By Jeffro on November 30, 2011
Some users of WordPress.com will now be able to partake in revenue sharing display advertising thanks to the launch of WordAds. I say some users because it’s available only if your application is accepted. This quote by Jon Burke sums up the story of how bad advertising had been for WordPress.com users over the past few years.
Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.
It’s indeed sad that Adsense can be considered the best that WordPress.com can do however, it’s about time they broadened their horizons and provided an alternate means of display advertising. Just a few weeks ago, I linked to a story that described just how bad the display advertising was on WP.com and the news of WordAds couldn’t come at a better time, despite being late.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this all comes together. The type of advertising, the sites content, and the actual products being advertised. If everything can mesh together well, this should be a success.
Posted in News | Tagged ads, advertising, wordads, wordpress.com |
By Jeffro on November 28, 2011
Some interesting numbers have been published by Dev4Press.com which show just over 50% of sites reporting data back to the WordPress.org mother ship are registering as using version 3.0. 10.8% for 3.1 and 16.2 percent use 3.2. When looking at the big picture, those are terrible numbers. That 50% number would ideally be 3.2 but for any number of reasons, those websites are not being upgraded. There is also the issue of accuracy in that many of the websites that are being reported may have either been abandoned or left online as a test bed.
I’m sure many plugin authors can relate to Millan in that supporting 3-4 versions of WordPress can be a pain in the neck considering some of the major differences between versions. What’s a plugin author do so since leaving those users out to dry is not acceptable?
Posted in News | Tagged Plugins, upgrading, versions |
By Jeffro on November 25, 2011
Ryan Imel of WPCandy.com has announced the launch of a quarterly magazine focused entirely on WordPress called the WordPress Quarterly. The magazine will be physical in nature meaning you can hold it in your hands as well as have a digital counterpart that won’t be available until the print edition ships. During the course of the year, the magazine will have four issues shipped, one in January, April, July, and October. If you want to own a small piece of WordPress history, you can pre-order the first issue for $12.00 while subscribing for the entire year will be $36.00. That doesn’t include shipping which many people outside of the U.S. have already complained about. However, Ryan has since tweaked the shipping prices to make them more affordable. The first issue already has a slew of contributing WordPress all stars which you can see here, covering the gamut from an article on TimThumb to bbPress and the GooglePlex.
What perplexes me is the idea of going through with a physical WordPress centric magazine at all. Back in March of 2010, Justin Tadlock started an interesting discussion on the Tavern forum regarding the idea of creating some sort of community oriented WordPress magazine. It would have been a website dedicated to the topics of WordPress, bbPress, BuddyPress and anything else that needed to be focused upon. Although the site wouldn’t really be used as a typical blog but more or less be used to publish non time sensitive content such as reviews, interviews, tips and tricks. At the end of the day, the idea never gained traction to see the light of day but it looks as though the excitement that was expressed regarding the idea back in 2010 is still prevalent as I’ve seen a number of people subscribe to the WP Quarterly Magazine.
Fast forward to the end of 2011 and the question I have is, what has changed since then to turn the idea into a reality with not so much of a website but a physical magazine? While Justin wanted a group of contributors to simply give back when submitting an article to the magazine, WPCandy is charging for this content. I wonder if the authors will be allowed in on profit sharing or if they are paid on a per article basis? Considering the alternative of being able to publish those great articles on ones own site, I’d be hard pressed to think people will just give away that type of content without a price attached.
At any rate, I’ll be watching from a distance to see if this magazine can gain traction and stick around for awhile or if the initial surge of subscriptions and excitement will die down. At the very least, owning the first issue will be like owning a small piece of history.
Posted in News | Tagged community, magazine, wordpress |
By Jeffro on November 17, 2011
VideoUserManuals.com who were one of the first to create a WordPress plugin featuring video based manuals within the dashboard has published an open letter to the WordPress community that tells us their side of the story in what looks to be another ugly mess for Incsub LLC.
At the end of the agreement period in June 2011, I checked in and saw that our videos were still being used so I sent James an email requesting they remove the videos and written manual from their membership site. We received an email back informing us the videos and manual had been removed. This was not the case. I waited a couple of days and checked in again to see that the videos had been re-voiced and re-shot on a different computer but were still using our scripts. In fact, in some of the videos I could see our script in the WordPress visual editor that was being used as a prompt for the person making the videos.
We’ll have to reserve judgement until we hear the other side of the story but if the past is anything to go by, this could be another black eye on the company. However, if any of it is true, it’s a crummy way of doing business. In a seperate issue, a claim of copyright infringement was brought up earlier this year on June 3rd 2011, where Joost DeValk published a post claiming copyright Infringement for his WordPress SEO Plugin.
*Update* James Farmer has added his side of the story within the comments of WPCandy.com
Posted in News | Tagged copyright, incsub, infringement |
By Jeffro on November 16, 2011
The big news over the past 24 hours is that Automattic has made their second investment, this time in a WordPress hosting company called WP Engine. WP Engine is a relatively new hosting company that manages WordPress.org installs for roughly 30,000 clients. The other side of the news is that a new partner program by Automattic called VIP Support For Webhosts which aims to provide VIP Support for Web Hosts including advanced systems and developer support for infrastructure-wide issues and improvements; annual review of the client’s entire stack as it relates to WordPress hosting; annual security audit and review of best practices and more.
Pretty cool to see Automattic making investments in WordPress centric companies. But what I want to know is, who can afford $50.00 a month for webhosting? By the way, the usual price is $100.00 per month. Congrats to WP Engine though for landing the funding and becoming the first partner program company for VIP support.
Posted in News | Tagged automattic, investment, wpengine |
By Jeffro on November 15, 2011
VaultPress has announced that the latest edition of the plugin now supports WordPress Multisite. This has been a killer feature that owners of large multisite installs have been waiting for. VaultPress will automatically backup each site that is installed within the network. However, it must be noted that only the Network’s main site will have their users table, plugins, and themes backed up. For non-main sites, VaultPress will not backup users, plugins, or themes.
The money maker for VaultPress lies within the fact that each site within the network will require it’s own subscription as if they were individual sites. There is not a plan that specifically covers multisite installations. Unless the sites within your network are making you some decent cash, this could potentially wipe you out from month to month and you’ll need to decide as a site administrator how much that peace of mind is going to cost you. On the flip side, the way they have structured their plans allows you to only backup the most valuable sites within your network providing you with more flexibility.
With regards to plan pricing, Pete Davies responded to a comment by Donnacha regarding a sliding pricing scale. It looks like it’s an opportunity that could be tapped into in the future.
Posted in News | Tagged Plugins, security, services, vaultpress |
By Jeffro on November 15, 2011
bbPress has released version 2.0.1 which is considered a maintenance release. However, if you have anonymous posting enabled, you’ll want to upgrade as soon as possible as this release addresses an issue where anonymous posters could potentially be able to edit topics and replies. If upgrading from 2.0, try upgrading through the dashboard as you would with WordPress as 2.0 introduced easy upgrades.
Posted in News | Tagged bbPress, forums, Plugins, security
By Jeffro on November 11, 2011

Matt Mullenweg announced on Twitter this morning that Automattic has now reached 100 employees. By Monday, November 14th the company will reach 102. If you would like to be part of the next 100 employees at Automattic, check out their jobs page.
By the way, a new position has opened up that doesn’t really require coding experience but rather being in the San Francisco area to be Toni Schneiders right hand man in managing the new Automattic Lounge. The most interesting aspect of this job posting is that no one knows where exactly the new Automattic Lounge is located. While @beaulebens is responsible for publishing the job posting link on Twitter, even Otto42 doesn’t know where the new lounge is located.
The previous lounge for Automattic which was located within Pier38 in San Francisco was shut down due to safety and building code violations.
Posted in News | Tagged automattic, jobs, lounge, pier38 |
By Jeffro on November 11, 2011

WordPress.com has crossed over yet another milestone in that they now host over 60 million blogs. After the GigaOm article has been updated, it now appears that half of the 60 million blogs are hosted on WordPress.com while the other half is on the self-hosted version of WordPress. This is a big number but unless those 60 million blogs are broken down into active sites, spammers, sploggers, dead sites, etc. then it will remain nothing but a big number. Touting big numbers is cool but showing how that number is figured out is even better.
Asides from the big number, I also wanted to point out the article that GigaOm published regarding this milestone. It has to be one of the most confusing articles I’ve ever read that mixes up WordPress.com and the open source project known as WordPress. For example, this sentence threw me for a loop:
Meanwhile, WordPress doesn’t plan to abandon its core allegiance to open source standards as it continues to expand as a for-profit company.
The sentence starts off with WordPress, then mentions open source standards and concludes with for-profit company. Even if you added the .com to WordPress that still wouldn’t make sense. Outside of all the confusion, the article itself is not bad considering it has a number of quotes from Matt when he participated in an on-stage interview with Mathew Ingram at the GigaOM RoadMap conference.
The big take away is that WordPress.com will be receiving a heavy dosage of social and mobile development.
Posted in News | Tagged blogs, confusion, stats, wordpress |
By Jeffro on November 10, 2011
For those looking to take polls or collect survey data out in the field should check out this primer published on the PollDaddy blog on how to use their iOS app on the iPad to substitute the typical clipboard and paper routine. Probably one of the best features regarding the app is the ability to collect information without an internet connection. When one becomes available, the app will automatically synchronize with your Polldaddy.com account. ∞
Posted in News | Tagged ios, ipad, iphone, polldaddy
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