundled with WordPress comes with it with no strings attached.  I think a better approach would have been to either require a manual download of the plugin with clearly defined terms or to offer some sort of standard (free) commercial version and an enhanced commercial (pay) version.

That said, Akismet is a good plugin.  Spam Karma is still around (at least for the time being…thanks Dave!).  And there are other anti-spam solutions out there like  Bad Behavior & WP-SpamFree (among others).  Give them a whirl and stick with your favorite.

WordPress 2.6 has been released.

Key new user features include:

• Post Revisions
• Google Gears support
• Image captions and better image control
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one
• Improved WYSIWYG editor
• Theme Previewer
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet

If you need assistance with upgrading or have any questions regarding WordPress, please contact us.

The Chicago Tribune published an article a few days ago that discusses business blogging and in particular includes portions of an interview with Robert Mark from CommAvia about their JetWhine blog.  I hope to see more of these sort of articles (business related or otherwise), as there are so many facets to blogging that could be explored.

CommAvia has been a client of ours since November 2006, right after the initial launch of the JetWhine blog, for the various WordPress services and tasks necessary to keep the blog up and running and growing.  It’s rewarding to watch a client’s blog and blogging grow and excel, especially in what I’d consider a relatively short time-span.

WordPress 2.5.1 has been released and includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix.

If you need assistance with upgrading or have any questions regarding WordPress, please contact us.

WordPress 2.5 has been released.

Key new user features include:

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets
• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• EXIF extraction
• Search posts and pages
• Tag management
• Password strength meter
• Concurrent editing protection
• Few-click plugin upgrades
• Friendlier visual post editor
• Built-in galleries

If you need assistance with upgrading or have any questions regarding WordPress, please contact us.

I was recently looking for a list of every official WordPress release to date and by date and could not find a place where this was listed.  So I have pieced together the list and have created a WordPress release history page for anyone else who might like to take a look at the release dates.