In the market for some new themes? If so, you can easily put yourself in the running to obtain a PremiumThemes.net club membership. PremiumThemes.net is a commercial GPL theme club which provides great support and designs all under one up front package price. I’ve worked with Bhavesh to obtain five theme club memberships to give away (Thanks Bhavesh!). That’s a total giveaway price of around $2,000.00. So what’s the catch?
Here is what I’m looking for. If you were in control of WPTavern.com, what would you do with it? Your answers can be serious or they can be playful. I’m more interested in the serious ones though. Each person who leaves a comment will be assigned a number that will be put into a random number picker. The numbers that are chosen will receive the theme club membership. Comments will be open until next Friday so get cracking! Oh, and if you could, please spread the word.
In this sleepy edition of WordPress Weekly, (since I was awake for 20+hours) I had a chat with Joseph Cefoli who is the guy in charge of The FairFieldMirror.com and Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress, a company specializing in the migration from College Publisher while also providing managed hosting. During the interview, we discussed a number of topics including the trials and tribulations of migrating 7,000+ articles from College Publisher into WordPress, the manual labor involved, the various plugins in use on the site and much more. I find the stories of migrations such as these to be interesting since they usually consist of painful experiences that were overcome.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WPClassroom.com. They have announced their next class called WordPress For Beginners will be held on Wednesday November 11th @ 6-9pm EST use the coupon code wptavern to take $5.00 off the price.
Jeff – WPWorldMap.net – WPWorldMap.net is a cool website where WordPress users from all across the world can register an account and place a marker above their general location since the site is made up of an embedded google map. It’s a great way to see if their are any awesome WordPress folks in your neighborhood.
This Weeks Trivia Question
Which forum software was the first to use CSS based layouts rather than tables?
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Tuesday, November 10th 2009 8P.M. EST
Been awhile since we’ve had something to vote on but I’ve finally found a topic where we you can weigh in on one side or the other. Recently, there was a discussion on the WordPress Hackers Mailing list that discussed the idea of changing the blogging nomenclature found within the administration panel of WordPress. The line of thought is that WordPress is constantly being used for more than just blogging but it will never be taken seriously as a powerful CMS until the blog nomenclature is removed in favor for something more generic. As for myself, I’m fine with both sides but I lean slightly more in favor of switching the words to something more generic because by having the word blog splattered everywhere in the backend, it gives the sense that WordPress is only meant for blogging and nothing else. That may have been the case when the project was lifting off the ground but these days, WordPress is powering some pretty hefty sites that blow blogging out of the water. It’s a simple change that I think would have a big impact on the software especially as it relates to perception. What do you think?
Should WordPress Change The Blog Nomenclature Within The Backend?
Just wanted to provide a quick update on what’s been going on. To make a long story short, going back to 35+ hours at the store from 4am to 12pm is taking it’s toll on me. On the side, I’ve been trying my best to put up at least one post a day on weblogtoolscollection.com as part of my second job but even that is proving to be difficult. WordPress stuff is hard for me to get into recently, especially as it relates to the wordpress weekly podcast. I don’t plan on abandoning the show or this website but work on it with regards to postings and such may be far and few between for the rest of this year. So, I have three jobs that I’m working and it doesn’t take long to feel like crap everyday, especially when good sleep is hard to come by. This all sucks because I’d love to get back to what I’ve been doing for the past few months but money dictates I do other things.
I have an interesting idea for a site redesign/rearrangement that falls in place with my idea of what the wordpress.org portal should be like. Wptavern will be my testbed for this idea to see how it pans out. No word yet on when it will be finished but I’m excited about it.
Looking forward to wordcamp NewYork next week which will be a welcome relief. That’s all on this front, hope all is well in your neck of the woods.
There is some great news for those involved with or following the BuddyPress project. Andy Peatling announced today on the development blog that John James Jacoby aka jjj has been added to the BuddyPress core development team which brings the total to two members. Anytime I’ve done a show about BuddyPress or needed to ask a question or two in the BuddyPress IRC channel, John has been around to listen or try to push me in the right direction. Congrats to him for being added to the core team for one heck of a project. This is a huge step forward allowing Andy to remove some of the development weight off his shoulders.
If you really want to get your WordPress fix during the weekend of Friday the 13th, consider attending WordCamp Phoenix and then WordCamp New York on the 14th and 15th of November. WordCamp Phoenix is being held at the Arizona Grand Resort which ought to be a blast on Friday the 13th from 8am – 5pm. For speakers, they currently have confirmed Matt Mullenweg, Merlin Mann, John Hawkins, Brent Spore, and Dave Moyer from the WordCast Podcast. The event is one day only and from what I can remember, may be the first ever one day weekday WordCamp. If you know of any others, tell me in the comments.
This episode of WordPress Weekly focuses on the upcoming WordCamp New York event being held on November 14th and 15th. Jane Wells joined me on the show to tell us all about the planning stages of the event and what to expect. We also talked briefly about WordPress 2.8.5 as well as what to look forward to in WordPress 2.9. If you are planning on attending WordCamp New York, I highly encourage you to give this episode a listen.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WebDevStudios.com. Webdevstudios covers all different aspects of web development whether it’s search engine optimization or, providing you with an e-commerce solution. If you need to take your site to the next level or even make the switch to WordPress, get in touch with the folks at Webdevstudios.com
The consensus is that it will not happen. However, Lynne Pops idea to change the first default post in a new install of WordPress to something that contains useful information will likely happen. No update email in core. Use the mailing list. Improve the copy in the first post to give hints and tips like subscribing to the list.
Trac voting
I was responsible for this question. In trac, each ticket has an up or down arrow where people can vote yes or no with regards to their approval of the ticket or to get it in core. As I suspected, the votes mean nothing and the up or down arrows are for decoration.
Multiple custom image sizes with retroactive image reprocessing
Leogermani wrote a patch that adds the possibility to add multiple custom sizes in addition to the core thumnail, medium and large. It also lets you regenerate all the thumbs, in case you changed any size. A few folks were not too keen on the rebuilding effect on previous images the patch would include and it won’t make it into 2.9. However, an edited patch looks good for 3.0.
Mailing lists
The recent WordPress Security thread on the hackers mailing lists ruffled a few feathers of long time members. So, the idea was to create a mailing list for what some deem as useless discussion. There will be a renewed effort to state what the hackers list is meant to be used for in terms of the discussions and content. Westi and others may act as more of a figure head as well. Enhancing this page is a good start which covers mailing list etiquette.
#WordPress ops
Thank goodness this simple thing is over and done with. Matt has added the following people as ops to the WordPress IRC channel. sivel, Viper007Bond, bazza, MarkJaquith, Ozh
Trac configuration
This had to do with enabled XMLRPC into Trac but it’s above my level of comprehension so if you’re interested, the conversation picks up here.
How To Participate:
If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, you can by visiting the WordPress development updates blog. If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.
chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 5PM Eastern time or 9PM UTC Thursdays. The meeting day was changed to accommodate European users.#wordpress-dev.
This episode of WordPress weekly was a little bit different than some of the previous episodes in that we discussed the topic of Hyperlocal websites and using BuddyPress to power them. I had two guests on the air with me to discuss this topic. The first was Ted Mann who runs InJersey.com. A hyperlocal website for New Jersey that is powered by BuddyPress. My other guest was Jeff Lee who is just starting to get his hyperlocal site off the ground at CityZombie.com. It was great getting to talk about these hyperlocal news sites and why they will be springing up left and right from the point where Newspapers left off.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WebDevStudios.com. Webdevstudios covers all different aspects of web development whether it’s search engine optimization or, providing you with an e-commerce solution. Webdevstudios features an entire team of talented individuals that on the side, have been responsible for releasing some awesome WordPress plugins as a way of contributing back to the community. If you need to take your site to the next level or even make the switch to WordPress, get in touch with the folks at Webdevstudios.com
I’ve been sitting on this post for a long time. In fact, I started thinking about this complex issue around the time when the discussions were centered around WordPress security and end user responsibility. The complexity extends way beyond end user responsibility in that, the bar to use WordPress has been lowered to a point where anyone can use the software. As an experienced user of WordPress (two years) I’m beginning to wonder how WordPress plans on handling this burden of inexperienced users as they far outweigh the number of experienced users. I don’t mean to insult any user types but that’s just the way the situation currently is.
So how has the bar been lowered?
Third party scripts such as Fantastico and Simple Scripts automatically install WordPress with little to no user intervention required. This means users don’t need to know about MySQL, PHP, or FTP in order to get WordPress up and running. Throw those skills out the window.
Upgrading is a breeze. Whether it is core upgrades, plugin upgrades, theme upgrades, they can all be done without using FTP. Instead, users make a couple clicks with their mouse and way they go.
WordPress has a built in text editor which provides an easy way to format text to your liking while providing a way for you to see how it looks in real-time. This means that instead of knowing HTML tags to format text in content, you only need to highlight the text with your mouse and press the corresponding format button.
There are other examples but I need to move on with my point. Don’t get me wrong, I love all three of the examples I provided as an end user but I see a set of circumstances that may or may not come true. When WordPress was just a small project, the core userbase was made up of developers. Today, I’d guess that 75% of those who use WordPress are end users while 25% are developers. Developers are smart people and they understand how things work. These are the people the 75% rely on for help. What happens if the majority of support these folks offer every single day becomes answers to questions such as simple HTML, uploading via FTP, upgrading, etc. Couple that with the fact that WordPress is becoming more and more user driven meaning the software will continue to be dumbed down to make it as easy as possible for everyone with a voice to make it known on the web and you have a scenario where the developers move on to a new project that has that feeling of being small with the majority of the user base being developers. This would leave the WordPress userbase consisting of not only end users, but fewer people who know the ins and outs which I think would hurt the community over time.
I think of this issue as a double edged sword. Make WordPress so easy to use that I can publish content with my eyes closed but on the flipside, I don’t have to know how to upload files, I don’t need to know how upgrades work, I don’t have to know HTML to bold text or italicize it, etc. As the bar to use WordPress continues to be lowered, how will the smart people cope with the ever increasing demands for support, especially for questions that would be considered common knowledge before using a CMS like WordPress such as HTML and FTP?
I don’t want to see WordPress become complex but at the same time, I don’t want to see the community turn into a bunch of end users that have no clue as to what they’re doing and that is who I have to rely upon for help. I suppose my only hope is that there is a constant flow of up and coming knowledgeable people in the WordPress community taking notes from the current crop of WordPress rockstars. If not, then I will harvest the current crop and continue to plant knowledge in the WPTavern forum!
In the market for some new themes? If so, you can easily put yourself in the running to obtain a PremiumThemes.net club membership. PremiumThemes.net is a commercial GPL theme club which provides great support and designs all under one up front package price. I’ve worked with Bhavesh to obtain five theme club memberships to give away (Thanks Bhavesh!). That’s a total giveaway price of around $2,000.00. So what’s the catch?
In this sleepy edition of WordPress Weekly, (since I was awake for 20+hours) I had a chat with Joseph Cefoli who is the guy in charge of 
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