This week marks the release of a new WordPress book named “Digging Into WordPress” by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr.

Digging into WordPress

I had the opportunity to catch up with Chris this week and he has been kind enough to offer a PDF version of the book for us to giveaway here at WordPress Vibe. Soon to follow will be a hard copy offering of the book with discounts to those who purchase the PDF version.

I reviewed the book this week, and let me tell you, it’s 400 pages of WordPress goodness! A great guide for people new to WordPress all the way to seasoned WordPress junkies that like having a great reference around!

Your Reward

• Digging Into WordPress

The book is jam packed with nine chapters ranging from WordPress installation, to theme creation, to best SEO practices. Here is a breakdown of the chapters:

1. Welcome to WordPress
2. Setting up WordPress
3. Anatomy of a WordPress Theme
4. Theme Design and Development
5. Extending Functionality
6. Working with RSS Feeds
7. Working with Comments
8. Search Engine Optimization
9. Maintaining a Healthy Site

Giveaway Rules

1. Follow @WPVibe on Twitter
2. Subscribe to our RSS Feed
3. Leave a valid email address
4. Leave a comment on WPVibe telling us a bit about what Veterans Day means to you. We would love to hear about those you are honoring today who have served or are currently serving.
5. Tweet this post. (Not Required but recommended)

Thank you to all of our visitors, and those who decide to participate.

We’re leaving this open for a couple day and will announce a lucky winner on Friday.

Thanks to all who serve!

As I sit here and write this post, I am thinking about my experiences from the past 15 years. As a 12 year Navy veteran, Veteran’s Day holds a special place for me.

I had the opportunity to serve with true heros during some very difficult times in our country’s history. In lieu of a simple post, we’ve decided to giveaway a small treat in honor of our military hero’s.

This day isn’t about the conflicts the US has been or is currently involved in. It does not reflect on US foreign policy or any other crazy relationship we have with any of our allies or enemies. Veteran’s Day is a holiday to honor the courage and commitment of those who have served throughout US history!

To all who have served, to those who serve today, and to those who will protect our future, I give you all of my thanks and blessings. Thank you for your service, I truly honor you for your selfless commitment!

For those of you currently in the hotspots around the world, keep your head on a swivel and check 6!

If you’re interested in becoming a WPVibe contributor, we would love to hear from you.

Good luck

Viper’s Video Quicktags (VVQ) plugin tackles this media sharing hurdle, and is flexible with various customizable options based on your video embed needs.

Quick and Easy

It doesn’t get much better from a usability perspective, check out all of the new buttons you get on your post editor, pick your poison.

When you’re ready to embed, click the appropriate video service button and you get a nice simple popup with an area to add the link to the video.

I’ve added a great video from YouTube on how to install VVQ, this will give you a good idea of what it looks like with my custom dimensions.

[youtube width="640" height="510"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzhZODEquc8[/youtube]

General Settings

VVQ not only supports over 10 of your favorite video sites, you’ll get better control of how the video’s display on your site directly from the plugin settings pages. Now that you have a general idea of what it does, and how easy it is to use, lets go over the various custom options you have at your control.

The general settings are straight forward. Listed are the various supported media types and it allows you to define the video dimensions of your choice with a maintain aspect ratio option. You can also add an edit button which you may find helpful.

Lower in the General Settings tab, you will also see that generic video files are supported but will be greeted by a disclaimer and link to a great help page briefly explaining the difficulties of using generic video files due to cross-browser issues. The easy fix is to convert your files to Flash format which is relatively easy to do and also something I would recommend.

Additional Settings

Here are a few more settings, and some advanced features of the VVQ plugin.

You can align the video’s to your liking as well as add specific text to show in your feeds. There is also the option to use Windows Media Player for regular video file playback for Windows users.

The Advanced settings on the Additional Settings tab provides Dynamic QTObject loading and custom CSS to style the video display.

Video Service Settings

Viper’s Video Quicktag plugins has also included seperate settings pages for some of the video services supported by the plugin.

I think the neatest thing in the settings area of VVQ is the preview option. It enables you to specify a video so you can see what it will look like as you customize.

Depending on the service you are using, the settings page allows you to do so some cool things like styling the default player by changing border and fill color or even setting color presets.

Again dependent on the service, you may also have some miscellaneous options like allowing full screen viewing capability and loop video playback.

All of the options will differ dependent on the settings allowed by the video service integration into the plugin.

Viper’s Video QuickTags FAQ’s

Have a question? VVQ has included a good FAQ’s section to help answer your questions.

If you have more questions or need further support, make sure to visit the VVQ Support Forum.

What’s Our Vibe

VVQ does a great job of making life easier when adding video to your WordPress site. It will definitely save you time and effort, and best of all, it is flexible and customizable.

Make sure to visit viper007bond.com for more information. Drop a comment and let them know how much you enjoy their great resource, I know you will

Download link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/vipers-video-quicktags.zip

Do you have more to add, did I miss something? Make sure to leave your comments and let us know what you think.

If you’re interested in contributing to WordPress Vibe, make sure to visit out Contributors page and get in touch.

These bug hunts are a great opportunity for the community to get involved with development and testing of WordPress core. If you are interested in getting involved, take a visit to the WordPress Trac site.

The idea with release bug hunts is to get more eyes on core code, the more the merrier I say! It definitely helps to have larger numbers reviewing changes in a new release, more specifically to test patches, help fix known issues, and find new ones.

Here are the scheduled dates for the bug hunts:

• Thursday through Saturday, November 5-7, 2009
• Saturday through Monday, November 14-16, 2009

For those of you attending WordCamp New York, there will be a special hacking room set up where you can join two of the core developers, Mark Jaquith and Matt Martz.

So there you have it, 2.9 is almost here and WordPress continues to grow. Join in on the fun and become a part of the culture.

For more information like IRC info and testing environment links, visit the original bug hunt announcement post on WordPress.org.

Already, plugin authors can use the option of “this plugin is compatible up to X version of WordPress,” so why would Automattic want to crowd-source plugin compatibility? I believe they added this bit because so often, a plugin is still functional for the most recent version of WordPress even though the plugin author has not updated the plugin to reflect that.

I really think this is a great function for the site because it will help people be able to trust plugins, not forcing them to decide whether or not it’s safe to use for the current version of WordPress.

What’s great about this new compatibility box is that it’s not just for the most recent version of WordPress. It lets you choose your setup, for whatever version you are using, whether it be 2.3, 2.5, or bleeding edge 2.9-rare (expected to be released next month), you can more easily see if the plugin is working for other people.

This kind of crowd-sourced system is great as it helps build credibility to the plugin repository.

There are still a number of other things that I would like to see happen with the plugin repository, but you’ll hear about that in the coming weeks.

Edit: Mark Jaquith posted an official announcement about it this morning.