Okay, so, Twitter! When all those apps started popping up using the Twitter API, things like automatically following anyone who followed you and sending an automatic Direct Message seemed like good ideas. We’re all friends, right? Wrong. That auto-follow bit us hard, and the huge amount of spam the account gets means that it’s been nearly impossible to monitor legitimate messages from WordPress users and developers who need to be pointed to a help resource. We’re sorry! Just as we needed to get the Ideas Forum under control* so that it could become a more useful resource for the community, we needed to get rid of the spam clogging our Twitter arteries. Except there was no easy way to do it.

We had wound up following over 50,000 people. If someone went to the @WordPress profile page on Twitter to see the stream of updates from people we followed, almost none of it had anything to do with WordPress or the community. Diet pills, Twitter scams, and multi-posted spam messages were the norm. Yuck! Who else wishes there was Akismet for Twitter? Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to clear this stuff out quickly (mass unfollows trigger their TOS alert, so it’s not surprising). I even contacted Twitter directly to see what the options might be, and it was suggested we use a script to clear the account. To be clear: Twitter flagged our account so that when the script was run they wouldn’t mark us as spammers for violating the TOS with a mass unfollow. We communicated with them beforehand, and the use of scripts to do this is not encouraged. Twitter was doing us a nice favor to help us get our house in order. Thanks, Twitter! Last night I ran the script and removed everyone. Extreme, but in good cause, right?

We’re now starting to re-follow real people from the WordPress community. There will be no more auto-follow. If you are a WordPress developer, designer, blogger, fan site, whatever — and think your tweets should appear in the @WordPress updates stream, then send an @ reply to us and we can add you to the new list (assuming you’re not hawking diet pills, free iPads or ways to get a million followers). This way, people who are new to WordPress and go to check us out on Twitter will (hopefully) get a sense of the vibrant community that we have. People who send @ messages to us won’t (hopefully) wonder indefinitely why they were ignored, because without all the spam, maybe we can use Twitter as it was intended to be used, as another channel of communication.

And for anyone who uses Qwitter and thinks @WordPress stopped loving them because of the last tweet they posted before the script ran… sorry! It wasn’t like that, we swear! It would be nice if the script could have done a bulk DM before the removal, but nope (otherwise we’d have included a message about this). So trust us, we still like you! And if you haven’t already been re-followed, please don’t take it personally… just send an @reply to @WordPress (tell us how you use WordPress!) and we’ll try to get you re-added soon. Later today (hopefully) you’ll find out what’s been keeping us so busy!

*Have you noticed? We cleared out thousands of old threads, added categorization, and will try to keep it to under a hundred open idea threads at a time so that they can be managed in a timely fashion. Check it out and rate some of the new ideas today!

style.css: CSS (style sheet) file
index.php: Home Templates
archive.php: Archive / Category Templates
404.php: Not Found error page template
comments.php: Message / Reply Template
footer.php: Footer Template
header.php: Header templates
sidebar.php: Sidebar template
page.php: content pages (Page) templates
single.php: page content (Post) template
searchform.php: template search form
search.php: search results template
Of course, specific to a particular section of a template, might have been more than these documents, but generally speaking, these documents are necessary for each template.

Tag to determine the basic conditions for
is_home (): whether to Home
is_single (): whether the content pages (Post)
is_page (): whether the content pages (Page)
is_category (): whether the Category / Archive Page
is_tag (): whether or not to Tag Archive pages
is_date (): whether the archive page for the specified date
is_year (): whether the archive page for the specified year
is_month (): whether or not to designate the month archive page
is_day (): whether or not for a specific day archive page
is_time (): whether the archive page for a specified period of time
is_archive (): whether or not to archive page
is_search (): whether the search results page
is_404 (): whether the “HTTP 404: Not Found” error page
is_paged (): Home / Category / Archive Page is a multi-page display
Header part of the PHP function used to
: blog name (Title)
: CSS file path
: PingBack Url
: template file path
: WordPress version
: Atom Url
: RSS 2.o Url
: blog Url
: the type of blog page Html
: blog page coding
: blog description
: page-specific content (Post / Page) of the title
PHP template commonly used functions and commands
: Call Header Template
: call Sidebar template
: call Footer Template
: display the contents of (Post / Page)
: check the existence of Post / Page
: If there Post / Page will be displayed
: While the end of
: If the end of
: show time, time format from “string” parameter determines the specific reference to PHP Manual
: the body of the message link. If you use comments_popup_script (), the message will open in a new window, on the contrary, in the current window
: page content (Post / Page) title
: page content (Post / Page) Url
: page-specific content (Post / Page) owned Category
: author
: page-specific content (Post / Page) ID
: If the user has to log in and have permission to show the Edit link
: display the link in the Blogroll
: Call Message / Reply Template
: Showing Page List
: display the list of Categories
: under an article link
: on an article link
: Calendar
: display the contents of archive
: navigation, display a / under the link to an article
: embedded in other documents, for customizable templates, or other type of document
Template associated with the other function
: output the corresponding information
: display the registration link
: show the logon / logoff link
: the content of the current page
: the content of the current cut-off in order to not be home / directory page displays the entire contents of
: page load time (seconds)
: page load queries

WordPress Lifestream Theme – Agregado

Agregado is a free WordPress “lifestream” theme designed by Darren Hoyt, author of the very popular Mimbo theme. This theme is designed to have a personal feel. It aggregates your Twitter, Delicious, and Flickr account data and publishes it in one convenient place. Available on the release page (linked above) is the PSD of the design.