In what is being considered one of the more interesting conversations at Le Web this year according to what I’ve read on Twitter, Om Malik And Matt Mullenweg discussed a number of things revolving around WordPress. While there were a number of tidbits to take away from their conversation, my favorite is Matt’s comments regarding the mobile usage of WordPress.
Mobile is giving us a chance to re-imagine the interface of WordPress from the ground up
To follow that statement, Matt also said that Automattic currently has more employees working on the various mobile applications versus the core of WordPress.
Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic was recently interviewed on TechCrunch TV. In the interview, they discussed the new vertical launched on WordPress.com for restaurants. There were a couple of things within this interview that I found fascinating.
The first is that across the Automattic network which includes sites such as PollDaddy, Gravatar, VaultPress and WordPress.com, Quantcast reports 660,000,000 monthly unique visitors making it the largest network on Quantcast.
The second is that, WordPress.com operates on the principle of small, incremental changes to the service. Because of this, WordPress.com has gone through about 50,000 versions of WordPress, if every change was a bump in the version number. Even at their current size and scale, they still release multiple batches of code every day.
Thirdly, I thought it was interesting that Toni Schneider basically said that WordPress.com is following the lead of the overall WordPress community when it comes to features and or verticals on WordPress.com.
Last but not least, WordPress powers 17.2% of the web, Joomla powers 3% and Drupal has 2%. Everyone else encompasses the rest of the 100%. So while it seems like everyone and their mother as well as their grandpa has a site on WordPress, there is still a huge segment of the market that’s been untapped by WordPress.
After watching the interview, is there anything that surprises you or is this all par for the course?
Fresh from WordCamp Phoenix 2012, Lance Willett who works for Automattic and is part of the theme wrangler team gave a great presentation for beginners on how to navigate the vast landscape that is WordPress themes. He covers the gamut such as where to look for themes, commercial themes, things to consider before using the theme on your site, etc. This presentation is truly for the beginner as it has nothing to do with coding. Nice job Lance.
To celebrate the launch of a new WordPress course that will be offered by Grumo Media, Miguel has produced a song specifically for the course with his guitar. Not a bad tune.
The following is a presentation by Chip Bennett at WordCamp Kansas City 2011. In this video, Chip Bennett explains the entire process of what it takes to get a theme hosted on the WordPress.org Theme Repository. Pretty awesome to see Chip go from being a vocal member on WPTavern within the past year or so to really getting involved with the WordPress community overall. Not only has he stepped up and has volunteered his time for the WordPress Theme Review Team but now he has a couple of WordCamp visits/Presentations under his belt. The only thing missing from Chip now is some sort of book!
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.
Here is the recorded video featuring the presentation of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress with Dries Buytaert of Drupal discussing open source. Kudos goes out to the Schipulcon group for getting these two together for an awesome presentation. The audio is terrible until you hit the 4 minute mark. If you want to see a transcript for some of the questions you can read them on the Schipul Blog. Definitely watch from 32 minutes onward as that is when the audience starts asking some pretty good questions.
Within the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the term ‘Responsive‘ showing up everywhere, especially as it relates to WordPress 3.3 and the administrative area. Having no idea what this term meant, I got in touch with Sara Cannon to figure it out. Unfortunately (or fortunately), she is pretty busy helping with making the back-end of WordPress 3.3 responsive. So the next best thing is her presentation from WordCamp Boston on optimizing a WordPress site for multiple devices. To make a long story short, having a responsive designed WordPress site means it will look good across multiple screen dimensions without the need for plugins or weird tricks. The webpage responds to look correct within the confines of the devices screen. It’s not about designing one site that is pixel perfect on a 30 inch monitor. It’s about designing a website that can be fluid enough to look great on an iPad, 30 inch screen, or an iPhone. After watching the presentation, I can see why this is a cool technique. Perhaps with WordPress 3.3, we’ll be able to login with our iPhones and be able to easily navigate and administrate our websites much easier through the phone rather than through a specific app. I recommend viewing the video in full screen mode as it’s difficult to see the slides.
Not really WordPress news but it’s cool to hear a WordPress reference in the show, TheGuild. Fast forward to 9:03 to hear the WordPress remark. As an aside, I watched the entire episode and didn’t understand the show one bit. This was the first time I’ve watched TheGuild and since I’ve never played MMORPG games, I guess I don’t get any of the inside jokes.
Pete Davies of Akismet presented a 31 minute presentation at WordCamp San Francisco detailing the history of spam as well as talking about the creation of Akismet.
