It generates a random validation text and renders it in an image obfuscated with some lines.
The generated image is stored in a given directory and the text is stored in a session variable for posterior validation.
Two more new photo and graphics editing software have been added to the Free Drawing and Painting Software, Image and Photo Editing Programs page. The new image/photo editors boasts a large number of features that make it easy for you to create, edit or touch up your pictures. There are now 10 free picture editors listed on that page, as well as 3 free 3D Content Creation programs. Who said that there's no such thing as a free lunch?
Check them out now.
It can search and replace for marks and replace them by variable values.
The class also supports section delimiting marks to evaluating loops, and conditional sections.
It takes an array of data and generates an HTML table of a given number of the columns, filling the cells with the array data.
The class returns the generated HTML table as single string.
A new editor has been added to the Free HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors page. CodeLobster PHP Edition is a code editor for PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS and it has numerous facilities to make it easy to work on such code. It has autocompletion facilities for PHP, JavaScript, SQL, HTML and CSS, a PHP debugger, class view, project management, syntax highlighting, context sensitive help, browser preview, and so on.
If hand-coding in HTML is not your cup of tea, and you prefer to use a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) web editor, take a look at the other editors listed on the Free Web Editors page.
Google has announced the successful applicants for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, and WordPress is lucky enough to have eight students allotted to our open source project. It was a tough choice, since we had almost 60 applications to choose from. We’d like to thank all the students who applied, and we’re sorry we couldn’t take on more of you.
Developers, if you see these bright young things in the dev channel, please be your usual friendly, helpful selves. 
Everyone else, wish our students luck with their projects this summer, which promise to be challenging but awesome. Without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce the GSoC projects (in no particular order) and the students tackling them.
Justin Shreve, Extended WordPress Search Engine. Justin will be mentored by Andy Skelton. One of the complaints I hear over and over again is about the search engine, so this could have great benefit to WordPress core.
Rudolf Cheuk Sang Lai, Adding Photo Grouping by Album Functionality. This project will wind up being a piece of a larger media redux project for 2.9/3.0. Mark Jaquith is mentoring, and Noel Jackson will be a backup mentor.
Daryl Koopersmith, WYSIWYG theme editor/generator. This will allow users to create and edit themes without touching any code. Beau Lebens is the mentor on this project.
Michael Benedict Arul will be working on a similar project. Michael will be mentored by Andrew Ozz, since this project will be using jQuery. It’s our hope that having two students working on this idea separately will foster competition and allow us to compare approaches.
Daniel Larkin, Modified Preorder Tree Traversal (MPTT). Lead Developer Ryan Boren will be his mentor. This is Daniel’s second GSoC working on WordPress.
Diego Caro, a student from Chile, will also work on an MPTT project. Diego will be mentored by Thorsten Ott.
César Rodas, social and text processing algorithms for BuddyPress and MU as related to recommendation engines. Alex Shiels and Andy Peatling will co-mentor this project.
Anthony Cole, Event management with WordPress. Co-organizer of WordCamp Australia and New Zealand, Anthony will be working on a suite of plugins (or maybe just one or two out of a planned set, scope TBD) for event management/attendee networking that will be built on BuddyPress/MU/bbPress. We’ll use wordcamp.org as a test case, and release the final product to the community. Jake Spurlock will be mentoring, with Andy Peatling as backup.
Congratulations, guys*!
*Seriously, we didn’t get more than a couple of applications from female student developers. Where are all the geek girls?
Ever wanted to create a website that you can manage with just your browser, one where you can add galleries, forums, chats, content rating, a site search facility and even a paid membership area and support ticket system, etc? Check out ocPortal, the newest entry that has been added to the Free Content Management Systems (CMS) PHP Scripts page. Do I need to mention that it's free? (So are the other PHP scripts listed on that page, for that matter.)
As promised, here are the results of the 24-hour has-patch marathon that was announced, begun and completed over the course of a few days last week (more on timing after the results). Results include activity from 8am Pacific time on Thursday, April 16, 2009 to 9am Pacific time on Friday, April 17, 2009.
Total number of patches committed to core: 44
Contributors whose old patches were committed: 9
Marathon contributors whose patches were committed: 13
Tickets closed: 102 (breakdown below)
Tickets created: 20 [I guess not everyone got the memo that we were trying to close tickets. ]
Tickets reopened: 4
Number of testers who left comments in ticket threads: 10
Number of testing-specific comments: 18
These numbers are based on opening each ticket that registered activity during the marathon hours and counting the actual comments that indicated some testing of a patch. Contributions to philosophical discussions without a patch, while important, weren’t counted for this purpose. Nor were Trac notices that simply noted a ticket was being closed because it was a dupe, invalid, etc.
Top five contributors (committed patches): Denis-de-Bernardy, filosofo, nbachiyski, scohoust, simonwheatley
Top five testing feedback providers: shanef, Nicholas91, Denis-de-Bernardy, sivel, williamsba, mrmist (tie)
Given the short notice/last-minute nature of the marathon, I think we did pretty well. Granted, there were people who complained that two days wasn’t enough notice to clear their schedules, but let’s be honest, the 24-hour has-patch marathon was more of a rallying cry to help clean out Trac than a deadline based on anything specific. Patches are always welcome/encouraged, and now that the big features for 2.8 are mostly done, the lead devs will be able to spend more time reviewing Trac tickets and patches. Still, not too many people tested existing patches (or if they did, they failed to leave the requisite comment in the ticket threads). Testing patches is one of the easiest things you can do to help further development, since patches won’t be committed or rejected until they’ve been tested by several people.
As we get closer to the 2.8 release, jump into Trac any time and test a few patches (don’t forget to leave the feedback!) if you have time. If there’s a ticket you’re sick of seeing there, write a patch and ask your fellow contributors to test it and comment on the ticket thread. We’ll announce an official bug hunt soon (and yes, there will be more than two days’ notice), but the fact remains that addressing new bugs is easier if Trac isn’t clogged with old tickets. If you spot duplicate tickets, mark it a dupe, note the other ticket number in the comments and close the ticket. If you see one that is no longer relevant because the current code base fixes a problem reported several versions ago, mark it invalid, leave a comment and close the ticket. These simple housekeeping tasks may not seem like much, but they do help. Special props to Denis-de-Bernardy, who in addition to writing a couple of patches during the marathon and testing a few others, did a bunch of ticket maintenance like this, and cleared out a number of tickets.
Thank you to everyone who participated, and until the next marathon, happy patching and testing!
If you're planning to create a panoramic picture, where your image is very wide or very tall, you may find the free software on this new page very useful. These programs automatically stitch together a set of photos or other images to form a larger image that (hopefully) seamlessly combines all the separate pictures. Why manually align photos in your photo editor when you can let these free panorama stitching software do the hard work?
There was an Webthumb outage yesterday, the main server Kernel Panic’d and didn’t reboot properly. DNS was switched to the backup server, and for most users there was no noticable change.
However there was a bit of database skew between the 2 servers so some accounts weren’t available on the backup.
Because of this all webthumb usage on the backup server won’t be charge to your accounts. It also won’t show up in your history so if you need a thumbnail after the cut back please open a ticket and I will grab the files for you.
(You can also grab them directly by replacing http://webthumb.bluga.net with http://api1.bluga.net).
The DNS switch back to the primary server is happening within the hour, let me know if you have any problems.
On an un-related note Bluga.net now has a helpdesk, feel free to use it too notify me of any problems your having.