Fernando comes up with a new plugin to display “Comments Off” when comments are disabled, and the regular comments link when they are not disabled. It’s all at Dumb Comments Link Plugin - go take a look, use it and spread the word!

He says :

What is a person who is new to PHP to do when they have a vision for WordPress, but lack the skills to accomplish it? Keep trying until they are on the verge of destroying their computer, of course!

Right on! Fernando, that’s the spirit.

Gnuker invites you to try out the free wordpress weblogs before deciding to use their free hosted service.
blogs.gnuker.com seems to be ad free (now, seems like it is not), and the installation comes with some plugins pre-installed. You get :

50 meg disk space
1 gig transfer/bandwidth
1 Database
1 Email Address
(Space and Bandwidth can be adjusted - Terms Apply - Other plans available for domain name owners)

Ali’s Thumb-in-post plugin allows you to include some fancy tag+info and the GD library to create thumbnails for a picture, when the thumbnails does not already exist.
<thumb>fullsizeimage.jpg?cap=This is a caption.</thumb>
in your post will create a thumbnail of fullsizeimage.jpg complete with the caption “This is a caption”.
It resizes gifs, jpegs and pngs, as it uses GD (GD’s resizing looks kind of ugly at times, I should say). I do not know if lets you decide the size of the resized image.
Neat, eh?

Neil Turner makes a few templates and shares them.

Stephanie writes a how to convert mysql database contents to utf-8, but in general this method of using iconv should work for most char encoding conversions. It was awfully nice of her to write it all down, me thinks.

I should have said “Tutorials”, ’cause there’s two parts to this one by Chris.

1. Part 1
2. Part 2

He does a good job of explaining things, and though the article is long, I think it explains what is a non-trivial task to the proper level to detail.

Blogthing offers free, hosted WP blogs. I guess the google ads on the blogs will pay for them.
Jamie explains more.

Scott Yang’s syntax highlight plugin, uses GNU Enscript to highlight code from a variety of languages, including, of course, php. Now you can display your code-fu in technicolor.

About.com has a few people taking an active interest in wordpress.

There’s a WordPress plugins and hacks page, and Sheila seems to be happy with PictPress

Randy Peterman has written a two-part article on how to write wordpress plugins.

1. Part 1
2. Part 2

He is the author of Stattraq a plugin + hack to analyze the visit statistics of wordpress blogs.

Xmouse finds a new way to display code snippets using xml, and a plugin.

It displays code snippets as an ordered list, and with some fancy css styling you have a pretty good looking code snippet

Chinwags writes about MT’s upcoming 3.1 and says:

That’s all I managed to squeeze out of him about the dynamic templating before I had to leave sad But I’m very excited about MT becoming dynamic. Unlike Wordpress, I think there will be the flexibility there always has been where you can create different archive templates (a feature I felt greatly lacking in WP)

Well, that’s not true, WordPress lets you create as many “templates” as you want.

The WP FAQ is an example. I use three different templates there, the default, a sorted archive, and a list of categories.

Much more is possible, in fact there is no limit to the different templates you can have with WordPress.

You can get more smileys for your wordpress installation at the following sites (besides others)

1. RogotWorld
2. Jason’s smiley collection

Add the new smileys to wp-images/smilies and then add new “text shortcuts” to smilies (like

) in wp-includes/vars.php.