Alex King and his company Crowd Favorite have a proposed solution. Their plugin adds a really nice UI to the New Post screen, with tabs that appear depending on which Post Formats your theme enables and different input fields that change depending on which tab is selected.

In addition to the way cool plugin, they have a sensible naming convention for custom fields to go along with it. I think it would great if the Core team adopted that as a recommendation for theme developers, and incorporated the UI plugin into WordPress proper.

Alex King did say, back in November, that he planned to suggest it to the Core developers once WordPress 3.3 shipped, so keep your fingers crossed.

WordPress Post Formats Admin UI [Alex King]

The Star Wars wiki (starwars.wikia.com) is every bit as bad as TV Tropes. Send help!

— Matt Harzewski (@redwall_hp) December 19, 2011

The latest version of my Tweetable plugin, version 1.2.4, includes support for Twitter’s new embedding API, which enables you to do that with minimal effort. If you have the plugin installed (and “Auto-embeds” is turned on in the Media page of your Settings), you can just paste a properly-formatted URL from Twitter onto a new line in your post. After you hit Publish, it will appear in your post, thanks to the magic of oEmbed.

The best part? This is going to be built-in to WordPress 3.4, so you have ensured forward-compatibility. Otto, one of the major contributors to the WordPress core, has already worked up a patch and it is currently slated to be included in version 3.4. Beat me to it.

Not everything in wp_options has a corresponding UI, though. What if you had reason to modify an API key a plugin is storing, but the plugin doesn’t give you a UI option to update it? Or maybe some information is being cached and you need to blast it out while you’re working on a new theme.

WordPress actually has a page where you can see everything in wp_options, as well as edit the values. (You can’t mess with serialized data, though. You would need to use open phpMyAdmin for that.) You can access it by visiting the following URL, replacing example.org with your own domain, of course:

http://example.org/wp-admin/options.php

Obviously, you should be careful with this. You could break some things in your WordPress installation if you don’t know what you’re doing. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, you should probably not be messing around with the values…

This is one of our biggest release to date and it’s absolutely free. WooCommerce is an all-new plugin application and library of integrated themes for WordPress that help individuals and businesses turn their sites into professional, e-commerce stores. Our aim for WooCommerce is to be an e-commerce toolkit that allows anyone to sell anything online. View the WooCommerce page to see all the powerful features packed into the plugin.

WooCommerce is a fork of the lesser-known Jigoshop plugin, with a bunch of nice additions. This has been the cause of some controversy about the “ethics” behind the decision, despite it being 100% legal under the GPL. Personally, I can see merits to both sides of the argument, but I think it should encourage competition. The Jigoshop team should be able to absorb some of the improvements WooThemes made to their fork back into Jigoshop as well.

How do you make one of those?

If you don’t mind making your own from scratch, Michael from Pro Blog Design has a great tutorial. His floating box looks nice, moves smoothly and is very customizable, since you’re adding it directly to your theme.

If you need a plugin, Sharebar and Digg Digg both create a similar result with much less effort, but they don’t look quite as nice.

I discovered this by accident when I was leaving a Facebook API example for a commentator, and posted a code snippet that included the <script> tag referencing http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1. To my surprise, a Facebook Comments widget appeared within my comment!

I did some testing with a fresh WordPress installation and ensured that it wasn’t related to any of my own customizations or installed plugins, and that only high-ranking user accounts could do it.

This could potentially be a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability, as a user with Editor privileges could conceivably “go rogue” and post malicious JavaScript in comment threads. This could be used for any number of nefarious things, such as injecting a malware loader into the page or inserting spam links.

So I did some digging, wondering whether I should report the issue to the core developers, and found this:

Users with Administrator or Editor privileges are allowed to publish unfiltered HTML in post titles, post content, and comments. WordPress is, after all, a publishing tool, and people need to be able to include whatever markup they need to communicate. Users with lesser privileges are not allowed to post unfiltered content.

[...] Regardless, an Administrator has wide-ranging super powers among which unfiltered HTML is a lesser one.

In WordPress multisite, only super administrators can publish unfiltered HTML, as all other users are considered untrusted.

It makes sense that Administrators be able to do that, as they have unfettered control over everything else. (And there are probably some cool things you could do by inserting JavaScript into your comments, like placing polls without having to use a plugin.)

So, the lesson here is to be cautious with who you assign Editor privileges to. If you don’t trust them, don’t give them an Editor account. Besides, a rogue Editor could play havoc on posts and comments even without being able to paste-in malicious code.

So now that the core contributors got rid of my convenient quick-access to my scheduled posts and cache settings, I decided to hack together a makeshift replacement. I noticed that the Profile and Log Out links had been rolled into a new User Info menu (a.k.a. the “Howdy Menu”) and set about looking through the WordPress API for a suitable hook. After finding the right one, I set about writing a little bit of code…

add_filter('admin_user_info_links', 'wsc_add_custom_user_links');

function wsc_add_custom_user_links($links) {
    $links[] = '<a href="options-general.php?page=wpsupercache&tab=easy">Cache</a>';
    $links[] = '<a href="edit.php?post_status=future&post_type=post">Scheduled</a>';
    $links[] = '<a href="http://example.org">Another link</a>';
    return $links;
}

Here’s the part where I laughed maniacally about thwarting Matt Mullenweg’s scheme to lower blogging productivity.

You can plunk this code snippet down in your theme’s functions.php file, adding or removing links as you wish. It’s not as elegant as the favorite actions menu, and its a bit narrower. So you will need to watch the character length of your link text, unless you want some ugly word-wrapping to happen. I imagine you could improve it by hooking in a new CSS file with some modifications, but that’s a bit more than a 10-minute fix.

There you have it. You can add your own links to the User Info menu in WordPress 3.2 in place of the favorite actions menu.

It has been a minor annoyance for me, since I get a few every week and have to manually remove them.

Fortunately, Jeff Starr (of Digging into WordPress fame) has come up with a solution. Apparently you can put Unicode characters into the WordPress comment blacklist…which of course would include Cyrillic characters. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that to begin with, it’s so simple.

Anyway, his post includes several characters you can copy and paste into your blacklist.

10 Characters for Your WordPress Blacklist [Perishable Press]

If you’re a reader of WPTavern, you’ll be happy to learn that an undisclosed buyer has acquired the site under the stipulation that Jeff continue to be at the helm.

I’m happy to report that not only have I sold the content I generated to an awesome buyer, they have requested that I continue about my business with WPTavern, the forum and the podcast as if nothing has happened. The only distinct change that has happened and will be the only thing to happen for the foreseeable future is that the site will be owned by someone else. I am in charge of maintaining and operating the site as I normally would. At the request of the new owner, the terms of the deal as well as who the new owner is is under wraps.

Another part of the deal, there will no longer be display advertising on WPTavern…though perhaps we’ll be seeing some from the new owner in the future?

Digging into WordPress has a neat guide to doing this yourself in WordPress, if you don’t mind editing your theme files and working with a bit of PHP.

…the key difference between the two types of posts: regular post titles link to the single-view of the post, but Link post titles link to the URL of an external resource (i.e., whatever awesome thing you’re sharing with your visitors). This makes it super-easy to share links via true “Tumblr-style” Link posts.

I really like the idea of Daring Fireball-style link posts, though they aren’t necessary an ideal feature for every blog. They would be great for niche news blogs, for referring people to stories broken by another website, without writing a fluff piece that doesn’t really add to the story.

Tumblr Links with Post Formats [Digging into WordPress]