Justin Tadlock who uses bbPress to power his support forums for the Theme Hybrid framework has published a tutorial on how to create custom views in bbPress. Custom views are pretty cool as they allow you to create different ways of viewing topics on a bbPress powered forum.
Speaking of bbPress, don’t forget to tune into WordPress Weekly this Friday evening as my scheduled guest is Sam Bauers, lead developer of the bbPress project.
I’m not sure if any of you have noticed but on the right hand side of this site on the frontpage, there is a widget in the sidebar called WordPress Links And Resources. It’s been there for quite awhile and it’s my parsed RSS feed coming from my shared items bin from within my feedreader. If I don’t get a chance to write about it or share it in the forum, then I place it into my WPTavern links bin which shows up within this widget. Thanks to some changes I’ve made this morning, you can now subscribe to this link roll with your own RSS reader by clicking on the little orange icon. Or, just keep an eye on that block as every time I open my feedreader, I add a few items to the bin.
Nathan Rice has been working on his own framework for a few months now to help give iThemes a solid base to work from. His framework is called Prodigy and the first public developer beta is out and ready to be tested. As it stands, this theme is not for the faint of heart in that right now, it’s developer centric. However, once the beta period winds down and the bugs are squashed, Nathan plans on publishing a series of tutorials explaining the purpose behind the framework, its capabilities, and how to use it.
Head on over and help him out if you’ve got the time.
From now on, the way I am going to format these posts is to bold the item that was listed on the agenda and then below it, publish a summary of what was decided for that item.
Creating an announcements mailing list that include all plugin and theme developers and using it to send information on significant core changes that are likely to affect them. It would be very low volume (1-2 emails per month) and would include by default everybody that is listed as contributor to at least one plugin or theme hosted on wordpress.org. Of course it would be open to everybody to subscribe or unsubscribe.
The majority of folks who participated in the chat agreed that this was a great idea. The list would be low volume where announcements could be pushed out if their are changes to the WordPress API. This would provide theme and plugin authors a heads up on a change that may break their project. Plugin and theme authors would have the ability to ‘Opt-Out‘ if they don’t want the announcements.
matt posted about adopting plugins: “I saw something on PEAR today I like (I know, gasp!) and it was where certain modules were marked as abandoned and up for adoption, and they seemed to have a mechanism for adoption.” example: http://pear.php.net/package/Net_DNS
Many thought the idea of inactive plugins on the repository to be put up for adoption was a great idea. If an author got an email about a change and knew they weren’t going to have time to bother updating, the WordPress team could point them somewhere to announce that. The thinking right now is that based on a number of failed attempts to get in touch with the plugin author could be a base for what is considered non maintained. Then it goes up for adoption, or branches and the old one is marked as dead.
scribu - an edge case: what if a plugin author still maintains a plugin, but doesn’t update it on Extend?
ddebernardy - then he answers the mail
Jane_ - if there’s a policy in place that un-updated plugins in repository go to bed after time, am guessing they’d be more likely to update there too
Meta tables was on the agenda but has been pushed to the July 22nd meeting.
Ddebernardy wanted to talk about bugs and committer workflow, but without rboren, hard to make any firm progress This topic might be discussed again on the July 22nd meeting.
westi posted “User experience for comment deletion undo / trash. (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4529)”
The question regarding this ticket deals with the User Interface. There might be a poll in the future where users can vote on whether they want a link to a trash can or a simpe undo. Next was the discussion surrounding whether the stuff in the trash can should auto-delete or not after 30 days. The decision was that by default, trash will autoclear but there will be hooks available to override how long before things get deleted.
The results from the media survey were to be published the night of the meeting with screenshots but it hasn’t happened yet. Look for that on the dev blog at some point in the near future. Also, the poll results didn’t change much from last time.
Out of all the GsOC projects, all but one passed. The event management plugin suite for buddypress is the one not moving forward, though the student says he is going to keep working on it even though it’s no longer gsoc
To see the entire log file for this day which contains the fine details into the various agenda topics, head over to the WordPress Dev IRC Channel Log.
PollDaddy has now added survey filters to their polling service. These filters enable users to create more meaningful reports based on your specific needs. Here is a good example of a filter in action:
As an example, you may have a question in your survey like, “What is your gender?”. If you then created a filter on this question and specified the condition to be; all respondents that answered ‘Male’. After you enable this filter, all the reports will display just the answers given by the respondents that answered male.
Sounds like users of the service will now be able to dig into the data a bit easier based on these filters. I wonder if these filters will make Jane’s life any easier when she dives into the surveys that are published on the WordPress development blog. For more information regarding survey filters, please see this support topic on the PollDaddy forum.
Just wanted to let everyone know what to expect for the rest of this month regarding the WordPress Weekly podcast. This Friday is the rescheduled appearance of Sam Bauers, the lead developer of bbPress. I hope he can make it as we have quite a backlog of questions from the first go around to ask him. Here are the dates and scheduled appearances for the rest of the month.
Nothing has been scheduled for the month of August but if there is someone you would like me to try and get on the show, give me some suggestions in the comments.
Here are the threads that are making there rounds in the WordPress Tavern forum. By the way, we reached a milestone this past week as the forum now contains over 300 registered users!
PixoPoint WordPress Unzipper – Ryan Hellyer shares a script he created which makes the WordPress install process a little easier. As a side note, there is a similar project coming down the pipeline that I’ll be writing about in the near future.
TavernCamp – It looks like plenty of people are supporting the idea that I create some sort of TavernCamp event. The event would be like a WordCamp in so far as containing a ton of WordPress content in the form of interviews or online presentations. I have yet to decide on if I’ll do this event or not but a side of me is leaning towards yes.
Do You Actually Care About The GPL – Don’t worry, this is not another thread that dissects what it means to be GPL compliant. Instead, it’s just a general question asking if you care whether a theme is GPL or not.
New WordPress Podcast – There is a new WordPress podcast gearing up for production. Bryan posted a link to a recent blog post which provides a few names for the show for us to vote on.
Theme Hooks – Dan Cole wants to know in terms of hooks, what makes Thematic, Hybrid, or some other advanced theme better than the Classic and Default themes?
Styling Posts In The Loop – This one comes from the Troubleshooting department where a user wanted to know how to style a particular post versus all the others.
There was an interesting post published on WPCandy.com by JD Bentley where he discussed three different ways in which WordPress could be used as a project management application. JD describes three different ways to accomplish this functionality. Using a plugin called WP-Project, using the P2 theme, or using a vanilla install of WordPress. However, JD notes that none of these solutions matches what BaseCamp can do either because the solution is too simple or the feature set is too complex.
JD has recently got involved with the development of WP-Project as he believes the plugin has a lot of potential. If you’re interested in helping out with this aspect of WordPress which Ryan Imel says is ripe for innovation, get in touch with him.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com has revamped their home page by presenting a clean layout of the services they own along with the non-profit open-source projects they support.
I like this new way of presenting the projects page which used to show the same information. This clearly shows the projects they support that they don’t directly own/operate which I hope clears some of the confusion people have with thinking Automattic is the development force behind WordPress.org.
The feedback is starting to come in regarding this past weekends WordCamp Montreal event which I followed on Twitter and it looks like the event was a success. At least one person, Laura Roberts has published her thoughts and lessons learned while attending the event. She also highlights the fact on why you should be backing up your site on a regular basis and then downloading those backups onto a hard drive or some other media. You can read Laura’s experience from the event here. I also wanted to say congratulations to Brad Williams of WebDevStudios.com for putting on a great presentation discussing WordPress Security which you can also view online here.
This weekend, it’s WordCamp UK. If you want to follow along via Twitter, here is the hashtag to follow #wordcampuk.