Automattic chose the Thanksgiving weekend to serve notice that it will punish any plugin developers who earn a tiny financial benefit by displaying passively loaded sponsorship messages within their plugins. The rationale for their threats? According to Automattic, passively loading a sponsorship message amounts to ‘phoning home’. [Updated 30 November]

It’s been lingering on my to-do list for years now, and at last I’ve finally set up a new site specifically for my WordPress plugins. Welcome!

With nearly 50,000 downloads between them, all four of our popular WordPress plugins have received major updates that can significantly boost performance even before WordPress 3.0 arrives (any day now).

With WordPress 2.9 just around the corner, we thought our readers who are also bloggers might like to be prepared in advance for some important changes that are coming up. Updates to our two most popular plugins (with around 16,000 downloads between them, as of this writing) have you covered.

WordPress can be dangerous to your mental health! For all kinds of reasons, each new release of WordPress creates headaches for a subset of users. Learn how to fix a few of the commonly reported performance problems with the 2.8 update.

For WordPress bloggers, there’s a new contender in town for high performance ‘white hat’ SEO. Configure over 100 separate on-page SEO characteristics. Load just 600 lines of code per page view. No junk: just high performance SEO at its best.

Continuing with the updates to our free plugins for fellow WordPress users, this new version of the threaded conversations counter brings higher performance, several minor enhancements, and a revamped administrative interface.