Called CheezCap, it’s a simple library for easily creating custom admin panels.

Cheezburger Network uses a single shared theme across all their sites. In order to avoid having to create conditionals and other per-blog modifications in their theme, they developed CheezCap. Any of the administrators can update the options controlling the layout, design, colors, etc, without having to dig into the theme code.

When asked what motivates his engineering team to participate in the WordPress community, CTO Scott Porad replied:

I can say without hesitation that WordPress has had a hand in the success of Cheezburger. So, to the extent that we can help other people be successful with WordPress, we’re on board!

What I meant to say is… All aboard the WordPress Express! Choo Choo!

How easy is it to use?

Find the good stuff. There are tons of insightful comments that get lost in a sea of white-noise. You can help your readers find valuable comments with a rating mechanism like comment voting to sort the good stuff to the top. Anything that can help you determine the commenter’s reputation and credibility will help you get a quick overview of which comments are worth your time.

Stay organized and involved. Organization makes for better debates. With comment threading your replies will appear in just the right spot instead of at the bottom of a long, long list of comments. Email notifications for new comments and the ability to respond to comments via email, keep your commenters involved and they won’t miss a beat.

Are your comments social?

Know who you’re talking with. When your readers know their fellow commenters, they will automatically become more engaged.  Profiles, avatars, user descriptions, comment history, and Twitter integration makes it easy to get to know one-another.  Here’s an excellent example of a commenter profile.

Lower the barrier to participation. Tie in their existing profiles from WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook, so all they have to do is type their comment and hit submit. And it’s all about sharing, so you should also give your commenters a way to share their comments on Twitter and Facebook.

How easy is it to manage?

Moderation, moderation, moderation! A commenting solution with hardcore spam and moderation filters will help you manage your comments easily and keep it all in good order. Different admin privileges are helpful for assigning additional moderators to help manage your account.

Crowdsource it! Give your readers the ability to report abusive comments. Having the option to set filters to automatically remove problematic posts will let your readers help you keep the conversation classy.

Performance is key! Managing high comment volume can be a burden on your servers, especially if your traffic and comments are just starting to take off.  Hosted commenting solutions are a great way to alleviate the pain, so you can focus on more important things like your next post.

We offer a super-charged comment system called IntenseDebate that can be used on any website. We’ve identified and developed loads of features to increase comment activity, along with new ways to efficiently manage your comments. As a hosted commenting solution, IntenseDebate can help you optimize your site’s performance so your servers don’t have to do any heavy lifting when it comes to your comments. The features described above are just a few of the ways IntenseDebate can improve the discussion on your site, and we’re constantly working to bring more features into the mix.

To learn more about IntenseDebate have a look at the video below, check out IntenseDebate.com, or email me at michael@intensedebate.com.

VIP Services: Hosting and Support
From the team that runs WordPress.com, at Automattic, we also offer VIP Services in the form of Hosting and Support. We’ve worked with more hosts than you can imagine, and in our opinion, the companies in our hosting directory represent some of the best and the brightest of the hosting world. If you’re a publisher with significant amounts of monthly traffic, VIP Hosting by WordPress.com is another option for your hosting needs. If you’d prefer to run WordPress on your own servers, but want some extra optimization, streamlining, or security help to future-proof your site for the traffic to come, you’ll want VIP Support.

CodePoet
CodePoet is a shortlist of WordPress consultants brought to you by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. As the world’s largest operator of WordPress blogs (over 16 million and counting), we receive a steady stream of requests from people looking for WordPress savvy web design and software development firms. In response we’ve started CodePoet, a directory of consultants who specialize in building beautiful and efficient WordPress sites.

Details about the beta and how to get involved in this Open Source project are available on the blackberry.wordpress.org site.

Below is also a quick video overview of the app:

[ Visit blackberry.wordpress.org ]

Utilizing the WP e-Commerce plugin, this beautifully designed site allows for the downloading of free icons and the purchasing of paid ones as well.

[ Visit IconDock ]

• Pressing j moves the current selection (light-blue background) down.
• Pressing k moves the current selection (light-blue background) up.
• Pressing a approves the currently selected comment.
• Pressing s marks the current comment as spam.
• Pressing d deletes the current comment.

For any site that regularly receives dozens or even hundreds of comments per post, this new feature can dramatically speed up the comment moderation process.

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer on the WordPress project, put together a screencast to show how this new feature works:

[ Keyboard Shortcuts on WordPress Codex ]

Open Source and compatible with iPhone 3G, iPhone, and iPod Touch, this App works with WordPress.com and self-installed WordPress version 2.5.1 or higher.

Here is a quick video walk-through of the app:

As Matt points out in a recent post, with each new version of WordPress it has become easier to be notified of updates, new plugins, and in WordPress 2.5 there is even a one-click auto-update feature for plugins.

In addition, one-click updating of the core WordPress software is something that’s being actively tackled for future versions of WordPress.

So what’s the best way to update your WordPress ? Matt has a good summary:

Upgrade your blog to the latest WP. This shouldn’t be hard. There are plugins for it, if you’re techy use Subversion, there is the standard FTP method, and finally Media Temple, Dreamhost, and Bluehost (through SimpleScripts) all have been pretty good about having their one-click upgrade systems ready with new versions within a day or two of a release. If your host is chronically behind, vote with your wallet and switch.

• If you need someone to help you upgrade, consider hiring help on the wp-pro mailing list. (It has close to a thousand subscribers and consultants on it.) Or you could always ply a geeky friend with caffeine, libations, food, or gadgets. Just get them to setup a system lik the above so you can do it yourself next time.

Change your passwords, for yourself and any other users you have on the system. If the attacker grabbed your password when you were on an old version, they can still log in after you’ve upgraded if you don’t change it. There’s a new password strength meter in 2.5 helps you pick a good password.

Search through your posts for any that might have been modified, and comb through the directories on your web server looking for anything out of the ordinary. Your host may be able to help you with the latter.

And big picture, if maintaining and upgrading doesn’t sound like something that your organization wants to tackle and you are hosting your blogs on your own infrastructure, consider hosting with a provider that offers one-click upgrades ( we list a few here ) or hosting on WordPress.com VIP.

[ via Photomatt ]

One consistent piece of feedback we’ve received from publishers, is that it can be difficult and time consuming to remember the exact steps that each video site requires to embed a video — as they all have slightly different methods and formats.

To make this video embedding process easier a company by the name of Vodpod introduced a “Post to WordPress” browser tool that works with hundreds of video sites and makes it easy to grab a video and publish it to your WordPress blog.

With support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Camino – the Vodpod tool works within your browser and is compatible with both WordPress.com and self-installed WordPress.

From the Vodpod help page:

When you see a video you want to post to your blog, just click the WordPress logo button. It should automatically grab the embed code (this works for sites like YouTube and 100s of other video sharing sites).

You can grab the free Vodpod browser tool here, and read the help documentation here.

Prologue is a way for “each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.”

As you can see from the screenshot below and by clicking through to the Prologue demo it’s all about helping teams of people communicate and collaborate in an efficient manner — similar to Twitter but with a focus on groups.

For publishers looking to deploy this kind of tool, Prologue is very easy to use.  Like other themes for WordPress, you can install this on WordPress.com with a single click in your “Presentation” tab, or quickly add it to your themes directory for self-installed WordPress.

And since Prologue is a theme,  it leverage the power of WordPress to provide user management, privacy settings, RSS feeds, Gravatar, and more.