By Jeffro on July 27, 2010
A topic of discussion that’s popped up numerous times within the WP Hackers Mailing List as well as other places throughout the community is when WordPress would stop supporting PHP version 4 and move up to version 5. Well, the good news for all WordPress theme and plugin developers is here in that starting with WordPress 3.2 scheduled for release sometime in the first half of 2011, the minimum required PHP version will be 5.2 while MySQL will be raised to 5.0.15. Mark Jaquith explained on the WordPress development blog why the time was right to finally make the move:
The numbers are now, finally, strongly in favor of this move. Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2. Many of them are on hosts who support PHP 5.2 — users merely need to change a setting in their hosting control panel to activate it. We believe that percentage will only go down over the rest of the year as hosting providers realize that to support the newest versions of WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), they’re going to have to pull the trigger.
Just for the sake of knowing, WPTavern.com is running on a shared webhosting server running PHP 5.2.4.
Posted in News | Tagged mysql, php, Plugins, Themes |
By Jeffro on July 27, 2010
It’s been a little while since I’ve installed the Limit Login Attempts plug-in that I’ve reviewed here and so far, it’s worked as advertised. Since May 15th, I’ve had 11 failed attempts to log into the back-end of WPTavern.com. Three of those occurred on July 24th. 10 out of 11 attempts used admin as the user-name while one attempt used a blank user-name field.
I think everyone should have this plug-in installed on their site or something like it. It’s pretty important to be notified of an IP address trying to crack the password into the back-end of your site although I find it odd that I have yet to see a user-name deviate from admin which leads me to believe that the attempts have been made by bots, or some type of automated script.
Posted in News | Tagged limit, lockdown, logins, reports |
By Jeffro on July 26, 2010
It’s no secret that Google’s own Matt Cutts is a fan of WordPress as he has used it to power his own website for quite some time. Recently, Matt was a guest on the WordPress Community podcast hosted by Joost de Valk and Frederick Townes. In the episode, Matt talks about blogging with WordPress, specific plugins he uses, whether or not meta tags matter, the duplicate content issue and 301 permanent redirects. All in all, this was one of the most information packed episodes I’ve listened to in a long time and Matt was a clear and concise speaker. If you’re interested at all in what the head of the spam team for Google has to say, download the show and give it a listen.
Posted in News | Tagged google, matt cutts, podcast, wordpress |
By Jeffro on July 26, 2010
Although Paul Cunningham wanted to hear experiences by those who have used the Genesis theme framework, he ended up starting a conversation that discussed the other frameworks as well. One of the common threads within the conversation is that Justin Tadlock has done a great job with Hybrid as the code is clean with excellent inline documentation. Now that Headway has gone split licensed, I think it’s only a matter of time before it’s included in the list of recommendations from some of the notable consultants within the community. At any rate, check out the discussion if you’re currently in the middle of choosing a theme framework for your next project.
Posted in From The Forum | Tagged framework, genesis, headway, hybrid, Themes |
By Jeffro on July 26, 2010
Peter Westwood, one of the core developers for WordPress announced on his personal blog that he has created a new resource specifically for those looking for information on how to contribute to WordPress. The new site is called Patches Welcome and will provide tutorials, a question and answer list, contributor interviews and more. The idea struck Peter as he was coming home from WordCamp UK. So far, the site features an introduction and a story of Peter’s first patch to WordPress.
While I think the idea for a site like this is great, a part of me feels that this is yet another island that’s been created within the WordPress development community that people will need to be pointed to. However, I’m not sure on where such a site and associated content would fit in. If the redesigned WordPress.org site has an area dedicated to resources such as a directory or some sort of map, it’s going to be pretty extensive with all the little islands extending from the project. I wonder though, perhaps it’s me who needs to organize all of the resources and not them?
Posted in News | Tagged patches, peter westwood, resources, welcome |
By Jeffro on July 25, 2010
About a week ago, Matt Mullenweg published a post over on the newly designed bbPress blog that hints to the platforms future. The topic of discussion was WordPress integration, and what better way to do that than to build an awesome bbPress plugin?
One, it’s an embarrassing pain in the butt to do now. One of the most frequent questions here on our forums. You have to jump through endless loops, and end up with something worse than most of the WP plugins for forums.
Two, we get the benefit of all the WordPress plugins and themes, which vastly outnumber our current options. Want private messaging? Use the BuddyPress plugin for it. Want OpenID? Stats? Sitemaps? There’s a plugin for that. Social network and profile features, in particular, are useful to the future of discussion forums and it’d be silly of us to duplicate that effort.
One of the more interesting points addressed in the post was Matt’s admittance that having BackPress and bbPress together turned out to be a hindrance more than a convenience, not to mention a performance hit.
Full, seamless integration with WordPress is something I’ve discussed for years. (Remember my dream of having each comment section being a mini-bbPress forum, complete with threads?) We’ve just taken a number of unfortunate detours (BackPress) on the way there.
This is an exciting development and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how mini-bbPress forums within the comments actually pans out. I’ve always thought that blog posts are just like forum threads except that the blog author gets to control the initial conversation. Forums on the other hand allow the community to create conversations. So if Matt can find a way to balance the two together, more power to him!
By the way, there are a few vocal people within the bbPress community that are pretty upset by the news that bbPress will be turned into a plugin but I think the benefits outweigh the negatives, as outlined by Matt in the post. However, thanks to the license and the open source nature surrounding the software, anyone will be able to take the core of bbPress, rename it, and continue providing updates as stand alone software. However, Matt did post this within a forum thread that addresses bbPress the plugin and the stand alone product:
Non-plugin bbPress development is going to continue until we have a perfect importer so people will be able to bring their content out of the legacy codebase.
No need to freak out as it will take some time to create that importer. Just make sure if you’re using bbPress to keep an eye on the development blog along with the forums for updates.
Posted in bbPress | Tagged bbPress, forum, future, wordpress |
By Jeffro on July 23, 2010
Over at the Akismet blog, there’s a new post asking users if they appreciate Akismet. The site is currently going through a redesign and new testimonials will be published when it’s finished. Now I know some of you have had your share of bad experiences with Akismet, especially when it comes to leaving comments on someone else’s site and being labeled as spam but in my own experience, Akismet has served me well with very little in the way of problems. So far Akismet has protected this site from 30,739 spam comments already. I’m interested in hearing what the number is like for your site.
Posted in News | Tagged akismet, Plugins, spam, testimonial |
By Jeffro on July 23, 2010
Yesterday was a great day for the WordPress community as Chris Pearson announced that the license for Thesis would be changed so that the PHP would fall under the GPL while the images, CSS, and other stuff would be licensed under something else. While this is not WordPress.org GPL worthy, it is kosher with the license itself and at this point, that’s all that matters. There are a ton of posts all across the community talking about the subject of Thesis, Chris Pearson, Matt Mullenweg, and the GPL but this one by Jolie O’ Dell of Mashable does a great job of summarizing the events that lead up to the split license for Thesis. For further reading and it’s a long post, I suggest this post that talks about the leadership role of Matt during this entire escapade.
It’s evident by this tweet that he simply doesn’t ‘get it‘ and most likely never will because ego or something else blinds the man from reality. What I don’t like is the simple fact that it’s just not right, to create a piece of work that ties into a free and open platform with millions of users and it’s licensed in a way that takes away the very freedoms users of that software have been granted thanks to the GPL license. Developers for WordPress should really get a grasp of the basic concepts of the license that WordPress has and if they don’t like it, develop for a platform that has a license that conforms to their thoughts, beliefs, or way they want to do things. WordPress is GPLv2 and it’s never going to change so they can either go with the flow or find some other platform to work on. It’s aggravating to me to think that going against the GPL within the WordPress community makes any kind of business sense at all but if you develop a decent product, have great marketing along with good support and a naive userbase who doesn’t know jack about licenses and the freedoms granted with the GPL, I guess you can get by for awhile.
So, congratulations to Thesis for coming into the realm of sanity with a split license model but as far as I’m concerned, the theme doesn’t exist and my feelings for the individual have not changed either.
Posted in News | Tagged gpl, license, Themes, thesis |
By Jeffro on July 22, 2010
Drew Strojny who operates The Theme Foundry and is the author behind the Traction Pro theme which I reviewed here, has published the back story of how he came to be involved with WordPress theme designing as well as how he founded his commercial theme company. From football player to working day and night to put food on the table, Drew’s story is one of inspiration to anyone else thinking about jumping into the warm pool water that is the WordPress commercial theme market. Congrats Drew on your recent and hopefully, continued success.
Posted in Themes | Tagged commercial, foundry, Themes
By Jeffro on July 21, 2010
WordPress community member Kris Young has registered the domain WP-Hackers.com which so far, points to a holding page. The question Kris asks on the WP-Hackers mailing list is what do to with it. His idea so far is to create a PasetBin like site where users could comment on code snippets until an agreed upon solution was met which would then lock the snippet and be used as a resource. This code snippet could then be linked to when someone asks a repeated question or one similar to it.
I’ve always thought about the idea of a website that just has code snippets where a user could copy and paste them into the appropriate location and it would work. Back in the days of editing archive.php, single.php, etc, I really thought the idea of some sort of code bank would have been awesome. Let’s say I was editing my theme and needed a code snippet that displayed comments in a certain way, I could look through the comments category and look for code snippets for the desired functionality I was looking for. Ideally though, this information would be better served as being within the Codex than on a seperate site.
If you were lucky enough to own WP-Hackers.com, what would you do with the domain to make it useful for the WordPress community?
Posted in News | Tagged domains, hackers, website, wordpress |