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WordPress is an excellent software that can run your website (blog or not). It's packed with excellent features, and is so flexible that it can really do anything you want, and it has a wealth of online resources. Additionally, it's super easy-to-use, and you need no special skills or prior experience to use it. Last but not least, it is free! Writing a widget bears some similarities to writing a plugin, but in some ways it's easier because there is a widget class that you can leverage for some of the functionality. In this article by April Hodge Silver, author of WordPress 3 Complete, we will learn to write a widget in WordPress 3.

Lately, I’ve been hearing system administrators and managers ask about solutions to keep people from accidentally removing their data. These are very smart and dedicated people asking for a solution so that data isn’t lost either by accident or on purpose. A wild idea I’ve heard to solve the problem is getting rid of user access to the rm command. Is this truly a crazy idea?

For years its been said that Blizzard has developed a Linux client for its very popular World of Warcraft MMORPG game but that it's never been publicly released. It turns out that this appears to still be the case that internally they have a Linux build of World of Warcraft but as of yet they have decided against releasing it to the public.

As requested by many of our readers, here is a video showing the latest GNOME Shell daily build (as of January 24th, 2011). There have been many changes to Gnome Shell since our last video, including the overview relayout (which is default for some time), notification changes, side-by-side tiling as well a functional notification area and many other changes.

The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the 'fathers of the internet', having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.

These days, the combination of CrossOver and all the hard work of our Advocates is amazing. Within 5 minutes, or less, you can easily download and install CrossOver and your favorite Windows application. But you don't have to buy, install, or hassle with Windows.

Kernel version 2.6.38 supports AMD's new Fusion CPUs and offers 2D and 3D acceleration with many current GeForce and Radeon graphics cards. Power economy for the graphics cores in Intel processors and chip-sets has been improved; new page flipping features aim to eradicate image flickering, tearing and incomplete rendering issues.

LXer Feature: 26-Jan-2011

In this extension of his two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) goes into detail comparing the functions of Konquerer and Dolphin and along the way discovers that he might actually keep Dolphin as his file manager.

The Document Foundation launched the first stable version of its open source LibreOffice productivity suite, following a breakaway from OpenOffice.org and Oracle's control. Due for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.04, among other Linux distros, LibreOffice 3.3 is a bit leaner than OpenOffice, and aims to get more so in the future to support mobile devices, says the group.

A popular Oracle-controlled open-source project faces a forking after the software giant reiterated that it will restrict what coders can change. Oracle has said that open sourcers are free to extend Project Hudson, the software-build and monitoring service it inherited from Sun Microsystems. They can add as many plug-ins as they like to the core code, and they don't have to contribute the plug-ins back to the community. But if they build such plug-ins, they'll have to give their code another name.

The Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) architecture is one of the most popular choices for web server architectures in use today. Author John Mertic examines five things every LAMP application should take advantage of for optimum performance.

ZDNet ran an article titled "Happy Birthday, Macintosh" yesterday, and I clicked, somehow thinking it would be a significant birthday. Nope. It's No. 27. Not 30, which we'll all be enjoying in three years' time. But just as I turned from Macintosh to Unix in the 1980s, I do as much of my computing as I can these days in Linux.

Saline OS 1.0 has been released. Saline is a new Linux distribution based on Debian Squeeze with the main purpose of bringing some of the things users' might want that doesn't fit in with Debian Open Source philosophy. It uses Xfce for the desktop, making it light weight enough for some older machines and netbooks while still bringing modern amenities.

While the LibreOffice project is a fork of Oracle's Open Office, Meeks also noted that the door remains open for Oracle to become part of the effort. "I think that there is a very real and sincere offer for them to join the community, the only blocker is Oracle," he said. "They could become a leading light in the LibreOffice community. We'd love that. We'd love to have Oracle. This is not attempt to attack them, this an attempt to do something better."

Here comes even more movies and short films made using Blender for visual effects. For starters, Blender is a free and open source 3D content creation application. If you have seen the brilliant collection of Blender made videos we have featured here before, you probably don't need any more lecturing on the abilities of this incredible open source tool called Blender.

A quick look at Dreamlinux 3.5 GNOME. Dreamlinux has been requested a number of times since the blog launched, and this week I’ve finally gotten around to taking a peek at it. Dreamlinux is based on Debian and it comes with Xfce or GNOME as the default desktop. I picked the GNOME version for this quick look.

The TLF is interested in having someone talk about Koha during the 2011 event. Texas Linux Fest will kick off on the 2nd of April and run through the weekend. Here are some important dates you might find useful.

Gray beard Bell Labs scientists and Unix operating system co-creators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications. Ritchie worked at Bell Labs (in its many incarnations) until he retired in 2007. Thompson held positions at Bell Labs as well as at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Sydney and is currently a distinguished engineer at search engine behemoth Google. Ritchie was the primary creator of the C programming language, arguably the most popular and cursed-at programming language in the history of the world.

Cisco is expanding its push to attract more small business professionals to its networking gear. This week Cisco announced a new set of 200-series switches and a new Linux powered router platform that adds several big-business features tailored for the needs of small business.

Starting with version 11.04 alpha 2 (to be released on February 3rd), Xubuntu will use a new theme called "Greybird" as the default theme.