WordPressWire.com

Mashable.com have provided a great list of tools to help you fight spam with WordPress.

Well worth bookmarking for those times when you need to go beyond Akismet.

Visit List

Bad news for those of us looking forward to the release of WordPress 2.4 in late January - it’s been canned.

From postings on the WordPress development mailing list it appears that the major changes that were due in the codebase, especially the admin side, are too risky to release publically at the moment, and that the next release will now be 2.5 due in March.

Whilst I’m sure we are all disappointed not to get the new features as early as we would have liked, I’m sure we are all happier having a stable version of the application. It’s good to see common sense prevailing in situations like these.

Business Blog Consulting has posted a snippet of a conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts in which he reveals that the Google algorithm is now taking into account the length and content of URLs as part of its ’spammy’ radar.

Check out this post for further information, including tips on how to configure WordPress to avoid this trap.

Tubetutorial has posted a video preview of the forthcoming WordPress 2.4 Administration Panel.

Well worth watching to get a taste of what is expected to be included in the next major release as this is the first noticeable upgrade to the admin panel for quite some time.

The WordPress team has announced the release of version 2.3.2, an urgent security upgrade which patches holes that can potentially expose your draft posts.

Get upgrading.

Design Disease have released a brilliant festive WordPress theme entitled Christmas Days as a gracious present to all us WordPress bloggers

Thanks, DD!

TMTBOX MEDIA have published an in-depth analysis of the changes in WordPress 2.3, now that the dust has settled on this significant release.

Highly recommended if your ears are pricked by any of the following topics :

• Tags
• Update Notifications
• Canonical Redirection
• Post Workflow Improvements
• Pluggable Dashboard
• Atomlib
• $wpdb->prepare()
• Deprecated Functions
• Multiple Category Widgets
• Pluggable RSS Library

To read more head on over now.

V1.2 of Shylock’s incredibly useful Adsense Plugin for WordPress has been released.

This version adds increased control over the placement of ads, widget support and now XHTML 1.0 compliant.

Brian Turner has produced a great list and detailed description of 7 wordpress plugins for better indexing

Many thanks to Brian for this list, it has given me several ideas of how to utilise these plugins across my blogs, not just for indexing, but to make the blogs more usable.

Design Vitality have published an excellent guide to getting started with WordPress.

The guide provides links to the following main categories :

• Beginning Steps
• Pre-Made Themes
• Making Your Own Theme
• Plugins
• Optimization
• Integration with other applications

Definitely one to bookmark.