In this episode of WordPress Weekly, special guests Brian Gardner and Lisa Sabin Wilson give us the lowdown on WordCamp Chicago taking place this weekend. Afterwords, David and I discussed the news of the week getting everyone back on track.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Contact them today for help with your WordPress powered website.
In episode 55, we had a roundtable discussion of sorts centered around the various WordCamps we attended over the past two weekends. David Peralty and Jeremy Clarke discussed WordCamp Toronto, I talked about WordCamp Columbus and Brad Williams talked about his experience at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. We discussed the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding our experiences. If you’re thinking about organizing a WordCamp event, be sure to tune in and take a listen as you might be able to pick up a thing or two to help improve your event.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Be sure to check out their new WordPress Support Packages.
WPTavern Listener Poll:
Last weeks poll question was: Do you think Premium themes have helped or harmed the WordPress community?
Out of a total of 20 votes 12 of you said Helped, 4 of you voted Harmed and 4 of you wanted to know what kind of question that was.
This Weeks Poll Question Is: With 2.8 on the horizon, did you enjoy going six months without upgrading to a major version of WordPress?
Plugin Picks Of The Week:
Jeff - CryptX – With CryptX you can hide all your email addresses, with and without a mailto-link, by converting them using javascript or UNICODE. Although you can choose to add a mailto-link to all unlinked email addresses with only one click at the settings.
David – Time Press – Easily add a timeline to your blog to present a new dimension for viewing your blog archive. Also has Twitter support.
Last Weeks WordPress Trivia Question:
Which version of WordPress introduced the ability to manage static pages?
Fresh off our one week break, this week we’ll be going crazy with our thoughts and opinions of WordCamps we attended. I attended WordCamp Columbus, David attended WordCamp Toronto, and Brad Williams who will be calling in will be talking about his experience at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. If you are a WordCamp organizer or are thinking of putting one together, you should tune into this show to pick up tips and tricks to help you put on a better event.
In this episode, David and I discussed WordCamp Toronto which started yesterday and will last until Sunday May 10th. So far, it looks like not all things are going according to plan at the event as the venue has awkward placement of outlets, no dedicated video or audio equipment and expensive food. Hopefully, David has a better time the rest of the weekend.
We also briefly discussed the fact that we may go six entire months before the first major release of WordPress for 2009. A stark contrast to the past two years where by this time of year, we would be gearing up for the second major release. Also worthy of note is that so far, the need to push out a point release such as 2.7.2 has not occurred. Hope you enjoy this weeks episode.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Contact them today for help with your WordPress powered website.
Each week from now on, I’ll be featuring a new listener poll question on WPTavern.com The poll is located in the sidebar on the right hand side of the site.
Last weeks poll question was: Do you take into consideration whether a theme is licensed under the GPL or not before you purchase it?
Out of a total of 27 votes, 13 of you said yes, 8 of you said no and 6 of you voted don’t care
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Do you think Premium themes have helped or harmed the WordPress community?
Plugin Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – Thumbnail Viewer – Thumbnail Viewer is simply used to overlay images on a page, similar to Lightbox JS. The javascript is from the Image Thumbnail Viewer code from DynamicDrive. The javascript included in Thumbnail Viewer from DynamicDrive is much faster than Lightbox JS, although not as feature packed, which is the entire point.Thumbnail Viewer works with the following image formats: png gif jpeg jpg bmp
Which version of WordPress introduced the ability to manage static pages?
Announcements:
On May 16th from 9am-5pm, join me at WordCamp Columbus taking place at Columbus State Community College. so far, there are over 100 people scheduled to be in attendance including Lorelle, Jane Wells, Noel Jackson, Mark Ghosh and more. Tickets cost $25.99 and I believe there are a few more left.
On episode 53 of WordPress Weekly, David and I had a chance to talk with Daniel Scocco who is the man behind the popular (and I do mean popular) site DailyBlogTips.com Daniel has used WordPress for DBT since 2005 and he also publishes reviews about a ton of WordPress plugins and themes so it made sense to have him on the show. However, the show wasn’t all about WordPress as we also discussed content generation, monetization, what it’s like to be in the Technorati top 100, and much more.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Be sure to check out their new WordPress Support Packages at http://webdevstudios.com/support
WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Each week from now on, I’ll be featuring a new listener poll question on WPTavern.com The poll is located in the sidebar on the right hand side of the site.
Last weeks poll question was: Is Blogging dying because of Facebook, Twitter, etc?
Out of a total of 36 votes, 23 of you said it’s just evolving, 12 of you voted no and 1 of you voted yes.
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Do you take into consideration whether a theme is licensed under the GPL or not before you purchase it?
Plugin Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – Odiogo Listen Button – Odiogo.com is a service that takes your text based blog posts and provides a listen button where end users can listen to a synthesized voice read the blog post. This makes your blog a little more accessible to those with vision problems. The voice isn’t bad but you can tell we still have a long way to go for natural sounding speech.
David – WordPress File Monitor – Checks to see if any files have been changed. Very important as code insertion hacks happen fairly often if your permissions aren’t set up correctly.
WordPress Trivia Question:
Which version of WordPress was named after a core developers son?
Announcements:
On May 16th from 9am-5pm, join me at WordCamp Columbus taking place at Columbus State Community College. so far, there are over 100 people scheduled to be in attendance including Lorelle, Jane Wells, Noel Jackson, Mark Ghosh and more. Tickets cost $25.99 and I believe there are a few more left. Visit WordCampColumbus.com for more information.
This edition of WordPress Weekly featured a special interview with the WordPress project leader, Matt Mullenweg. In this interview we asked a wide variety of questions. Some of which were mine while most of them came from you, the listeners of the show. It was great to get Matt back on the show again and I hope we can do this every three or four months just to talk WordPress. Here are the list of questions we covered during the show.
With Prologue 2 now publicly unveiled can you give us an overview as to what this theme is and how it’s different from Prologue 1?
Can you tell us about the 100 hour CMS Showdown event that took place at SxSW?
What is the process one must go through in order to patch a bug, complete a ticket and get it into the core of WordPress?
Question from Technocrank – Does it make sense to get involved with open source software projects in general?
What was your original vision for WordPress? In your opinion, has the software reached that vision and if so, what is your vision for the WordPress of the future?
Does you feel that WordPress already has the functionality it needs to be a good CMS or are some things still missing? If so, does you see them making it into core in the near future?
What is the state of the entire WordPress project? (WordPress Ideas, WordPress support forum, WordPress documentation project, etc.)
I’ve noticed that in most of your keynote sessions, you now include a section at the end regarding the license that WordPress is filed under. Is this part of a new strategy to educate WordPress users about the GPL license?
Can you give use your stance on selling GPL compliant themes or plugins. Is WordPress.org going to support commercial GPL Themes in some other way or what’s up with commercial GPL products and WordPress.org?
Do you feel that the GPL is the perfect license for WordPress or is it just the “most suitable” right now? Would they switch from GPL to something else if there was another license coming out that was more specific about webbased applications and code that doesn´t have to be compiled?
WordPress calls itself a “Publishing Platform” and many people use WordPress as a complete content management system. What features do you foresee being added in the future that will further extend the “CMS” capability of WordPress?
What benefits and features are coming to WP.org 2.8?
Apparently improvements are being made to widgets, “Improved Widget user interface”. Can you describe those improvements and how they will affect WP Users and/or theme developers?
Ok, what about the Theme installer/updater. How does that work?
What benefits are there for the core of WordPress to use Simple Pie instead of MagPie RSS?
Hooks are being added, Users, Categories, Link Categories, etc. Please explain what benefit these will add.
Will greater flexibility be added to roles and capabilities within the admin? For example – the ability to create custom roles?
Why not incorporate more of the commonly used SEO features into the WP core?
What feature are you most excited about within the WordPress software?
What is Automattic doing next as a company, and how has its continued acquisitions helped both the company and the WordPress community?
Are there any WordPress community members that deserve special recognition from the community that you don’t think are getting it as much as they should?
What is your fav plugin?
Ad Copy:
This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Contact them today for help with your WordPress powered website.
WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Each week from now on, I’ll be featuring a new listener poll question on WPTavern.com The poll is located in the sidebar on the right hand side of the site.
Last weeks poll question was: Is Blogging dying because of Facebook, Twitter, etc?
Because of the interview, we didn’t have a chance to go over the poll so it’s been extended by a week.
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Is Blogging dying because of Facebook, Twitter, etc?
WordPress Trivia Question:
How long has Matt been a member of WordPress.org?
WordPress Trivia Answer:
6 Years. We was the first registered member in 2003.
Announcements:
We will be interviewing Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com on May 1st, 2009.
David Peralty didn’t make it this week but a wide range of people did. It was a blast from the past episode as it mainly consisted of a roundtable discussion on a number of topics ranging from TalkPress to the WordPress HelpCenter to Plugin Style Sheets. This is an insanely long episode but when you get a group of WordPress faithful together in a tavern serving free drinks on a Friday evening, this is what you’re going to get. Enjoy.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Contact them today for help with your WordPress powered website.
Each week from now on, I’ll be featuring a new listener poll question on WPTavern.com The poll is located in the sidebar on the right hand side of the site.
Last weeks poll question was: Are You Excited For WordPress 2.8?
Out of a total of 22 votes, 11 people voted Meh, 10 of you voted Yes while 1 of you voted No
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Is Blogging dying because of Facebook, Twitter, etc?
Plugin Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – DiggBar Killer – DiggBar Killer adds a little snippet of Javascript to your WordPress website to remove any frames or iframes, such as the Digg Bar, which are surrounding it. DiggBar Killer also has a (100% optional) annoy feature. You can choose to annoy users coming from digg.com by showing an obnoxious message. The default “annoy” folder comes with some ugly animated GIFs and a MIDI file, but can be easily customized using plain-ole HTML & CSS (no PHP knowledge required).
The last WordCamp Chicago ticket is still up for grabs for whomever provides the correct answer first. Provide your trivia answers in the comments and I’ll email the person who gets it correct.
WordPress Trivia Question:
How long has Matt Mullenweg been a member of WordPress.org?
WordPress Meetup:
If you’re located in Ohio, more specifically the Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland areas, be sure to join me for the WordPress meetup that is taking place on April 23rd 2009 at 7PM EDT at a place called Office Space CoWorking located in Akron Ohio. The meetup is being conducted by myself along with Brian Layman of b5 media. The first meetup will be a meet and greet as well as a preview to the WordCamp Columbus event in May.
Announcements:
Matt Mullenweg is scheduled to be on WordPress Weekly on Friday April 24th, 2009
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up regarding the next few weeks of WordPress Weekly. This Friday won’t feature any guest interviews but instead, we’ll take time out to discuss the news of the past two weeks and catchup on other things that are happening within the community.
For episode 52 on April 24th, Matt Mullenweg will be our special guest. He was originally slated for March 20th but was unable to make it due to a meeting. On May 1st, we’ll be interviewing Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com. Daniel has worked with WordPress for a long time now so it will be nice to get him on to talk about his experiences with the software.
May 8th will feature no guests as we get back on track and possibly talk about WordPress 2.8 and whatever else is happening in the community. For Friday May 15th, it may be a shorter than average show as I will most likely be on the road headed towards Columbus for the WordCamp event scheduled to take place that weekend. We’ll be providing an overview of the event and will be talking about whatever else is happening in the WordPress-O-Sphere.
This week on our big Five-O episode, we had the chance to interview Cathy Perkins otherwise known as The WordPress Wizard. We discussed a number of issues pertaining to WordPress such as the complexity of the software, how its changed over the years, tips on how to choose a theme as well as plugins and much more. This episode was geared more towards end users rather than developers.
Ad Copy:
This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress support and development services. Contact them today for help with your WordPress powered website.
WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Each week from now on, I’ll be featuring a new listener poll question on WPTavern.com The poll is located in the sidebar on the right hand side of the site.
Last weeks poll question was: Will WordPress Win A Webware 100 Award For The Third Straight Time?
Out of a total of 14 votes 12 of you voted yes and 2 of you voted no.
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Are You Excited For WordPress 2.8?
Plugin Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – Widget Reset – This plugin created by Justin Tadlock will completely wipe the slate clean with regards to widgets. Sometimes, widgets get stuck, disappear, or can not be chosen more than once even if the widget is not in use. This plugin will reset all settings regarding widgets so you can start from scratch.
The person with the correct answer to the trivia question will win one ticket to WordCamp Chicago, courtesy of Mararet Roach of Margaretroach.com.
WordPress Trivia Question:
How long has Matt Mullenweg been a member of WordPress.org?
WordPress Meetup:
WordPress Meetup: If you’re located in Ohio, more specifically the Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland areas, be sure to join me for the WordPress meetup that is taking place on April 23rd 2009 at 7PM EDT at a place called Office Space CoWorking located in Akron Ohio. The meetup is being conducted by myself along with Brian Layman of b5 media. The first meetup will be a meet and greet as well as a preview to the WordCamp Columbus event in May.
Announcements:
Matt Mullenweg has been rescheduled to be on WordPress Weekly on Friday April 24th, 2009
Cathy Perkins who operates the website, The WordPress Wizard will be our special guest on the 50th episode of WordPress Weekly Friday, April 10th. We’ll be discussing general WordPress topics with Cathy including maintenance, backup and recovery, traffic analysis, and other WordPress related topics. This episode is aimed at the end user rather than the developer.
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, special guests Brian Gardner and Lisa Sabin Wilson give us the lowdown on WordCamp Chicago taking place this weekend. Afterwords, David and I discussed the news of the week getting everyone back on track.