Over on Om Malik’s Blog, he says that Matt has raised a fair amount of money in his current business venture to further develop wordpress.com (the hosted version of his blogging software) and the related aspects of that business.

As you know we here at htmlfixit dot com are huge fans of wordpress. I don’t personally know either Om or Matt — and probably never will, but I hope that growth doesn’t spoil the open source product I love.

WordPress has long been a favorite software around here. It is open source, it has a great group of users and developers and it is better every time we use it. One of the best new advances has been the addition of WordPress Widgets.

In the original setup, they were added by means of a plug-in to WordPress (2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.4, 2.0.5, 2.0.6, 2.0.7, 2.0.8, 2.0.9, 2.0.10, 2.0.11, 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3). However, the utility of them is so great, that they are now standard fare in WordPress 2.2 and following releases (to date, 2.2, 2.2.1, 2.2.2, 2.2.3, 2.3 and 2.3.1).

Originally the widgets were placed into your directory structure as explained on Autommatic’s How to Use a Widget Page. However, that information and directory structure are no longer accurate. You will now find your WordPress Widgets in a file called widgets.php located here:
…\wordpress\wp-includes\widgets.php.

If you need to modify your widgets, make an addition or otherwise address the default widgets that are included, this is the place.

I found a great article from a guy whose work I have liked and used on several occaisions over the life of WordPress. Once again Meall Dubh explains clearly how to use the built in power of WordPress to pull RSS feeds in.

His code has one typo in the following line:
echo "<li><a xhref=$href>$title</a><br />$description</li>";

Should actually be minus the x or you won’t have good links:
echo "<li><a href=$href>$title</a><br />$description</li>";

Further his code included the description from the feed. In my case I found it helpful to delete that part of the code:
$description = $item['description']; and just use the title and url link.

I was working this up to a widget when I visit a newer install and find that there is an rss feed built into the sidebar widgets. It would appear the lifting is already done, although again I may wish to go modify it.

See it in action at MichFamLaw.com (about Michigan Divorce, Custody, Collaborative Divorce and Divorce Mediation) where the site pulls in the last five posts from DomesticDiversions.com (about the lighter side of marriage, divorce, human relationships and children) and displays them in the right sidebar.

I was having a dickens of a time tonight extracting content from a WordPress install. The template tag the_content() always wraps your content in paragraph tags <p> and this caused me problems as I wanted to substitute <li> tags.

I found a great little plug-in called “Content Extract: Taking control of excerpts in WordPress“. Now granted it didn’t do exactly what I wanted to be sure as it would actually use the excerpt if there was one, but I modified it to my liking by always forcing it to use the actual content, strip the paragraph tags if any were present and then use the content after wrapping it in a set of unordered list tags.

Excellent find.