“2001 is just a visionary film in every single way,” Heilemann said. “There’s something about it that transcends every other film.”
Naming the template Kubrick “seemed like a cool way” to honor the director, although Heilemann still has some reservations. “It seems almost blasphemous,” he said. “I would hate for someone to Google ‘Kubrick’ and find my theme.”
Although I hate the site this story was published on, it tells a good story of how the Kubrick theme came to exist.
Shortly after I started the WordPress Weekly podcast, I got in touch with Brandon Rosage who was the webmaster of MVN.com. MVN which stands for Most Valuable Network was built around WordPress MU with a bunch of customizations. I interviewed Brandon in episode 8 where we talked about what goes on behind the scenes on a network filled with a bunch of sports blogs and how they tied them altogether throughout the site.
I learned today that back on December 7th 2009, the owner of MVN Evan Brunell, announced that MVN would be closing its doors and ceasing to exist at all. It’s relevant to WordPress MU since this was a large collection of sports blogs in one place and was linked to my many different sports authorities. Sad to see it go but it’s uplifting to see that all of the comments on that post are high accolades from those who wrote for the network. You don’t see that often!
Best of luck to Evan and I wonder what Brandon is up to these days. Would have been interesting to hear how they were planning the merge of the code bases.
Raphael Mudge announced on the AfterTheDeadline blog today a pretty cool bit of news. He has released an AtD Bookmarklet that enables you to have the ability to check spelling, grammar, and misused words from your browser. The AtD button appears magically on every text field displayed on a web page.
A couple things worth noting about the bookmarklet. It currently does not work in Google Chrome. The bookmarklet is limited to 7,000 characters of text. It only works for TEXTAREA form elements and does not support WSYIWYG editors. Text boxes inside of an IFRAME are not accessible to the bookmarklet. If you’re interested in the source code behind this bookmarklet, it’s available here.
While FireFox has a built-in spell checker, I don’t think it has a grammar or misused word checker. Since the AtD bookmarklet has a very small footprint, it’s pretty cool to be able to use it outside of WordPress in FireFox to work in addition to the built-in spell checker.
Keep an eye on that AfterTheDeadline blog as Raphael has been doing some terrific work as it related to the After The Deadline service. It’s clearly evident in his writing that he has a passion for this stuff.
It’s time to announce the winners of the WordPress Trivia game I started back in 2009. The game was fun and although I didn’t ask as many questions as I’d like, it was a challenge to stump those who regularly contributed to the game. To all who played, I hope you had fun. The winners are as follows:
I also want to say thank you to each company who volunteered a prize as part of this Trivia game. I won’t be continuing the trivia segment into 2010. If your name is mentioned in this post, I’ll be in contact with you via email to get your prizes squared away.
News is spreading around the community that the plugins created by MaxBlogPress have been removed from the plugin repository. Apparently, his plugins contained a forced opt-in mechanism that is, once you installed the plugin, you had to provide a name and email address in order to activate the plugin. Based on numerous complaints over the span of the last three months on the WordPress.org support forums, the plugins were finally removed. After getting the end users email address, the marketer would send email marketing messages sometimes daily without an easy way to unsubscribe.
Not only is the forced opt-in a terrible way to do anything, but it acts as a usage restriction of the plugin which violates the terms of being hosted on the plugin repository. I think Bobby Ning sums up the reasons for removal quite well as does Otto in the WPTavern forum.
If you take away the marketing and phone home aspects of his plugins, it looks like they provide good functionality. Since the plugins have been taken off of the repository, I wonder how long it will be before someone who really valued the plugin ends up creating a fork, minus the marketing stuff and submits that to the repository as a replacement. So far, it looks like Chip Bennett has done that to at least two of the plugins.
If I haven’t had a chance to say it to you over Twitter or on the forum, Happy New Years! With that said, time to update everyone on what’s been going on. For starters, I took on more hours at work during the holidays since I almost ran out of cash. I’m doing ok now. I’ve discovered that working 4am-10am at my first job is a nice balance between what I do with content creation and the weekly paycheck. So, that’s what I’ll be working for the most part starting next week. During the holidays, I’ve really loosened up on the amount of content produced on this site and the advertisers have suffered because of that. I’ve discovered that once I fall out of my routine of keeping my eyes and ears in the know, it’s really difficult to get back into the groove. I’m looking forward to getting at least one quality post a day on WPTavern.com throughout the month of January.
As for the forum, I recently purchased a VBulletin 4.0 license. Over the New Years break, I upgraded the forums to the latest version only to discover that two of the mods I rely on as well as all the themes I had installed were not compatible. Instead of dealing with trying to find alternatives or spending time making a new skin, I’ve reverted the forums back to 3.8.4 Patch Level 2 and will not upgrade to VB 4 until my modded theme and the two mods are compatible. Now I know what it’s like for users of WordPress to upgrade their sites only to see the plugins they rely on fail to work. I completely understand the need to revert back to an older version or stick with an older version of WordPress until those plugins are updated. It’s a tough slope considering that the newest versions of WordPress usually contain security fixes and the like which trump features or compatibility. I don’t know what to advise now considering the situation I put myself through with the upgrade to VB4.
I like what I have going between the site and the forum so I will not be making any major shifts in terms of the software I use. I know quite a few people have said they would love to see WPTavern on BuddyPress while using bbPress but right now, BuddyPress on a single install of WordPress is fresh baked and bbPress is nowhere near what I’d like it to be. So I see no reason to deviate from my current setup.
As far as WordPress Weekly goes, I’ve been debating constantly with myself on what I’d like to do with the show. I plan on continuing to produce episodes throughout 2010 but I don’t think every show will be produced on Talkshoe.com. I’m thinking that I will reserve at least one episode a month to be recorded live on Talkshoe.com while all of the other episodes will be conducted over Skype and recorded locally, then uploaded to Talkshoe.com. To be quite honest, one of the biggest reasons I used Talkshoe to do the show is that it provided plenty of options for me to give a voice to the WordPress community. Anyone could call into the show and voice their opinion or talk about WordPress. This has happened on occasion but not to the point that I’d like. With that in mind, I don’t think anyone will mind the increase in audio quality with the non live recorded shows.
As far as WordCamps go, I’m starting off the year in Boston during the weekend of January 23rd to moderate an awesome panel around the subject of Monetization In A Free World. The panelists consist of Jane Wells of Automattic, Carl Hancock of GravityForms, Joshua Strebel of Page.ly and Brian Gardner of StudioPress. This is the first time I’ve taken a more active role at a WordCamp and I’m jazzed to be able to moderate a panel such as this. Depending upon how things go for WPTavern in Jan-March will determine if I am finally able to make WordCamp San Francisco this year. It’s all a matter of finances. Speaking of finances, wanted to give yet another shout out to Brian Gardner of StudioPress.com for generously paying for half my airline ticket.
WordPress Tavern will turn one year old next month. It’s been quite a year for the site as it’s grown beyond what I had hoped for in 2009, especially the forum aspect of it. I’ve been able to accomplish one of my longtime internet goals of creating a vibrant community. I want to continue to build this community throughout the year. Any referrals the current community member base can provide would be a great help towards getting to the 1,000 registered members mark before June of this year.
Speaking of community, it’s a bit of a struggle sometimes to put forth time and energy into WPTavern.com alongside the WordPress project itself. Sometimes I wonder if WPTavern.com is a segmented portion of the WordPress community where the energy spent in discussions and such would be better served on the WordPress.org domain. While I have not submitted any patches to fix bugs for WordPress, I have tried to contribute in other areas of the project such as the forum, IRC channel, generating thoughtful discussions around the project on both WeblogToolsCollection.com and the WPTavern forum, editing bits and pieces of the Codex, chiming in on ideas, bringing some of the behind the scenes stuff more into the forefront, etc. I’ve also tried to steer the intelligence within the WPTavern community into the WordPress project itself. I have no idea if anything I’ve done actually helps the project but I’d like to think so. I mean, every little thing adds up to bigger things right? I hope to continue to find that balance of pouring energy into WPTavern.com as well as the project itself.
That’s about everything that’s on my mind regarding WPTavern and 2010. If you are a member of the WPTavern community, feel free to tell your friends about it. Looking forward to meeting more new people throughout the year and becoming more involved in the project. I hope that everyone who hopped on the WPTavern bandwagon in 2009 is still on board to continue the ride.
I’m often asked the question, why do you use VBulletin?
When WPTavern was under construction, I had the chance to try out a few different pieces of forum software. During my experiments, I used phpBB3, SimplePress, and I think I gave bbPress a look through as well. At the time, phpBB3 didn’t have syndication built-in which was a deal breaker for me so I didn’t use it. SimplePress was nice but it was a real pain to style so it matched the design of the website. Previous to WPTavern, I’ve had the pleasure to use VBulletin in the past for various projects. I figured that if I was going to start a community forum from the ground up, I better use software that I most likely won’t need to migrate from due to lack of features or some other reason. Also, I’ve been looking for any reason to finally purchase a VBulletin owned license since I enjoy using the software so much. In no particular order, here are some of the reasons that I went with paid non GPL software to power the forums.
Inline Administration – I can do most administrative tasks without logging into the administration section of the forum. The best part about some of these inline administration tools is that they use AJAX meaning there is no need for a page refresh. For example, I can double-click a forum thread title and edit it inline and save the edit without reloading the page. Last but not least, most of the tools I need to administer the forum are a drop down box away.
Most Of What I Need – When comparing my options, it was easy for me to see that VBulletin provided the most of what I needed from forum software straight out of the box. This includes multiple options for content syndication, email notifications, easy user group management, easy to use permission system, etc. To date, I only have four plugins added to the forum.
It’s my opinion that VBulletin is the best forum software available whether it be paid or free. If my knowledge on other forum solutions is not accurate, it’s because VBulletin has yet to give me a reason to look into other options. Don’t get me wrong, I love open-source solutions but just because something is open-source doesn’t make it the best option available.
So what would make me switch to something like bbPress? Tough question considering I just recently purchased the owned license for VBulletin 4.0 but if I were to be swayed, bbPress would need to provide easy integration between the blog and the forum. I would also like to have the option to replace the commenting system in WordPress with the forum system in bbPress. Each post I publish on the blog side of things becomes a new thread in the forum with the comments acting as thread replies. This provides the flexibility of steering the conversation on the blog side of things while the community still has the ability to start conversations of their own. A killer feature for bbPress which the VBulletin publishing suite recently added is widgets. Seems like a no-brainer to me that bbPress themes should be able to support widgets just as WordPress themes do.
Overall, I’d like to get the same user experience out of bbPress that I get out of WordPress. With WordPress I can install themes, plugins, perform auto upgrades all from the backend. I want to do that in bbPress as well. Also, I’d like to see bbPress become more of an end users forum software rather than a developers toy box. WordPress appears to do both quite well.
Those are just a few ideas that might get me to think about switching from VBulletin to bbPress. Of course, the last thing I would need for it to ever happen is a migration tool that works.
The immediate future of The WordPress Podcast has been determined. Joost de Valk has purchased the name and rights to The WordPress Podcast for an undisclosed amount. Over time, PressThis and The WordPress Podcast will merge together with The WordPress Podcast eventually being the mainstay of the show. Also as part of the new format, Joost will be joined by Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache plugin and CTO of Mashable.com. He’ll be doing the news segment of the show each week. Personally, I enjoy listening to the show and am a fan of what they are doing. With WordPress Weekly, I’m either all news or all interview. These two will be mixing it up so you get the best of both worlds.
2009 has been an unfriendly year for Charles with financial troubles, personal issues, technical problems and sadly, the death of his mother. Charles is using this as opportunity to start fresh on a new project that will involve video. I wish him the best of luck. He’s a great guy and the primary inspiration for me starting WordPress Weekly.
In one of my favorite episodes of the podcast, I had the unique opportunity to chat with Charles Stricklin about his foray into WordPress, the difficulties involved with producing the show, podcasting in general and a few other tidbits.
Just wanted to provide a quick update on what’s been going on. To make a long story short, going back to 35+ hours at the store from 4am to 12pm is taking it’s toll on me. On the side, I’ve been trying my best to put up at least one post a day on weblogtoolscollection.com as part of my second job but even that is proving to be difficult. WordPress stuff is hard for me to get into recently, especially as it relates to the wordpress weekly podcast. I don’t plan on abandoning the show or this website but work on it with regards to postings and such may be far and few between for the rest of this year. So, I have three jobs that I’m working and it doesn’t take long to feel like crap everyday, especially when good sleep is hard to come by. This all sucks because I’d love to get back to what I’ve been doing for the past few months but money dictates I do other things.
I have an interesting idea for a site redesign/rearrangement that falls in place with my idea of what the wordpress.org portal should be like. Wptavern will be my testbed for this idea to see how it pans out. No word yet on when it will be finished but I’m excited about it.
Looking forward to wordcamp NewYork next week which will be a welcome relief. That’s all on this front, hope all is well in your neck of the woods.
Over the course of this past weekend, Leland of Themelab.com launched a new website called WPChat.com. The site consists of a simple design which almost takes minimalism to a new level but I like it. The chatroom loads on the index page enabling you to choose any nickname you want without registration. This has a pro-con effect where registration is not required but there is no way to validate someone is who they say they are. This has happened already and ends up leading the discussion to a point where a pop quiz is offered to the person to validate their name. Leland is currently taking feedback to figure out how to resolve this problem as well as whether or not he should replace the chat with an IRC based one while keeping a web client to access the channel.
Those small issues aside, I’ve already participated in a few heated conversations regarding themes as well as a number of other topics. So if the Tavern is having a slow day, I’ll now know why.