WordPress Weekly Episode 15 featuring David Peralty, formerly of BloggingPro.com and SplashPress media has come and gone. I thought it was an hour and a half of excellent information, particularly for those who are interested in the topics related to the business of blogging. This podcast featured a mix of topics such as, making money as a blogger, managing, implementing, and maintaining a blogging network, using separate WordPress installations as opposed to using WordPress-MU, WordPress and caching and so much more. Near the end of the show, I let Nathan Rice and David Peralty go back and forth as they had quite the conversation regarding some of the topics covered in last weeks show.
Also near the end of the show, David gave us the low down as to what is next for him in regards to leaving BloggingPro and SplashPress media. David has gained a position as community manager for Pic App. David also informed us that he will have a hand in helping to build and maintain the GrandEffect blogging network. David Peralty and blogging networks go together like peanut butter and jelly. At any rate, I wanted to thank David for coming on the show and sharing his expertise in regards to blogging networks as well as sharing his thoughts and opinions related to all of the WordPress questions I asked.
I currently do not have a guest lined up for next Friday’s show so it may be an open mic round table event. Stay tuned for details on that. Enjoy the show.
Episode 14 of WordPress Weekly featured an hour and a half interview with Nathan Rice of NathanRice.net. We covered premium themes, the theme market, some of the pros and cons of Small Potatoes theme club model, the issue of finding things in themes that shouldn’t be there and much more. I really enjoyed my time with Nathan and I thank him for coming on the show.
Well, I think this interview might go down as the best one I’ve done yet. Really enjoyed my 2 hour long interview with Lorelle where we covered everything from WordCamp Dallas to tips on using WordPress and then dove into some of the concepts of using WordPress to make money as well as general blogging issues. I really want to thank every one for joining the live show through the chat and to everyone who called in and asked questions. Without further adue, here is the 2 hour long interview.
Episode 12 of WordPress Weekly went into detail in regards to WordCamp Dallas. Near the end of the show, we delve into WordPress 2.5. We ended up sharing our favorite sessions at the WordCamp event as well as giving our 2.5 upgrade experience.
Next Friday will be episode 13 where Lorelle Van Fossen will be on the show for an hour long interview which will be interspersed with listener questions.
Episode 11 of WordPress weekly features a one hour interview with Small Potato, formerly of WPDesigner.com. We’ll be talking about his inspiration that lead him to creating themes in WordPress, why he chose to work with WordPress and not another publishing platform, the reasons for WPDesigner going up for sale, his outlook on themes in WordPress and perhaps where he sees themes heading in the near future. We will also open the phone lines and invite listeners to call in and ask their own questions.
Jeffro2pt0 – Ever wish WordPress out of the box would have a certain feature? Perhaps you believe that your idea should be in the core of WordPress? The good news is that, WordPress has a section of their website dedicated to users sharing their ideas with the team. Its located at wordpress.org/extend/ideas. Once you submit an idea, people can then rate your idea base on a 5 star rating system. The higher the stars, the higher the rating which means the higher the probability that the idea will see the light of day. For example, the most popular idea right now is Easy Updating of WordPress which honestly, is coming down the pike faster than we know it.
Ronald – Duplicate your website locally, and install WP 2.5 from there.
For developers, you can develop and sell mobile applications easily with the help of http://www.movaya.com/
Ptah Dunbar – When floating DIVs, use margins rather than padding and provide width and height parameters to the floating DIVs to contain IE bugs.
Jeremy Clarke – To make sure your plugins are working, try out 2.5 and if the plugin does not work, notify the plugin author and encourage them to look at making their plugin compatible with WordPress 2.5.
Jacob Santos – If you don’t want to start a flame war with the folks dealing with Ruby, don’t say it sucks and don’t say Ruby is Ruby on Rails as they are two separate things. Don’t say PHP does not scale to prevent flame wars with PHP people.
Join us for Episode 9 where we’ll discuss the Buddy Press acquisition, Gravatars with and without a plugin, Ebay decided to use WordPress?. We’ll mention the WordPress icon pack and the WordPress.com February wrap up.
AOD Design released a stylish WordPress icon pack that you can use to pimp your love for WordPress.
Turn WordPress into a Membership Directory – Chris Cagle wrote a guest blog post on WP Designer which explains how to build a membership directory within WordPress using the default WordPress 2.3 install with two plugins.
Jeffro2pt0 - Jeremy Clarke mentioned to me about a way to search the Codex, WordPress support area and the plugin repository all from within FireFox. Simply click on the links of the search engines you want to add into the search bar within FireFox and install. Searching these various resources from within FireFox has already saved me a ton of time. To find out how to do this, check out the article I wrote explaining how to install these search engines into FireFox.
Brad - Give your blog readers the option to easily print out your blog posts, pages, along with or without the comments attached to them with the WP Print plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-print/
Ronald – Separate Trackbacks from Comments by using this nifty article as a guide.
Patricia – http://authorityblackbook.com/ – free ebook with a blatant WordPress slant on how to develop an authority blogging presence.
In episode 8, I interview Brandon Rosage. Brandon is the webmaster of MVN.com, a WordPress powered site that covers sporting events from A-Z. We cover the news of the week such as Matt’s speech at the Future Of Webapps Conference, Should You follow or NoFollow, Sniplets plugin security woes, an article highlighting how WordPress has reached it’s current point of success, the revolving topic of WordPress themes and more. This week, we’ll close out the show with our WordPress tips of the week.
Lack of creativity or lack of inspiration? I share my thoughts on this question and provide my overview as to the state of WordPress themes as I challenge theme authors to keep it simple yet raise the bar at the same time.
The negatives of DoFollow For a period of time, bloggers were used to using NoFollow. But because of how great Akismet and other anti spam measures work, people have resorted to disabling the NoFollow attribute. We discuss the various issues surrounding Do-NoFollow.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Brad – Brad discussed using the OpenID plugin for WordPress. OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your blog URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. This plugin allows verified OpenIDs to be linked to existing user accounts for use as an alternative means of authentication. Additionally, commenters may use their OpenID to assure their identity as the author of the comment and provide a framework for future OpenID-based services (reputation and trust, for example).
Ronald - Ronald discussed his comment sorter plugin. His comment sorter plugin allows you to
Prevent Trackbacks/Pingbacks from showing.
Sort comments by Date Ascending.
Sort comments by Date Descending.
Sort comments by Name Ascending.
Sort comments by Name Descending.
The ability to remember options.
Check it out if you have a chance.
Andrew Rickmann – My tip of the week was for plugin authors who have a plugin that adds a DBX box to the advanced section of the post page.
There is a new function to create these boxes – add_meta_box
This is a function, not a hook, so you need to call the function from within the admin_head hook.
Also note that as of the current SVN version the old hook is still there, so you not only need to add the new method, but make sure the old version will not run if the add_meta_box function exists.
I’d also like to throw in an article about no-follow that I mentioned in the show and a poll on my site for people to comment on what I have done with comment links.
Jacob Santos – In the dashboard, click on the Edit link in the “WordPress Development” Feed. The link is to a RSS feed, and therefore supports any site which has an RSS feed. It could even be Jeffro2pt0 site or another planet.
For myself, since I’m using SVN, it is more useful for me to get SVN commits than plain releases I’m not doing to download anyway.
You can also change the title, which is below the link text box to change the feed title. The Primary and Secondary feed widgets are the only ones you can change the title for.
In episode 7, I interview Tommy from Buzzdroid as I try to figure out the inspiration behind the Shifter WordPress theme. We then dive into the news of the week which stems from WordPress.com experiencing a DoS attack to a topic of WordPress upgrading being more of a fuss, than a must. Near the end of the show, we begin our WordPress theme round table and then conclude with our tips of the week.
Ian Kallen of Tecchnorati lets us know that they have seen a number of blogs “exploited by a recently announced WordPress vulnerability”. You folks might want to upgrade your WordPress installations if you haven’t yet done so already.
Roundtable discussion revolving around the state of WordPress themes. We will discuss trends, our favorite/worst themes, and any other topic dealing with themes we can think of
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Didn’t have time to go over our tips of the week. Instead, we each gave our likes, dislikes, and our thoughts as to where we would like to see themes head into the future.
This week on Episode 6, we finally see WordPress 2.5 feature froze which is a standard practice for all versions of WordPress. A live WP 2.5 demo site has been made available to the public in case you want to see what you have to look forward to, WP.com intros summarized stats for the stat junkies, Yahoo interviews Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com and discusses a variety of topics. Movable Type does WordPress in a weird sort of way. Your WordPress Weekly Digest update and some tips on making sure that your WordPress plugin using Jquery does not conflict with other plugins using Jquery. Last but not least, some WordPress beginners lingo.
Panel Members:
Andrew Rickmann: Long time user of WordPress who has molded themes, plugins and hacks within the WordPress code. Fun with WordPress is Andrew’s solution to putting all those thoughts in one place, and giving something back to the community.
Kaspars Dambis - Author of the WordPress themes Morning Racer, Agneka Simple, Sans-serif Racer and Times Racer. Kaspars is also a WordPress plugin developer.
David Peralty – A man who seemingly needs no introduction, but I’m going to give him one anyways. David is a very busy man who has love/hate relationships with WordPress. He currently is the marketing guy for SplashPressMedia and has coded over 100 themes for WordPress.
You can catch all of David’s blogging related material here BloggingPro
Stories Discussed:
WordPress.com Introduces Summarized Stats – WordPress.com users can rejoice as they now have a summarized version of their stats available for consumption. The summarized results includes detailed information such as referrers, search terms, and clicks. Andy also let’s us know that there is a refresh time limit of 180 seconds or 3 minutes before the data within your stats is updated. Definitely an awesome update for all of us stat junkies.
WordPress 2.5 Now Under Feature Freeze – No more new features will be added. Concentration will be on fixing bugs, polishing up the new admin design, and finishing off the new features that are already in. We still have some styling work to do on the new design, but the big changes are already in.
Yahoo Speaks With Matt Mullenweg – Yahoo had a chance to interview Matt Mullwenweg which allowed us to get some good information related to WordPress 2.5, PHP4 versus PHP 5 and some other nifty tidbits.
MovableType Plugin Mimics WordPress Dashboard – What started off as a joke, has now turned into an excellent proof of concept that the MT backend could have an alternative interface with little effort involved. This thing looks like an almost exact replica of the WordPress administration area. If I didn’t know any better, I would of thought WordPress invaded Movable Type.
WordPress 2.5 Demo Site Launched – Chris Johnston has announced the availability of a public WordPress 2.5 demo site.The other way of seeing WordPress 2.5 is by manually installing an SVN or Subversion installation of WordPress which requires time, and effort. This makes it painless for end users. Be sure to check in from time to time each week to see the progress.
Building A Web App In 45 Minutes – Matt Mullenweg will be participating in a panel featuring Kevin Rose from Digg.com and other web app superstars at the Future Of Web Apps conference being held Feb 28 – March 1st. However, Erick Schonfeld has yet to decide what he wants these panel members to build and is conducting a poll which you can vote on to help decide which app should be built.
Kaspars Of Konstruktors.com Shares Some Jquery Tips – Kaspars lets us know of a few tips that would help out plugin authors planning on using Jquery within their plugin. There is a certain Jquery line of code that you need to know about to prevent conflicts with other plugins also using Jquery.
Weekly Digest For Feb 4th – Feb 10th 2008 – As 2.5 is now under feature freeze, it’s time for the WP Dev team to really crank out the bug fixes. Here are some things worth noting in this weeks diget
Renaming of is_front() to is_front_page() to avoid conflict with bbPress (#3682)
Introduction of the ability to have random post ordering (#4617).
Reversion to full content, including content after the more tag, for feeds (#2582).
A more informative error message when theme files are not writeable (#5783).
Removal of gzip_compression(). Leave it to the server to handle (#4342).
www versus non-www: On the WordPress Support Forums, clarification on the issue of www to non-www has been given. WordPress 2.3 offers “canonical URLs” which redirect www to non-www or vice-versa. Go to Options > General and set the URL to whatever you want it to be, with or without the www and WordPress will automatically redirect visitors and search engines to the correct URL and permalink.
WordPress Beginners Lingo – Earlier this week I wrote up a post the described various WordPress terms that people who are just starting out in the world of WordPress may hear about, but may not know the definitions to. The lingo post contains 8 words and I believe I will be writing a part 2 of this post containing even more.
WordPress Tips Of The Week:
Andrew Rickmann - If you are running more than one local version of WordPress and want to standardise your local theme and plugin folders so you can test them all without copying them to different folders you can make some minor changes and use a quick plugin to do that.
I have written more about it on my blog at the link below:
Kaspars Dambis - Kaspars tip of the week dealt with semantic blog posts. Users should use the heading tags as well as using a proper title tag when inserting a link to your article.
Jeremy Clarke - About my tip of the week, people can find the codex Firefox search bar plugin at this page, which has the search results for searchbars related to wordpress. The one I recommended is called “WordPress Codex”, though “Wordpress Support” might also be useful. On that page you can just click on the name of the searchbar thing and it will install like a FireFox plugin. While people are there they should see if there are other sites they want in the search bar. I love it for everything. (the php.net manual one is very useful for coders and who doesn’t need the youtube one?)
Jeremy also posted a video link which highlights some of the work that the folks from Happy Cog have done. How Not To Get Noticed
David Peralty - David recently helped a friend migrate from Typepad to WordPress while keeping their permalink slugs in tact. David explains the tactics he used and why the technique was successful. A good read if I must say so myself. View the article here Migrating Post Slugs From Typepad To WordPress
Jeffro2pt0 – If you notice that many of your posts that are older than one month are attracting spam bots, login to your admin panel and browse to the plugins tab, then click on Akismet configuration. Check mark the box that describes the option to automatically discard spam comments on entries more than a month old and click the save button. This has really cleaned up my Akismet spam filter.
WordPress Weekly Episode 15 featuring David Peralty, formerly of BloggingPro.com and SplashPress media has come and gone. I thought it was an hour and a half of excellent information, particularly for those who are interested in the topics related to the business of blogging. This podcast featured a mix of topics such as, making money as a blogger, managing, implementing, and maintaining a blogging network, using separate WordPress installations as opposed to using WordPress-MU, WordPress and caching and so much more. Near the end of the show, I let Nathan Rice and David Peralty go back and forth as they had quite the conversation regarding some of the topics covered in last weeks show.