Plugin Name: Snowfall
Version: 0.9.1 rc1
Plugin URI: wpplugins.info/category/plugins/snowfall/
Description: Snowfall creates the effect of falling snowflakes, leaves, hearts, flowers etc.
Author: Andy Beard
Author URI: www.wpplugins.info

I thought this would be a nice Wordpress plugin to knock together for the holiday season.

It is based on code from DynamicDrive.com thus I had problems with writing a license that comply with the original authors requirements and those of Wordpress which is under GNU GPL.

Release Notes:-

0.9.1 release candidate 1

The code is fully functional on an estimate 50% of themes.

Tested on:-

Wordpress 1.5.2
Wordpress 2.0

Things like this are always fun… a technical challenge

This site’s main theme with a snowman displays perfectly with Firefox 1.5 on my system.

If I use a standard Wordpress Kubrik theme, the snowflakes also display perfectly on IE6

However if I currently test in IE6 running the main theme, you will most likely get falling white squares with a dreaded red “x” in the middle.

If you have any test results, positive or negative, I would love to hear from you.

(Note there are no known browser incompatibility issues other than validation, which I hope to have fixed shortly)

It looks like I have the theme fixed for IE6 now. The site should display correctly with the Snowfall Plugin on both IE6 and Firefox 1.5.

I reinstalled the default theme, and am slowly rebuilding with the customization I had made.

On the Wordpress Support Forum someone had requested a tiling system that would provide an interface for adding page elements.

It wasn’t greeted with a huge amount of enthusiasm, but I know such a system would have saved me a lot of time in tracking down the problem.

I would love to be able to switch theme and have all (or at least most) of my page elements appear on the page.

Watch this space…

With the days getting shorter, the leaves will soon be falling from the trees.

Just a reminder that the snowfall wordpress plugin does come with a graphic for falling leaves (snow1.gif) and I have switched to this effect until the snow begins to fall.

I recently returned from a long offline break, and thus before “starting anew” with my various online activities, including wordpress plugin development, I spent a fair amount of time researching the changes in the fast-paced online world.

Whilst browsing around the Wordpress.org site, I noticed some information regarding the naming of domains with wordpress.

Now it should be noted that this website has been live for over 9 months, and at the time I registered the domain name, I hadn’t seen this reference on the Wordpress.org site

So I started to do some more research on trademarks in general, and in particular the Wordpress trademark status.

Reading the June 14th 2006 IRC Wordpress Meetup gave me a very clear understanding of what I still regard as a not very well documented trademark policy.

[17:18] Something that we were unaware when we started (but seems logical after a bit of thought) was that WordPress is a trademark and that we shouldn’t use it in domain names.

My next step in research was whether Wordpress™ had an application to become a registered trademark.

Off to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website, whete you can perform searches not only on awarded patents and trademarks, but also those that are pending.

There I found the application for the Wordpress Trademark

Defending Trademarks

There is lots of information on the internet regarding defending trademarks, but here are some good case studies news stories to help readers understand.

First up, Linus Torvalds defending the Linux trademark.
Here is a 5 year old quote Linus Torvalds made that was used in the piece.

“Trademark law requires that the trademark owner police the use of the trademark,” Torvalds said in the 2000 posting. “This is nasty, because it means, for example, that a trademark owner has to be shown as caring about even small infringements, because otherwise the really bad guys can use as their defense that ‘Hey, we may have misused it, but look at those other cases that they didn’t go after, they obviously don’t care.’”

Slightly more recently, Robert Scoble was discussing Google lawyers and trademarks. He makes it quite clear that defending trademarks is a perfectly normal thing to do.

Much more recently, Apple has been clamping down on websites that use the word “pod” in all shapes and sizes, including variations such as “podcast” which many feel has become a general term.

General Use

The danger for trademark holders is clear. They have to defend their trademarks, or face the danger of their trademark becoming watered down to the point it can’t be defended even for situations of direct competitors using it to compete against them.

Wordpress Trademark

Back to the issue in hand…

First off, noone from Wordpress has approached me regarding my domain name. I am taking voluntary action, which may also be looked on as preemtive.

I don’t want the Wordpress brand to be diluted by my actions, and I recently explained this to Matt in an email.

Wordpress is a great tool, and I honestly want it to flourish. It is in my financial interests for Wordpress to have a strong trademark, so they can benefit financially from the trademark, and continue to grow.

Wordpress Domain Naming Solutions

Matt suggested to my to use “WP” in the domain name rather than “Wordpress”, as many have done on other sites, such as wp-plugins.net and wpplugins.org .

This is actually the route I have taken, but I have some reservations. Both the above mentioned domains themselves could claim that “wpplugins” (and derivatives thereof) are a trademark.

To this end I have tried to contact Dr Dave who of the 2 above mentioned sites has the most possible “prior claim” to the term “wplugins”.

That being said, I have taken action based upon what I hope will be the final result of a discourse with him, as I am not trying to compete as a database of all wordpress plugins. I might at some time list the ones I like to use on my own blogs, but developing plugins will remain my core focus for this site.

Action list

Register domain and point it to the site
Modify backlinks where I can
Use Google’s webmaster tools to point out to Google that the old domain and the new domain are one and the same, and I want results to show for the new domain. Google do not like duplicate content, and they have provided a way for webmasters to take the initiative to fix the listings themselves.
301 redirects - I am not actually sure if they are needed with the new Google interface, but they will probably be needed for MSN and Yahoo. It should be noted, I didn’t move the site, just pointed a new domain name at it, and changed a lot of options in Wordpress to show the right domain name. I will make the changes after I have had a visit from all the bots.

and of course…

Promote the site (with new domain name)
Create lots more plugins

Action List (for others)

Don’t register domains which include the word “wordpress”. It is bad for the future of Wordpress, which in turn might also affect your own interests/business.

And as a footnote, I haven’t used “™” in reference to Wordpress (or other brands for that matter) throughout this article, i.e. Wordpress™ because honestly I am lazy as I think most people are, but I do acknowledge that Wordpress is a trademark, and is soon to be a registed trademark of Automattic Inc.

I have constant problems with plugins that hook into all my pages.

Whilst some plugin authors have attempted to add some level of “selectivity” to their plugins, so that the plugins only hook into certain types of posts, or certain page slugs, it rarely works on all pages.

Thus you end up switching off all automatic hooks, and placing the function calls manually in each template.

Is there a need for some kind of universal plugin or feature in the core that can be used by all plugin authors to control exactly which pages or posts a plugin is allowed to hook into?

The ultimate aim would be to have a system such that you can switch theme, and not have to make 100s of modifications to your template for simple plugins for bookmarking etc.

Maybe implement it just as a barrier. Have an interface of active plugins, and currently template files, and allow or disallow the plugin to automatically hook into a certain template.

I am not a programmer, I just uncover problems I need solutions for. If I can’t find solutions, I feed them through to my programmers.
Whilst I haven’t looked into this in depth, I have a feeling this would require some form of modification to the core. That is potentially ok for my own sites, but not very suitable for widespread distribution.

It could alternatively be created as an include for future plugin authors to use, but that would require widescale adoption by plugin authors and updates to plugins that already exist, which I feel is a little drastic.

Maybe this is something that is already going to be included in some future version of Widgets, such that maybe you would have multiple “widget templates” that control all code relating to every hook on every template, independant of the templates themselves.

It is possible some of the commercial offerings offer some of this functionality, and if I implemented it, in all honestly it would also have to be a semi-commercial undertaking with some form of pro version for those managing multiple commercial blogs that needed additional functionality.

wordpress wordpress plugins wp pluginswidgetsblog templates

An interesting post by Chris Pirillo

• I’d also like to see a similar WP plugin for Bookmarking the post in the multitude of social engines (on hover, add to del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, etc.). I don’t wanna clutter my posts with hundreds of icons, and I believe this is plugin is also within the realm of possibility.

There are plenty of solutions to this, I will probably do a roundup over on Andybeard.eu soon. None are complete solutions, but that isn’t necessarily the plugin author’s fault.

• What about a plugin that takes incoming search terms and auto-tags the post based on those terms (with or without moderation)? So, if a user searches for KeywordXYZ on Google and ultimately visits one of the blog entries, that blog entry will have the KeywordXYZ added to its tag list (via UTW or something).
• I also need a WP tool that recursively goes through my posts which have not already been tagged, then tag the posts with keywords it finds most appropriate (either through the Yahoo! API or internal logic) - almost like how the Related Posts plugin works against the posts database automatically?

The Yahoo API has some limitations. Using UTWs interface atm, quite often you will receive an error stating that a post was too long for the API to handle.

A good way of handling auto tagging (with a plugin) is using Sean’s alinks plugin. It can also be achieved by using a specialised desktop application for blogging.

Using search for tags is hazardous, as half the terms are long tail.

I am going to try to put together an incompatibility list for both themes and plugins. If you know of a particular problem with a default unmodified theme or plugin, please let me know, and I will add it to the list.

Incompatible Plugins

External Links Plugin 2.1 Will try to find a work around
Google Analytics Another problem with Semiologic plugins (I really hope I can fix this)

Incompatible Themes

Sunset This was the theme Jerry was having problems with.