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WordPress Apps for LinkedIn

We can add WordPress application for LinkedIn now.

With the WordPress App, you can sync your WordPress blog posts with your LinkedIn profile, keeping everyone you know in the know. Once added, you can filter your posts with a special LinkedIn tag and even display your personal WordPress Gravatar (global avatar). Updates are automatically sent to your network for instant notifications and gratification. (WordPress Apps details)

This application is available for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress.

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General

WordPress 2.6 Features

The coming WordPress 2.6 (scheduled to be released on August 7th, 2008, or July 7th, 2008) will have more features. Most of you probably heard that about the probably-most-well-known Post Revisions feature. But, there are some other features that should be highlighted. Here are some of them I find (using WordPress from SVN, revision 8094):
Post Revisions
WP 2.6: Post Revisions
Using this, our WordPress will save a copy of our post everytime you edit it. We can take benefit when we want to revert our post. We can also compare or show diffs from two revisions. Wiki users should be familiar with this. This Post Revisions feature will be shipped and activated by default. If we think that we do not need this, we can deactivate it easily. Just add define('WP_POST_REVISIONS','0'); in our configuration file (wp-config.php). More info about Post Revisions.
Google Gears supports
WP 2.6: Google Gears support
Description from ticket #6965 tells about this:

First run. Support for Google Gears managed offline storage. The patch adds all static files used in the admin interface to a single offline storage. That speeds up page loading a lot, as it serves virtually all requests for static files from the computer’s HD instead of the network. So instead of 50-60 requests to the server on some pages, there are only 2-3.

There will be a new small link on the top-right navigation. It says “Speed up!“. Learn more about Google Gears.

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General

Handling error when WordPress plugin functions are not available

When we build a WordPress theme, sometime we need want to add more features using WordPress plugin. For example, we want to display commenter’s avatar from Gravatar service. Because we (as the theme creator) want to make our theme can handle Gravatar plugin by default, we directly put plugin function inside our theme file — to be more spesific inside comments.php.
If we share our theme (someone uses our theme), and his/her WordPress installation does not have Gravatar plugin installed, the theme might be broken. There will be an error. Single page (where the gravatar/comment should appear) will stop loading. Why? Because there is a gravatar plugin tag/function, but the plugin is not available.

Another thing, you downloaded a free theme, and you want to add gravatar function by yourself. So, you downloaded the Gravatar plugin, put plugin tag, and voila! All works. But when this plugin is deactivated (probably when you upgrade your WordPress installation) and you forgot to activate it again, your theme might nor working well. So, what’s the solution? It’s pretty simple: use the conditional tags. Okey, we’ll use Gravatar plugin as the example.