Woo Nav Menu Update
Jeff Ikus who is the man responsible for the Woo Navigation menu system gave an update on his progress of integrating it into core. The menu stuff is ticket 11817. Jeff has stripped down the menu system to remove the Woo branding and has reworked it for the core and in its current form, is working just fine. The area of discussion however is that it adds MySQL Tables to the database. Right now, the idea is to try and eliminate the need for tables with perhaps using a custom post type. A few contributors will work with Jeff under Ryan Boren to accomplish this.
Schedule Update
WordPress 3.0 is currently behind schedule. The proposed release date of late April is now bumped by 2 weeks giving the release time frame somewhere around WordCamp San Francisco on May 1st. This gives more time to hammer out the menu navigation system and some Multi Site things.
The Planet Feed
This topic was not covered because it’s not tied to the core development of the software. Instead, it will be moved to the forum for discussion. This has also prompted Westi to write a 3 to 5 liner on what the developer chat is supposed to be used for with instructions on which other venues should be used for other topics of discussion.
Core Plugins
Progress on core plugins has been very slow. Since Andrew Ozz has been out, nothing has been done with PodPress, one of the three plugins slated to be part of the experiment. Each core plugin will have their own mailing list if you want to keep tabs on them.
Trac Gardening
Nacin has been doing a great job in Trac and gave everyone a status report. There are some other things happening regarding tickets and such that you can read more about in the log file.
To read the log file for this meeting, click here and scroll up.
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 3:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
Picking up where I left off in part one of the review, Backupify notified me via email that a backup of my site had successfully completed and that it was available in their Archive.
After downloading the archive to check out what was backed up, it was clear that this service will only provide a backup of the database. I was not able to test the restore feature because this is the site I created the backup from and I wouldn’t want to revert back to a few days ago in posts.
As for the full backup manually issue I described in part one, I still can’t figure it out. I disabled all the plugins to see if it would get to 100% and it still froze at 99%. I’m going to give this plugin a try on my local server install to see if the problem still persists.
Conclusion:
While I only concentrated on the WordPress aspect of Backupify, the service can back up account data from Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is where the service really shines and what it should really be used for. I think WordPress plugins such as WordPress backup or even this brand spanking new plugin, WordPress EZ Backup may be a little more up to the task.
Back in episode 78 of WordPress Weekly, I had the chance to interview Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress to talk about their work with college publishing. Unfortunately, news has come out today that CoPress is shutting down operations. The two major reasons cited for the closure are lack of financial sustainability and a support system that didn’t scale well.
What this ultimately meant was a rapidly growing number of emails for us to answer. Needless to say, it’s become difficult to make this scale in any meaningful way. Our eventual goal was to build software for distributed support, but the resources required for hosting and support severely challenged our ability to make headway on the project.
One of the biggest perks that CoPress offered was a conversion mechanism to take sites that were using College Publisher and convert them to WordPress. CoPress will be be publishing their conversion script as open-source allowing other individuals to pick up where they left off.
I wish the owners of CoPress the best of luck in future endeavors.
Nuclear powered Raphael Mudge has announced on the After The Deadline blog a couple of interesting developments the first being the removal of API Keys. Using the service no longer requires users to register with the site. However, if you need to use AtD in a commercial environment, you are encouraged to use the open source software edition of AtD. The post covers a couple of other announcements such as an update to the bbPress plugin, AtD speaking more languages and the WordPress plugin now being available in more translations. Seems like every week Raphael has something exciting to tell us regarding AtD which is a good thing!
Some stats for the forum. Most users ever online was 110, 01-27-2010 at 05:45 AM. Threads: 1,274, Posts: 12,728, Members: 589, Active Members: 133. We’re rolling right along towards the 1,000 registered user count which I hope we can achieve by June but things are slow going so far this year. While the forum was roaring with posts due to a few threads last week, it’s a bit calmer this week.
Woo Menus – This will be one of the big reasons why upgrading to WordPress 3.0 will be worth it. If you haven’t seen the video demonstrating how it works, check it out and then tell us what you think in the forum.
Ads On Your Website – Do you have ads on your site? What kind? What about direct sales or using a network? This is a good thread to get involved with if you’re thinking about different routes to take when it comes to advertising on your website.
CSS Mysterys – Mild Fuzz is working with tables and is finding out that his cells are not lining up despite having widths defined by classes. There are a couple of different ways in which Mild Fuzz can approach this situation that are discussed in the thread.
ABCs of WordPress – One of my favorite forum threads of late that is more like a game. Starting with A, members have to come up with a WordPress related word. We’ve gone through the akphabet about 4 times already. This is a great way to get a grasp of the terms used in WordPress.
Free Support – Ryan has been providing extensive free support for his plugins but was recently contacted by an individual who politely told him that one of his responses came off as rude. This has him rethinking free support as having a bad attitude will not help his business.
If you’re not a registered user of the Tavern forum, I highly suggest getting yourself an account and please, answer the anti-spam question or I’ll delete your registration.
What a pleasant surprise this show turned out to be. I started the show solo but about 10 minutes into the recording, a familiar voice called into the show. You might know him as Matt Mullenweg. Kim Parsell also joined me to talk about WordPress. We discussed a number of stories that occurred during the week but since Matt was on the line, I went into rapid fire mode discussing all sorts of things such as the road map for bbPress, the WordPress store and its possible role with the foundation, ideas on the best way to provide feedback on a problem, the most difficult aspect of managing the WordPress project, a bit about the default theme, why he won’t be attending as many WordCamps this year and just a ton of other stuff. Really want to thank Matt for dropping by on a night where I was prepared to go solo.
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Browsing through my feedreader today, I came across a service known as Backupify which uses Amazons cloud service to store the backup data. Much if not all of the data that we send to Twitter, Facebook, and other social outlets does not exist on our own machines. Depending on how you feel about that data, it could be a big loss to see it all of a sudden disappear. One of the services that Backupify is aiming to support is WordPress.
Registering a new account is simple and gives you 1 Gigabyte of data. After registering, you’ll need to click on the Manage link for WordPress under Services In Beta. This will initiate the backup process. However, you’ll need to install the WordPress Backupify plugin before you can proceed.
After the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll have to visit the plugins settings page and initialize the plugin to the Backupify service. You can also take this time to configure the backup option. Notice how I said option. That’s because the only option you can configure from within the plugin is the ability to exclude comments. The full backup area provides a button where you can backup the site locally. The question is, what is backed up? The database of course.
For some reason after I ran the backup locally, the process became stuck at 99%. The status within the browser window said Done so nothing was ongoing. When trying to refresh, I received a warning that my backup would fail if I reloaded the page but after waiting for 5 minutes, I went through with the page refresh.
I have no idea what happened to 99% of the database that was backed up. After refreshing the page, I gave the full backup another try and the same thing happened. It’s supposed to reach 100% and then save the file to my desktop as a third copy. I’ll troubleshoot this more and report on my findings in part 2 of the review.
Speaking of Part 2, that will be published in the next day or two as the backup system is performed automatically and the backups do not show in the archive until 24-48 hours after it’s complete. Speaking of things happening automatically, the process of installing and configuring this plugin has confused me. I’m used to clicking boxes or selecting options but this plugin does not really have any of that. The Backupify website is also sparse with options because everything is performed automatically. The only thing I can really configure on the website is managing accounts and selecting when backups should occur and how I should be emailed.
Backupify is a free service for up to 1 Gig of data so if you give it a try this evening or in the next few days, let me know in the comments if the 99% local backup problem happens for you.
Andrew Warner who produces the video show Mixergy which interviews entrepreneurs of successful start ups and established businesses has published the video featuring his interview with Adii of WooThemes.com. In the interview, we get a glimpse of just how successful WooThemes has become with net margins now in the 50-60% range and revenue of over two million dollars. Adii tells us how WooThemes was started, who inspired him in the beginning, the team involved with WooThemes, how they deal with theme piracy, brief discussion about the GPL and much more. All in all, it was a great interview that shed some light on one of the most successful businesses built on and around WordPress. Andrew Warner asked all the right questions, including some that I would have never thought to ask regarding the business aspect of WooThemes.
Oh, and I found a way to get WPTavern name dropped (36:40) on the show which I’m very appreciative of. Thanks again Adii and Andrew.
Andy Peatling has announced on the official BuddyPress development blog that version 1.2 is now available to the public. This version is a milestone because BuddyPress can now be used on standard WordPress installations whereas before, you needed to have WordPress MU installed. Other goodies that 1.2 offers include:
Simplified Install Process – This version only uses three steps and has done away with the manual installation routine.
New Default Themes – Andy Peatling must have drank the default theme kool-aid as 1.2 sports a new, out of the box look.
Activity Streams – Activity streams have been revamped. Each activity stream item has it’s own permalink making bookmarking or saving the event much easier. Any user can comment on activity across the site with support for threaded conversations. You can also publish events to a group activity stream or site wide while also marking activity items as favorites.
If you don’t want to test BuddyPress by installing it on a live or local site, take a gander at the BuddyPress Test drive website which is using the latest version.
Congratulations to Andy Peatling, John James Jacoby and everyone who contributed to the release. It seems like it was only yesterday when 1.0 was released where the most requested feature was support for standard WordPress installations. Now that BuddyPress can be used on regular WordPress sites, expect to see BuddyPress empowering the social nature of WordPress sites all across the web.
When WordPress implemented the new feature they failed to change the permissions granted when the post is in the trash. This means that an unauthenticated user cannot see the post, however an authenticated user can no matter what privileges they have, even ’subscriber’.
There are probably a few other bug fixes in this version but they were not part of the release announcement. If your site only has one author and no registered users, this upgrade is not critical.
Woo Nav Menu Update
What a pleasant surprise this show turned out to be. I started the show solo but about 10 minutes into the recording, a familiar voice called into the show. You might know him as Matt Mullenweg. Kim Parsell also joined me to talk about WordPress. We discussed a number of stories that occurred during the week but since Matt was on the line, I went into rapid fire mode discussing all sorts of things such as the road map for bbPress, the WordPress store and its possible role with the foundation, ideas on the best way to provide feedback on a problem, the most difficult aspect of managing the WordPress project, a bit about the default theme, why he won’t be attending as many WordCamps this year and just a ton of other stuff. Really want to thank Matt for dropping by on a night where I was prepared to go solo. 
