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WordPress Dev Chat For 4-01-10

WordPress Dev Chat For 4-01-10

By Jeffro on April 1, 2010

wordpresslogoStatus And Schedule Update
Jane mentioned that they are behind. There is one month left till the launch of 3.0 unless it gets pushed back. Right now, menus is still being worked on with a chance at having them finished by Monday. If the team could do a massive punt, ID major bugs, start reviewing/testing all existing patches 3.0 could go beta next week. However, there was a 6 week planned beta/RC to allow some leeway in case things were not finished on time. Westi does not think 3 weeks is a long enough beta period. It looks like tomorrow, there will be an announcement of a pre-beta to get people into testing mode.

So far, VIPs have been testing a WP.com merged branch of 3.0 with good results. The plan is to have beta 1 Friday, April 2nd and beta 2 sometime next week.

Core Plugins
Not much has been worked on since the last update. Westi has some code pending plus he wants to review some other code and then he will push out Alphas. UI For the core plugins will most likely come in 3.1, not in 3.0. Core plugins for the rest of the WordPress 3.0 dev cycle will most likely not get much more help.

GSoC
They have scheduled IRC chats on Sunday and Wednesday in #wordpress-gsoc. Students have come and gone throughout the week to ask questions and get feedback. The application period ends April 9th. So far, 10 proposals have been submitted with more expected before the 9th. Two ideas have been removed from the list. User roles and Widget repository as they are too political. But, a couple of new ideas have been added to the Codex page. The application template has also been updated to be a little more formal. Students and those interested can follow WPGSOC on Twitter to keep updated.

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 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.

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Movie Night At The Tavern – Poisonous People

Movie Night At The Tavern – Poisonous People

By Jeffro on April 1, 2010

I just finished watching a great video presentation by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman that discusses open source projects and poisonous people. I have seen this video and idea referred to numerous times but when it was referenced today in the WordPress Hackers Mailing list, I finally decided to sit down and devote an hour to watching the entire presentation.

While listening to the presentation, there were a number of instances in which I could relate certain things that have happened in the WordPress community to poisonous behaviour. I also had a better idea as to who some of these poisonous people are in the community or have been at some point. My verdict is that everyone who participates in the WordPress community or any online community for that matter should watch this video and then do a self review. I know there have been a few times especially with certain topics on the Tavern forum where I’ve harbored poisonous behavior but that is the not the goal of this website. I’ve stated this before and it’s worth saying again, WPTavern.com does not exist to poison the project or to inject conspiracies, hatred, or disgust into the project. It exists out of my enthusiastic views and uses of the software and the community surrounding it. I think a lot of people could do better to analyze how they discuss ideas or how they apply criticism without insults or taking it to a personal level. I also think there are a couple of people that could learn how to not respond to everything time and time again as if it’s their way or the high way.

Ultimately what this video showed me is that I have a lot to learn when it comes to the human element of open source software and managing a community.

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New Home For bbPress Development Chatter

New Home For bbPress Development Chatter

By Jeffro on April 1, 2010

Gautam who is a member of the WPTavern forum recently let us know that he has setup a bbPress Developers area for bbPress developers to chat about developments in the software similar to how WordPress has one. If you are a member of the WPTavern forums and are also one of the few who decided to help regenerate the bbPress project, send him a private message with your email address and he will add you as a member to the blog.

When asked whether the site was endorsed by Matt or considered official, Gautam responded that Matt doesn’t really know about the site just yet. I imagine he will now.

While we are on the topic of bbPress, might as well provide an update as to what’s been going on. As far as I can tell, there has not been a developer chat since January 13th, 2010 and a few other people have noticed this as well. The bbPress forums are still pretty active. In fact, many people are now asking support questions regarding bbPress with BuddyPress.

There is a thread in the tavern forum specifically regarding the off and on activity process surrounding the bbPress project. In this thread, I asked two individuals that initially showed quite a bit of interest in helping to regenerate the project why their activity has faded.

Jeffro – Considering you two were part of the rally to get things back on track for the project, are you both still interested in helping out? Are you guys waiting on direction on what to do and where to go from Matt?

Ryan Hellyer – I wanted to help, but it seemed that after the first IRC meeting or so it was looking like the project was going to just stagnate again, so I haven’t taken much notice since.

Justin Tadlock – Same here. I’ve even went so far as to code my own mini-forum using WP’s custom post types and taxonomies. It’s actually not too difficult. But, I lost the code on a recent computer crash. I might revisit the idea though.

Hopefully at some point, bbPress gets the ball rolling on a consistent basis. Perhaps that will happen once bbPress is turned into a WordPress plugin.

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Interview With Brian Casel Of ThemeJam.com

Interview With Brian Casel Of ThemeJam.com

By Jeffro on March 31, 2010

Since this Saturdays show of WordPress Weekly will be focusing on commercial themes, I thought it would be a good idea to interview someone who is just getting their feet wet in the market. Brian Casel is a freelance web designer based in New York City. He’s the founder of ThemeJam and CasJam Media. Brian loves to talk about freelancing and WordPress on Twitter @CasJam.

There is almost a WordPress commercial theme store on every corner, why have you decided to jump into this market?
No doubt about it. This market is extremely saturated. But I actually think this is a *good* thing. Healthy competition shows there’s a thriving market for quality WordPress products and support. I was inspired by some of the great theme companies (Woothemes, Press75 /Theme Garden, Obox-Design, to name a few) and felt this was a good space to put my skills to work. As a freelance web designer specializing in WordPress, this was a logical next step for me.

Since you’re just getting started, what are some of the biggest walls that stand in your way to becoming successful?
I’d say the biggest challenge would be marketing a new brand in a saturated market. The challenge is to find new ways to get the word out about ThemeJam, other than the traditional methods, where most of the competition is. My hope is to slowly build a strong following based on personal recommendations from customers.

What does your company/themes offer that makes you different than the other guys?
One way we’re differentiating ourselves is by offering private 1-on-1 consultations. For the month of April 2010, every theme purchase comes with
a free 1 hour consultation. Details here. I’ve had success in my freelance web design business by providing great support/consultation and I’m hoping to translate that personalized approach over to ThemeJam. We offer matching site templates and email templates to go with our WordPress themes. The idea is you can easily have consistent design/branding across all aspects of your web presence.

In terms of pricing – we don’t have a “single” or “developer” package for our WordPress themes. One price, unlimited use, lifetime support, and they come packaged with the PSD.

Do you think there is room for a few more WordPress commercial theme companies?
I do. I believe as long as a company is willing to invest the time and effort to produce quality products and support, it’s possible to make it work. You’ve got to really be passionate about it and ready to work hard. You can’t half-ass it or be unresponsive because this will show in the quality of your product.

When analyzing the marketplace and the competition, what are some of the things you discovered that you could capitalize on with ThemeJam?
I wouldn’t say that I look for shortcomings of other theme companies or aim to bring down the competition. I love keeping tabs and seeing what others come up with. It’s inspiring and keeps things interesting.

I think there’s something to be said for choice when talking about design. Just as designers have varying styles, customers have varying tastes. WordPress themes are a very subjective thing. One person might love one particular theme, while another scrolls right past it.

In the end, it’s all about the design. Flexibility and options are important, but ultimately the design has to be just right for the customer’s website. So I just try to develop my own style, design themes that I think could work for a variety of customers, and provide the best support possible.

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Automattic Launches VaultPress – No BackupBuddy Killer

Automattic Launches VaultPress – No BackupBuddy Killer

By Jeffro on March 31, 2010

The biggest news of the week so far in the WordPress world happened yesterday when Automattic launched a new service called VaultPress. Instead of explaining what VaultPress does, Matt Mullenweg published a comment on Techcrunch that sums it up nicely.

  • It can handle any amount of stuff. For example my site (ma.tt) has about 30,000 photos on it, totaling about 33 gigabytes.
  • It’s an all-in-one package. You don’t need one thing to back up your database, one thing for your files, one thing for your themes, et cetera.
  • It’s real-time. You make a post and it’s in the cloud seconds later.
  • It’s enterprise-grade and not reliant on one provider, including us. Your site is stored on no fewer than 2 cloud services in addition to our own copies.
  • It going to do more than just backup. The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.
  • There’s even more I can’t talk about yet.

When asked whether VaultPress was designed for self hosted WordPress sites or WordPress.com users, Toni Schneider responded with:

VaultPress will be available for WP.org installs (and was in fact primarily developed for WP.org users).

This should help mitigate the confusion. Also further in the comments on the initial launch post, Matt said that VaultPress is technically on a different infrastructure than WordPress.com.

I didn’t see VaultPress coming but it doesn’t surprise me that something like it was launched. I mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter that I noticed a bunch of backup plugins and services specifically tailored to WordPress showing up in my FeedReader. In fact, I reviewed one of them called Backupify. VaultPress is in the middle of stiff competition when you consider that most webhosts enable backups through cPanel, or free WordPress plugins that back up the database of the website or, commercial plugins such as Backup Buddy which I’ll continue to use in favor of VaultPress because I feel that VaultPress doesn’t take away what a good product BackupBuddy is. Also, Backup Buddy has the ability to make migrating a site from one host to another as easy as pie. Right now, VaultPress only backs up and restores to the same site.

The one feature that intrigues me is that VaultPress will be able to monitor your site:

The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.

I know Matt would love to have a way to push a button and have a bunch of sites upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Well, this gets him part of the way there and there is cash involved to boot! What I don’t want to happen is some sort of major delay between the 0 day fixes being available for all WordPress users versus those who have paid for that type of comfort. I doubt that will happen but I think the benefit here is that by using VaultPress, you’ll be one of the first to get the fixes so you don’t have to worry about any upgrades.

It’s interesting to note that there is no price listed anywhere on the site. That’s because the service is in beta. In fact, if you browse to their beta application page, you’ll notice that one of the fields specifically asks how much you would be willing to pay per month to cover all of your WordPress powered sites. I put in $5.00 per site because it seems reasonable to me. $60.00 per year is not much to ask for when you consider everything that is going on behind the scenes of VaultPress to make sure it doesn’t disappear like other companies that couldn’t find a way to stay in business.

However, I hope that the team at PluginBuddy.com does not get discouraged because of the launch of VaultPress. Right now, their backup solution offers more bang for the buck although without the convenience of having the data in the cloud. Their price is only $25.00 and that covers two websites. This price also covers upgrades to the plugin and one year of support. $25.00 for an entire year. VaultPress will need to be pretty darn cheap or offer as many features as Backup Buddy in order to be considered an awesome commercial alternative.

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Review Of Traction Pro By The Theme Foundry

Review Of Traction Pro By The Theme Foundry

By Jeffro on March 30, 2010

At A Glance:

Traction is a 2 column theme with three different sidebars for widgets. This particular theme features post thumbnail support, a featured post slider, and a nice looking color scheme composed of dark gray, light gray, and blue. The Theme Foundry is owned and operated by Drew Strojny and is the successor to what used to be Jestro Themes or Themes By Jestro. In February of 2009, the Vigilance theme developed by Drew was added to WordPress.com as one of the many themes to choose from.

License:

All themes available for purchase are licensed under the GPL.

Installation:

Installation was really easy although you have to install two themes as Traction comes with its own Parent theme and Child theme.

Configuration And Use:

I love it when I install a new theme and it doesn’t wreak havoc with the plugins installed on my site. When I activated Traction Pro, everything fell into place without too much hassle. In fact, without configuring anything, I could have started publishing content right away but instead of ending the review early, we have to dive into the nuts and bolts of the theme options.

Right off the bat, I enjoyed the look and feel of the theme options as they meshed in with the WordPress back-end. Instead of the tabbed approach, each option panel slides down when clicked on, then slides up when clicked again. The first option to configure is the Custom Logo Image. Traction Pro gives you the chance to specify whether you want to use a custom logo image or not. Unfortunately, this panel does not provide a way to upload the custom header image. Instead, you must upload it to the specified location and then provide the name of the image file. You can also configure the ALT attribute for the image and choose whether you want to display the site tag line below the logo.

Next up is the featured slider. I can turn the slider on or off, have it auto start, configure the delay time for the auto start to occur, the slide animation speed and the fade speed. I’m disappointed in this slider implementation because there is too much work involved when using it. In order for the slider to shine, you need to use a custom field called short-description which is used to show a description on the button within the sidebar of the slider. Then you need to use the read more tag so that the entire post does not show up within the slider area. Fortunately, post thumbnails within the slider content are handled automatically. Another benefit to this particular implementation is that the slider is not limited to pages or posts. Instead, anything that is stickied will show up.

I personally enjoy the default color scheme of Traction Pro but if you’re not a fan of blue, this theme ships with two additional color schemes. Red and Green.

Traction Pro also gives you a few options to configure the navigation of the site which I hope to see disappear from all themes once WordPress 3.0 hits the public. You can hide all pages, exclude specific pages, hide all categories, exclude specific categories and hide the home navigation menu item. Those of you who have read previous theme reviews know that I dislike excluding items by ID number. There is no reason to use this method when there are better ones available that eliminate the need to know the ID number.

Next we have the built-in advertising system. Traction Pro has two distinct advertising spots. The right sidebar and within the header. While configuring the advertising sections, there is a theme within this theme that I don’t like. Instead of providing a browse button where I can upload a 125X125 or 468X60 image which will be uploaded to the correct location, I have to use an FTP client to upload the images to the specified folder then add those image names to the option fields. While these things are not that hard to do, I feel all of those steps are unnecessary and could be done without the need of an FTP client from within the options panel. This advertising manager is bare bones. I’m beginning to question why theme authors even bother adding something like this to the theme if they are not going to go all out and provide a great manager. If commercial theme authors are adding bare bones advertising managers just to list it as a feature that is part of the theme, that is the wrong reason to have it. I digress.

Traction Pro also has an options panel dedicated to enabling various subscribe links through Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. All that’s needed is the link to your account.

The sidebar also has its own configuration panel as you can disable the sidebox, apply custom code to the sidebox, enable the link to the newsletter, easily apply your Feedburner feed to the newsletter link, and give your feed a title. The sidebox is an area reserved above all of the widgets that are displayed in the right-hand sidebar. It’s nice that you can easily apply a custom image, some text from your about me page or anything else in this area.

The next configuration box gives you the chance to configure your Twitter account details if you selected to show that link within the Subscribe Links option panel. The last configuration box for Traction Pro deals with the footer. Here, you can adjust the text that is displayed in the About box which shows up in the lower left hand corner of the site, apply a copyright notice and paste in analytics code. I think it would have been better to substitute the About box with another sidebar for widgets. After all, that’s what About pages are for.

Support:

Support for The Theme Foundry themes is conducted via a forum, tutorials, videos from WordPress.TV and theme specific explanations. The forum is quite active with already 45 topics listed for Traction alone.

Conclusion:

I’m always impressed when I can activate a theme and meshes well with my 30 active plugins. It’s not too often a theme does that these days considering their complexity and unique way of displaying content. Traction Pro has a clean, sleek look that can be used out of the box with minimal fuss. I think there are a bunch of things that could be improved throughout the theme configuration process in order to give this theme a more polished, PRO feel. I felt as though with all the uploading, finding ID numbers, having to do things outside of the theme, all took away from feeling as though this were PRO. However, at just $48.00 for this particular theme, it’s a good product for the price with support to match. Drew does great work and I hope to see refinements of Traction Pro at some point in the future.

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Woopra 1.4 Released

Woopra 1.4 Released

By Jeffro on March 29, 2010

Woopra Client 1.4 has been released to the public after a few months of beta testing. This new version includes a number of new features and enhancements. For instance, Woopra users now have the ability to embed a chat widget onto their site that enables inbound chatting whereas before, it was only outbound. Notifications have also been reworked so they are a scrollable list. A small but valued addition to the client is a usage meter. This lets paid users know how much of their monthly allotment they have used. Improved firewall connections as well as IP range filtering to exclude visitors have also been added.

The next time you open Woopra, you should receive notice that the update is available. I will not be adding the inbound chat feature to WPTavern.com because I use Twitter for that. It’s one less thing that has to be loaded. By the way, if you want to see what Woopra looks like on a 23 Inch Widescreen monitor, check out the following screenshot. Please ignore the WordPress Porn search query in the searches box.

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Classic And Kubrick Have Left The Building

Classic And Kubrick Have Left The Building

By Jeffro on March 29, 2010

It’s officially happened. Classic and Kubrick have been removed from WordPress as per ticket 10654. We all know by now that WordPress 3.0 will ship with Twenty Ten which is the new default theme. Those who are upgrading WordPress either manually or automatically will receive Classic, WordPress Default and TwentyTen. Those who install WordPress 3.0 as a new install will only receive Twenty Ten. Those who use Subversion though will see both classic and kubrick be removed the next time they update.

Classics New Home – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/classic
Defaults New Home – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/default

The goal is to try and get everyone who is running either Classic or Default to upgrade their themes to use the ones located on the theme repository as 3.1 may be the version where these two themes disappear for good. Is it a sad day or a celebration?

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The Skies The Limit For Freelancers And WordPress

The Skies The Limit For Freelancers And WordPress

By Jeffro on March 29, 2010

Brian Casel has a great post over on DesignM.ag that showcases the various opportunities that exist to run a freelance business around WordPress. Developers, designers, and copywriters all have a ton of opportunities to make money around WordPress. I suppose I would fit into the freelance journalist category even though I don’t consider myself to be a journalist. I know I’ve mentioned WP125 before to manage advertising on your site but Brian linked to one other advertising system that may suit your needs called Advertising Manager. Based on the features page, this looks to be a nifty plugin. I might review this at some point in the future.

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Toni Schneider From The Freemium Summit

Toni Schneider From The Freemium Summit

By Jeffro on March 29, 2010


Back on March 11th, I mentioned that Toni Schneider would be one of the guest speakers at the Freemium Summit held in San Francisco on March 26th. The summit focused on the freemium business model. That is, offering a free service with the chance to upgrade and that upgrade costing money. While GigaOm has a nice overview of the Summit from the various panelists, WebNewser took a keen interest in Toni Schneider’s session.

The thing that is most interesting to me is that WordPress.com does not work on a tiered model. Instead, everything is individualized à la carte style so that users can pick and choose the features they want. This enables WordPress.com to routinely release new features that they can charge for. I also like their method of only charging for the hard stuff although some would argue that editing CSS is not that hard and should be a free feature. However, you only have to hang out in the WordPress IRC channel for awhile or browse around the WordPress.org forums to see that many people have difficulty editing CSS.

A little insight into the amount of revenue Automattic makes by charging for premium features on WordPress.com.

His company now makes 40 percent of its revenue from premium services like domain mapping, with the remainder from ad sales and enterprise products. But he said the problem with this approach is customers may not know of services they could receive, because it’s harder to market them individually.

I also think some of the points raised by the commenters on the GigaOm article are worth reading. The Freemium model doesn’t work for everyone but more and more companies are going down that road. As a customer, I like companies that use this model. Generally, I get a good enough feel for the product or service throughout the life of the free version that at some point if I need an additional feature or some other value add on, I won’t have to think so hard about giving them my money. Actually, this sounds a lot like Trialware. Would that make a good comparison between the two models or are they the same thing?

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