For anyone who uses the WordPress.com stats plugin, you’ll notice it inserts a small smiley image in your footer. This image needs to be loaded to track the stats.
Some people might think this little smiley face is “cute”. The rest of you will find the smiley image unsightly (and possibly evil looking) and will look for ways to remove it. This post will go over:
- First of all, what not to do when hiding the smiley
- How to properly hide it, with some extra absolute position goodness for certain layouts
- If you’d rather not hide it, how to easily center the smiley image
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Spectacu.la, a WordPress theme club, has just announced the release of their free threaded comments plugin for WordPress. Basically what this plugin does is replace your theme’s comments template with a new one, generated by the plugin.
In addition to that, you also get pagination and jQuery based roll up of subordinate comments. For those who remember the old Theme Lab which used Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin, it’s kind of like that, except neater.
The plugin should work on almost any theme, even if it normally doesn’t support threaded comments, provided it uses the comments_template() call.
Pictured above is the light and dark styles of the comments which are included in the plugin. Read on to check out my screencast which demonstrates these two styles on a really old theme that wasn’t originally designed to support threaded comments.
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The lack of changelogs in a lot of WordPress plugins is something that’s bothered me for a while, and I wasn’t the only one. I’m very wary of upgrading plugins, and when I see that a plugin needs to be upgraded in my WordPress dashboard, I’d like to know exactly what’s being changed. It might be a major security fix, it might be a minor bug, it might not be a necessary update at all. Changelogs give this information to end users about changes from version to version.
Well, there’s some good news for all of you who like to check out the changelogs before upgrading plugins, but it’ll require some action on behalf of the plugin authors. There is now a standardized way of adding changelog information to the plugin’s readme.txt file. To plugin authors wondering how to do this, read this post on Peter Westwood’s blog. This information will then be displayed on a dedicated “Changelog” tab on the plugin’s page on the WordPress.org plugin repository.
I know themes aren’t usually updated as often as plugins are, but I’m wondering if it would be difficult to implement something similar for WordPress themes hosted in the official theme directory. Anyone have any thoughts about changelogs for themes too?
