DISQUS

I demand every theme to be i18n ready, seriously.
While writing the sourcecode it's very easy to internationalize the theme. Putting i18n in afterwards is a huge timefactor - I did it once for Neil Mertons Web2.0* theme and it took me a whole day to test and bugfix (too bad Neil disappeared from the internet - and so did his theme).

i18n is as easy as making widget-ready sidebars. Too bad most theme authors do not care about widgets and hardcode everything inside their sidebar...

Hi Andrew,
I'm wondering - do you get spam that still goes through Askimet? Since week 41 of 2007 I had a total of 20.656 views, 109 posts and 39 comments (that's what happens if you dont blog in english :D) - and Askimet caught amazing 3.611 spam-comments. Only occasionally a single spam goes through and pops up in moderation - but as of today, Askimet worked like a charm.

Wow, are you serious with the 24h-thing? Isn't it exactly this blogs are not meant to do? Provide information only to a limited audience/for a limited time?

On another note I tend to unsubscribe to feeds that do not send the complete text. There are really good reasons for not doing so (like ads on the blog to keep the cash flowing) but too many bloggers tend to write just blabber in the first lines without coming to the interesting stuff. If you only read the first 3 lines of a blog-post, how could you judge if it's important to you now/later? Information should be accessible without having to click again/open a new tab.

About the plugins, well, guess there are as much opinions on this matter as there are programmers, huh? :) I prefer cleaner plugins in terms of structure but as you said, it could become quite complex which might scare away non-plugin-authors to have a look at how plugins work. Not quite sure which way is "the best" - if there is any.

No need to kick yourself :)

Personally I'd expect a theme supporting i18n that includes theme-options in the adminpanel to support i18n in there too.
Consistency is something that should not be underestimated as it creates a feeling. If you see that a car has a nice green coat of varnish, you'd expect that green color to show up somewhere in the interior too.

Giving the admins a consistent naming for the bookmarks in their own language would be nice.

Hi Andrew,

could you make the theme i18n ready by default? It's not that much work when you're developing the theme and (at least I) would really appreciate it when translating the theme into german.

The idea of the plugin isn't bad, security always matters. However, I found teaching how to work with things related to security generates far more security than just installing several plugins to "harden" WordPress (or any other webservice, application, you name it).

In this case specifically: using .htaccess to restrict access to /wp-admin/ for a specific IP is definately a security measure that makes sense - if you use a passwordfile in a directory that is not accessible by an url. Else the hashed passwords can be cracked within minutes (depening on length and strength of the password). A good read is this: http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1368

Like I said, raising the level of awareness generates far more security than any super-duper plugin or security measure could probably do. For a start, I would not advise anybody to log into their website from a network you can't trust in the first place (public hotspots, shared connection to the net etc.) Wordpress does not rely on SSL by default, so your password is moving through the network anyway just waiting to be sniffed.

Also, hardening your WordPress install is not going to solve all your security problems. You have to keep WordPress always up to date - as well as your server OS, database software, webserver, PHP etc. etc. etc.

Security is more than something you can download and apply - you have to understand it first.

That's an interesting approach to preventing spam, however it drastically influences the usability of your site!
Browsers usually rely on the name of forms to fill them with previously typed content. I really don't want to enter my name, email and website every time I write a comment on a blog that I visit regularly :)

Nice to see your knowledge of WP influencing a theme, Andrew :)
First off, I have to say that i18n support is probably the easiest but most underestimated thing you can come up with for a theme. Make it multi language! At least I'd thank you ;)

All sidebars widget ready and gravatar-support should be standard, as you already said.

Also, make as much things that do make sense (Font color, size etc.) a theme option. See this great tutorial on how to do that: http://theundersigned.net/2006/06/wordpress-how...
Maybe you can even come up with saving different colorschemes for the theme?

Add a theme option to highlight the comments of the post author. Quite easy to realize in code (see http://paste.barnal.de/show.php?pid=473 - I dont think your comments will allow me to paste PHP here :) ) but it should be optional I guess.

Separate pingbacks from comments! Nothing looks worse than 20 comments mixed up with 10 pingbacks that ar not separated by each other (may it be visual style or by ordering them).

Maybe support asides (http://codex.wordpress.org/Adding_Asides) - although I've never been a big fan of it.

Nice to have: support for Scrobbler (http://leflo.de/projekte/scrobbler)


I'd also like to see switching between older/newer posts (on the front page as well as inside a post) "AJAXified". AJAX comments + followup notification + comment subscription as seen on your current theme are great additions too.


That would be all - for now ;)
btw, make sure to check out the Web2.0* (http://web2wptheme.com/) Theme by Neil Merton (http://www.neilmerton.co.uk/)

I tend to agree with your conclusion Andrew. Graffiti might be a solution for companies, but private use will likely suffer from the focus on .NET and the Windows platform.
I don't like putting up numbers, but the majority of webhosts out there run some sort of Linux derivate which rules out Graffiti immediately.

Sure, currently it's a Beta - but for something that wants to be "[...] a platform for helping you create and publish content.", I miss a broader toolset to use. You can add pictures to your content - good. But like WordPress, this does not include managing galleries.
Single images might work in a common blog environment (only to a certain degree, as personal blogs might have a lot of private flavour - pictures of the kids growing up etc.) but supporting galleries is often a major plus.
I also miss support for videos. Make it a button that lets you browse for your favourite youtube clips or a real upload function.
Something I haven't tried yet but was also unable to find on http://docs.graffiticms.com/ was the question whether or not Graffiti supports direct ADS authentification. That would - in a commercial environment - make Graffiti a more interesting candidate.

In the end, Graffiti is not yet worthy of beeing called an alternative to WordPress to me.

For compatibilities sake TinyMCE and the built in "code" view should always be supported and tested against. FCKEditor isn't supported by most plugins and writing in textile might be nice to be able to copy&paste between different applications/blogs, but is rarely used in WordPress.

Great plugin :)
I have to second the tinyMCE bug.
The color chooser is a nice to have feature, but beeing able to "save" an API-link would be great. However, having templates might work better in this case.

I dont like the workflow yet - creating the link, copy & paste into a post/page, going back to the API-Page if you need to change something. Implementing it into tinyMCE/plain editor would seriously speed things up.

What happens if you disable the plugin or even worse, disable all your plugins for a WP update by renaming the plugins folder?
With some types of scripts, this could seriously bring users in trouble if there is no "register previous version" functionality in the deactivation routine. And renaming the folder - as some people are used to - will certainly break stuff I guess :(

Sounds like nice things to keep you occupied hehe ;)
Talking about the theme - will it have i18n support? I really miss that from a lot of themes, even though it's really simple to accomplish.

I can only hope they include CodePress natively (http://codepress.org/) into the Adminpanel. See my Idea on WordPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=...)

It would simplify small changes in plugin- or themecode so much, but currently breaks the complete adminpanel.

I guess you could go pretty far with creating a theme that's completely made out of widgets. However, the gain in flexibility comes with the price of increased administration.
If I'm not mistaken every widget has to be installed as a plugin. Really makeing use of a widget-based theme could easily create a dozen of widgets which will sooner or later clutter the plugins-page. Wouldn't it be great if you could have a sort-of-wysiwyg editor for managing the entire theme?