Top 30 Wordpress Plugins that are actually useful!

The amount of Wordpress Plugins available for download are endless, to sift through them and find one or two that you can actually use can be horrendous. Quite often you can find, like a Flickr Plugins, hundreds that do the same function. Others are far too complicated for the designer as well as the user to be useable. Some are even just pointless, and use up design space. How do you test all of them? Do you rely on word of mouth? Do you ask someone to write a plugin for your tailored needs?

Link:
http://speckyboy.com/...

10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress

The administration area of a Web application is a favorite target of hackers and thus particularly well protected. The same goes for WordPress: when creating a blog, the system creates an administrative user with a perfectly secure password and blocks public access to the settings area with a log-in page. This is the cornerstone of its protection. Let’s dig deeper!

This article focuses on defending the administration area of WordPress, meaning all those pages in the wp-admin folder (or http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/) that are displayed after a user a verified. We bolded the phrase “after a user is verified” deliberately: it should be explicitly understood that only a simple query stands in the way of an evil hacker and the powerful admin area of your whole blog. The latter is only as strong as the passwords that are generated.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

Get a forum on a Wordpress blog with bbPress

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.

bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. We’re focused on keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add on features through our extensive plugin system.

Link:
http://bbpress.org/

Notable software releases

WordPress 2.7 "Coltrane":
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

Google Chrome 1.0:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-chrome-beta.html