Andrew Nacin who is one of the core developers of WordPress gave a presentation at the most recent meetup in New York City covering WordPress 3.3. The video is 35 minutes in length with Andrew going in-depth on many of the features that 3.3 will have such as the admin bar, drag and drop media uploading, post names for permalinks and more. The video is best viewed at full screen. Thanks to Steve Bruner for the hat tip.
WPWeekly Episode 116 – WordPress And Drupal Founders Share Stage
This weeks edition of the show features a one hour presentation with the founders of Drupal and WordPress together on one stage to talk about Open Source. This presentation took place on October 6th through the 7th, 2011 at an event called Schipulcon which is a web marketing conference. Unfortunately due to audio problems, I had to cut out the first 5 minutes of the presentation so your ears don’t fall off. Special thanks goes out to Katie and the Schipulcon group for providing me this audio file as well as the permission to play it through the WordPress Weekly stream. The next live show is scheduled for Friday, October 28th at 9PM Eastern.
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Automattic Hires Philip Arthur Moore On As New Theme Wrangler
Philip Arthur Moore who previously worked for WordPress themeing company Graph Paper Press is now under employment by Automattic as a theme wrangler. Arthur has published a great story on how he’s been able to reach this point in his life.
The first projects I completed for Automattic as a trial Theme Wrangler were .org to .com conversions of the WordPress themes Nishita and Bold Life5. The responses to them made me feel wonderful and I hope that a year from now I have many more theme conversions, as well as theme creations, under my belt at Automattic.
Congrats Philip, you’ve joined one heck of a company. By the way, if you’re reading this and thinking about applying for a job at Automattic, the good news is that they’re hiring. Just ignore the pictures of the Pier 38 Automattic Lounge as it’s no longer in existence.
WordPress.com Blogs To Get More Advertising
Federated Media in partnership with Automattic has signed a deal to sell advertising to potentially 25 million websites spread across WordPress.com. This isn’t the first time the two have partnered up as FM and Automattic have been launching a series of websites for specific subjects such as FoodPress and EcoPress. This deal presents Federated Media the opportunity to sell highly relevant advertising in mass. For example, Automattic most likely has details that allow them to know the best performing sites on specific subjects such as automotive, food, tech, etc. This data can be used to display relevant advertising from FM so that the content and the advertising are related to each other.
One of the quotes I’m seeing attributed to Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic rubs me the wrong way.
Automattic’s WordPress software supports 25 million blogs with a combined readership of 300 million unique visitors per month — a total of 15 percent of the web sites on the Internet, Schneider said.
First off, the only thing of Automattics’ is WordPress.com. Secondly, while it seems like Toni is talking about 25 million blogs on WordPress.com, how can that be 15% of the internet? That’s like saying 15% of the internet calls WordPress.com home and I highly doubt that. The only way in which that makes sense is if you combine the sites using WordPress the self-hosted software and those hosted on WordPress.com.
Based on the press release on MarketWatch, the advertising will be Opt-In. One of the most important questions that has not been answered is how revenue sharing will work. One would hope that those who are creating the content will end up getting a small slice of the pie. If not, it’s a bad deal all the way around.
A First For Automattic – Investment In OwnLocal
Automattic which is the company behind WordPress.com and is usually the one being invested in has made an investment themselves in a company called OwnLocal based out of Austin, Texas. The company has existed since 2007 and is built around publications by providing the tools necessary for newspapers to own their local market, hence the name. Liz Gannes of AllThingsD was the first to break the story and managed to get this quote out of Matt regarding the investment.
Their approach is highly complementary to our own goals of making it easy for anyone in the world to have a beautiful Web site
It’s an interesting investment considering local newspapers appear to be dying by the day. But OwnLocal is doing so well that despite the total amount of 2 million dollars thus far in funding, they are currently supporting their staff of 20 based on the revenue they are generating.
Related But Not Required Reading:
OwnLocal nabs new funding from Automattic to resurrect newspaper revenues
Ownlocal scores funds to get small firms online
Chip Bennett Hits 1,000 Theme Reviews
Just a shout out and congratulations to Chip Bennett who recently hit the 1,000 theme reviews milestone. To see each one of his reviews, check out the ongoing list on Trac for the theme repository. Thanks Chip and the rest of the review team for providing your time and knowledge to making the theme repository a better place. .
If you want to learn more about the theme review team, you should listen to episode 106 of WordPress weekly where most of the episode centers around the topic.
Prevent Skype Overwriting Phone Numbers In WordPress Themes
I didn’t know this was an actual problem until I read the advice on WPBeginner.com. Apparently, some WordPress themes can break when Skype changes a phone number into a number you can dial with Skype. The fix is a simple one liner that you add to the HEAD section of the theme. Personally, I don’t use Skype to call out and change my options to prevent the over riding phone numbers in the first place. ∞
WordPress Not Likely To Participate In Google Code-In
While a decision has not yet been finalized, judging by the responses so far on this blog post discussing the pros and cons of participating, it looks like WordPress may not be part of the event this year. Google Code In is an annual event sponsored by Google that is aimed at students between the ages of 13 and 17. The goal of the program is to encourage youths to participate in open source which is in contrast to Google Summer of Code which is aimed at university students. We’ll know whether or not WordPress is part of the program either through the WordPress.org website or when Google announces the participating mentoring organizations on November 9th.
How To Insert Links Inside Of Image Captions
Occasionally, I ‘ll take a look through the WordPress Ideas site to see what kind of activity is going on. The other night, I discovered an idea that immediately lit the light bulb over my head, mostly because I couldn’t believe that it was not already a feature in WordPress. Approximately one year ago, Jeremy Clarke submitted the idea to allow URLs to be inserted into image captions with the primary goal of making it easy to attribute images to their source. I’ve personally come across the issue where instead of applying the image credits within the image caption, I have to add a note somewhere within the post which is stupid since image captions are the PERFECT spot for attribution. Fast forward to October 18th, 2011 with WordPress 3.3. knocking on the door and this ability is still not present within WordPress. However, there are a couple of things that point to this feature being added soon as the status for the idea is marked Good Idea! We’re Working On It. There is also a ticket in trac, #18311 that has a patch but is currently awaiting review.
While there is not a native, user-friendly way of adding links to image captions, there are a couple of ways in which it can be accomplished. The first is by using ‘ instead of ” when entering the code for your link. However, when switching between the code and visual editors, the link is erased leaving text in place of the link.
Second, you can try using the code provided by Kaspars of Konstruktors.com inside of your functions.php file which will add a “Source URL” field to every image that is uploaded through the WordPress media library. When using this method, it’s important to note that the source URL will be visible only if you specify an image caption upon inserting the image. If implemented correctly, it will look something like this.
Third, you can try using the Links In Captions Plugin by Zack Katz. After activation, you can add links to captions via the following format: {link url=”http://www.example.com”}Anchor text here{/link} Two benefits to this plugin is that it has support for the Target and Rel attributes and you can use shortcodes within the caption area.
Personally, I think Kaspars solution is the most user-friendly after the functions.php file is setup correctly. I’d like to see him package that as a plugin so more users can take advantage of it as it looks as though it was part of the media manager all along. However, the best scenario is for this functionality to some how end up within the core of WordPress. If you have the know-how, please consider contributing to the ticket or writing a better patch to get this into core.
Validation And Sanitization Primer
Daniel Bachhuber who works with WordPress.com VIP Services has published a guide covering some key differences with data validation and sanitization. His explanation is not so technical that even I understood it for the most part. If you’re a developer, definitely give the guide a read and give Daniel some feedback. ∞