I’ve been heavily involved with WordPress for a couple years now and it has been fun to watch WordPress grow in popularity. Blogs have started to devote more time to covering WordPress and new blogs specifically focused on WordPress have been sprouting up everywhere. As a result, there is a lot of great work being produced. Here are a few WordPress posts that I really enjoyed:

• Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins - I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing more WordPress plugins designed specifically for CMS functionality.
• 63 Essential WordPress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files, and Cheats - This site was lucky enough to have several posts featured here and there is a bunch of other great works here to look through.
• WPDesigner explains how to style individual posts using the post ID. This is an older post, but one I just discovered and I think it goes a long way towards showing you how to style individual posts. This is a great method to improve specific posts that are important to your blog such as an eBook you released, a download page of some sort, etc.
• Sizlopedia explains how to easily post using the WordPress Bookmarklet. I would guess most people are aware of the bookmarklet, but may not know how to put it to use.
• Another classic post by WPDesigner, this one explains How to Display a WordPress Login Form In Your Sidebar. I’m not sure how many people want to do this, but I suppose for a blog with several regular authors this could be useful towards the bottom of your sidebar where it wouldn’t bother your readers.
• Performancing provides a WordPress hack explaining how to build a photo or movie gallery.   This is something I’ve never really had an interest in doing, but some of you might have.
• Miriam at WordPress Garage explains how to make the WordPress editor stop changing your code.  It has never really bothered me, but I see a lot of people complaining about the code formatting that happens automatically.

So far, today has started out great. In addition to the first round of the NCAA tournament starting off today, I just noticed that Hack WordPress has reached its second milestone. Today is the first time we jumped the 1000 subscriber mark! Here is a quick screen shot I took to remember it by:

As for Hack WordPress news, I am pleased to announce that we have added WordPress forums and a new theme to Hack WordPress. I hope to have the forums stocked with information sometime this weekend. As for the theme change, this is only the first phase. I have a few more features to add, a comment section redesign to work on, and I am going to be adding more color to it in the coming weeks to try to make the theme a little brighter.

If the theme changes look a little familiar, that is because it was based upon Brian Gardner’s Revolution Pro theme. One thing many people don’t realize is that many of these premium WordPress themes are not designed specifically to be installed and activated (although most can be and will work well). They are designed to be used as templates for someone to create their own design. If you dig through Brian’s showcase, you can see tons of examples of people that have taken one of the Revolution designs and adjusted it to fit their needs.

Some things you’ll find now here at Hack WordPress:

• A bigger emphasis on Gravatars - I’ve talked in the past about how I felt it was important to support Gravatars. In addition to finding them with the comments you leave, you’ll now also find them in the recent comments section of the sidebar.
• Recent trackbacks are now displayed - Whenever you send a trackback or pingback to Hack WordPress, it will now be displayed in the sidebar with a link back to your website.
• Better emphasis on categories - In a recent review of Hack WordPress, Ben Cook pointed out a couple things that he felt would improve our site. The first tip was that our archives need more emphasis. Our categories are now at the top and have drop-down’s for any children categories. His other tip will be addressed in phase two of the redesign.

The next phase will include more color and an improved comment section, among other things. In the meantime, if you run into any browser incompatibilities, please let us know. You can also let us know if there are any other improvements you would like to see.

Thanks again for supporting Hack WordPress! The great readership support, comments, and community around this blog makes it so much fun to write for.

For those of you basketball fans out there, tomorrow marks the beginning of the NCAA tournament, which is by far my favorite event of the year.  In addition to enjoying some great basketball, we also get to fill out our brackets.

I know it is late notice, but if you are interested in having a friendly (and free!) competition, I have created the Hack WordPress Challenge, which is hosted by Yahoo.  All you need to sign up is a Yahoo account and the following information:

Group ID: 166922

Password: opensource

You can click here to get signed up.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

If you ever scroll down in your WordPress dashboard, you’ve probably noticed some back and forth over the past week between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Anil Dash, who is the Vice President of Six Apart, which is responsible for Movable Type and Typepad.

So what is this argument all about?  Daily Blog Tips has been tracking the dialogs between the two in their post Movable Type vs. WordPress, showing that things have started to get a little heated.  So which is better?   I’ve never used Movable Type and this blog is dedicated to WordPress, so I don’t feel that I’m qualified to comment.

Have you used both?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

In the past I’ve talked about some great WordPress plugins for backing up your database.   This is a great way to backup your WordPress blog for people that don’t know how to do it manually.   You can also set it up to do your backup automatically, which I find extremely useful because I run several websites that need backed up.

Throughout the past few years I been fortunate to meet a lot of bloggers, and I’ve found that many prefer to avoid plugins as much as possible, or sometimes they are just the kind of people that like to be hands on and learn how to do things themselves.   For these people, Performancing recently posted a Bloggers Guide To Safely Backing Up Your WordPress Site, where they detail the steps you need to take to manually backup your WordPress blog.

As a quick note, if you decide you want to manually backup your WordPress blog, you’ll first need to make sure you have FTP access for your website and the ability to access your Control Panel (CPanel).   From there you will want to follow the steps in Performancing’s guide to create a backup of your posts and a backup of your database.

A lot of times I run across some great posts talking about WordPress, but they don’t always warrant a featured post. Here are a few WordPress related posts I’ve recently enjoyed and hope you will also:

• One Mans Blog explains How to Increase the Number of Comments in the WordPress Editor. This can also easily be covered with a WordPress Greasemonkey Script.
• Michael of WPCandy gives you ideas on where to find WordPress help. In addition to Google search and blogs like this one, there are a lot of great sources out there for WordPress help. People often forget about the WordPress Codex, which I will often reference when writing my posts. There are also some great forums dedicated to WordPress (ours will be up by this weekend hopefully).
• Weblog Tools Collection has taken our post explaining how to separate trackbacks and comments and expanded on it in their post explaining how to manage trackbacks and pingbacks in your WordPress theme.   While it isn’t quite as simple as our instructions, it will give you much more control over how they function and even provides a way to remove trackbacks and pingbacks completely from displaying on your WordPress blog.