It’s been awhile since I’ve visited WPDevel.WordPress.com which is the home of WordPress development updates and I’m happily surprised to see so much content from the folks who make things happen. The different teams that are working on various aspects of WordPress 3.4 are doing a good job of keeping not only the other team members up to date, but they are being transparent so that the public can view the progress and figure out what is going on. I hope the amount of communication on the site continues, the more transparent the merrier.
Creating A Simpler Login URL
While most users of WordPress will know that to login to the back-end, you’ll need to visit /WP-Admin/ or wp-login.php, but what if you could change that to make it simpler to remember? WPBeginner has a small tutorial complete with a code snippet that you place within your .htaccess file that enables you to rewrite the WordPress Login URL into a custom URL. Telling clients to visit yoursite.com/login is a lot easier than that gobbily gook everyone has to deal with by default. Personally, I’ve just bookmarked the WP-Admin URL for my site and use that instead of remembering anything.
Getting Started With Designing Your Site
BloggingPro.com has a good starter article on tips for designing your blog. Within the article, Amanda mentions that while most bloggers get the writing aspect of the job, design is another beast entirely.
When people talk about the perfect blog, they always focus on content. The content of a blog is obviously extremely important, and in most cases the content is what decides whether a blog will be successful or flop like a fish out of water. However, the design of a blog is also extremely important. Many bloggers understand the writing aspect of the job, but it’s the blog design that causes frustration. Because creating a blog involves a little bit of web development and web hosting knowledge, so many writers feel a huge weight on their shoulders. Once bloggers have WordPress and other plugins mastered, they sometimes don’t even know where to begin when it comes to design.
She’s dead on. When I first launched WPTavern.com, I felt brave enough to hack away at a theme’s layout I enjoyed and applied my colors via the CSS file for the sites first design. It came out dark, with hues of grey and blue with colorful links. Not the prettiest site on the web but as a personal preference, I liked it. Then, I started searching around at the various WordPress commercial themes and noticed quite a few that looked like they would be perfect for the site. However, when I purchased the theme and tried to apply my vision, it never seemed to work out. I think I’ve spent about three to four hundred dollars on themes that I thought would be perfect but ended up being too complicated or not what I had in mind.
I cringe at the thought of redesigning WPTavern.com by myself because I’d much rather focus on content versus the design. I’ve dipped my hand into the design area enough times to know that I’m a stones throw from creating designs that are as wacky as the world of Dr. Suess.
How many themes have you purchased to fulfill your vision but ended up putting them up on the shelf?
Theme Hybrid 3.0 Now Live
Justin Tadlock has published ThemeHybrid 3.0. The site has been rebuilt from the ground up and sports a new coat of paint. Amongst the changes, one of the most notable if the restructuring of the documentation area. Previously, Justin was using around 150 different pages whereas now, he’s implemented custom post types. As an aside, congratulations to Justin for developing and releasing Retro-Fitted, a theme for WordPress.com.
Theme Developers: Your 1,000 Hour Head Start
Theme developers will now have access to a cool new starter theme that the WordPress.com theme team will be using on a routine basis when developing new themes. Not only is this great news for ALL theme developers, but how they are going about it makes me think they are also using this opportunity to experiment with GIT instead of working purely with SVN. I think some would argue that this is what the default theme should have been like within WordPress from the beginning but looking at how successful Twenty Ten has become, perhaps it was’nt such a bad idea.
WP Pro Business Giving Away $9,000 Worth Of WP Stuff
This is one of the largest WordPress giveaways I’ve seen in a long time with a total value of around $9,000.00. Adam Warner formerly of WPModder.com is now concentrating his efforts on WP Pro Business which is a website aimed at providing the tools and knowledge to help propel businesses and individuals to success using WordPress. Adam explains the giveaway in a little more detail via the following video.
Adam is a good guy and did a great job with WPModder.com but if you’re wondering how he’ll use the data obtained from the giveaway, the following text can be read on the bottom of the giveaway page:
Information is collected through the supplied Rafflecopter.com widgets and (an optional) email subscription form. Entry emails are collected in accordance with Rafflecopter.com and AWeber.com terms and conditions. By entering this giveaway you agree to receive email communications from giveaway sponsors including prize notifications and new product updates.
You’ll have to decide before you enter on whether you want to go through the hassle and delete your email address from each sponsors list if you don’t win. Hopefully, it’s as simple as deleting one email address from WP Pro Business and that will cover the gamut for all future communications. Then again, you might not mind receiving an email here and there from the people sponsoring this giveaway.
Your Chance To Work With WordPress In Oslo, Norway
Ryan Hellyer who has been a long time member of the WPTavern community has given me a heads up that Metronet is currently looking for a WordPress Code Poet. Sounds like any other typical WordPress job posting right? Well, that is until you read the following lines within the job posting: “The opportunity to live and work in Norway, the best country in the world according to many surveys. Assistance with relocation and accommodation.“. So if you’re a WordPress Code Poet looking for an opportunity to work in Oslo, Norway this may be the best chance you’ll get! I’ve also learned that Ronald Huereca who wrote the book, WordPress And Ajax and who is the author of the Ajax Edit Comments plugin is a part of this development company.
If you’re interested in the job opening, you should highly consider the fact that they are only looking for people who are willing to relocate to Oslo, Norway at this point.
Congrats To Emil Uzelac
For recently joining the 700 club. That number represents the amount of themes he has reviewed since joining the WordPress theme review team! Thanks goes out to Emil for volunteering his time to make the theme repository a better place. Out of curiosity, after reviewing 700 themes, I wonder what sort of patterns or similarities exist between them all that Emil could share.
If you’re interested in joining the theme review team, read the following guide to get started.
Phoning Home To Plugin Authors
Reading through the WordPress Hackers Mailing list, Nuno Morgadinho wanted to know how to track user engagement with a commercial plugin that is being developed. The metrics that they were most interested in were the following:
- how much time has the user spent playing with my plugin since plugin activation ; - what is the normal usage of the plugin (once a month? once a week? once a day?) ; - while navigating through the plugin does the user go back and forth a lot of does he follow a certain pattern?; - etc.
While the developer would like to use this information to improve the experience of using the plugin, I can already see the people with pitchforks lining up to take this developer out if were not done correctly. Thankfully, Eric Mann has already chimed in with words of warning about how users do not like to find out about third party tracking, especially after it’s already occurred without knowing about it up front. Personally, I have no problem with what the plugin author is trying to achieve as long as I have the option to say no aka, Opt-Out or more preferably, Opt-In. I’m willing to bet that most WordPress website owners feel the same way. If not, feel free to tell me within the comments of this post.
However, I have to point out that according to the WordPress Plugin Repository Guidelines, plugins are not allowed to “phone home” without the user’s informed consent.
No “phoning home” without user’s informed consent. This seemingly simple rule actually covers several different aspects:
No unauthorized collection of user data. For example, sending the admin’s email address back to your own servers without permission of the user is not allowed; but asking the user for an email address and collecting if they choose to submit it is fine. All actions taken in this respect MUST be of the user’s doing, not automatically done by the plugin.
All images and scripts shown should be part of the plugin. These should be loaded locally. If the plugin does require that data is loaded from an external site (such as blocklists) this should be made clear in the plugin’s admin screens or description. The point is that the user must be informed of what information is being sent where.
In general, things like banner or text link advertising should not be anywhere in a plugin, including on its settings screen. Advertising on settings screens is generally ineffective anyway, as ideally users rarely visit these screens, and the advertising is low quality because the advertising systems cannot see the page content to determine good ads. So they’re best just left off entirely. Putting links back to your own site or to your social-network of choice is fine. If the plugin does include advertising from a third party service, then it must default to completely disabled, in order to prevent tracking information from being collected from the user without their consent. This is the method commonly known as “opt-in”.
Note that if you do include what we consider to be “advertising spam”, or attempt to game somebody else’s advertising system, then we will not only remove your plugin, but also report your code to the advertising system’s abuse mechanism as well. We do not react kindly to spam. Don’t try it.
After reading those guidelines concerning phoning home, consider that WordPress itself phones home data without the user ever having a chance to make an informed decision on whether to allow it or not. If you have time and want to read a passionate and heated discussion centered around this very topic, I encourage you to read the following forum thread – WordPress And Phone Home, started in 2009 by Elpie. Within the thread are arguments on what should and shouldn’t be collected, how disclosure should be handled, what is and is not publicly available information, last but not least, reasons as to why what WordPress does and how it does it is ok. While I’m a big fan of the repository guidelines, I don’t understand why plugin authors have to phone home with informed user consent while WordPress can phone home without informed user consent. What’s the difference between the two?
If you’re interested in knowing what data is sent back from a WordPress installation back to the mothership, Eplie has laid out a detailed post showing exactly what is sent.
*UPDATE* According to Otto, Core, Theme, and Plugin update checks do not phone home to WordPress.org.
