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How To Get Into The WordPress Showcase

How To Get Into The WordPress Showcase

By Jeffro on June 28, 2009

Douglas Hanna works for Automattic as a “Communications Engineer”, where he spends most of his time working running the WordPress Showcase and supporting WordPress.com users. He blogs about customer service at Service Untitled and occasionally uses Twitter as well.

You probably knew that WordPress could be used as a CMS for a simple content website, but did you know that it could also be used as a fully powered CMS for a complex real estate website? What about as a directory of iPhone applications? The short version of it is that WordPress is an excellent platform to do just about any sort of publishing on the web and most people aren’t aware of that. To help address that, the WordPress Showcase was created.

The Showcase aims to show the world what can be done with WordPress and help demonstrate that WordPress has tremendous capabilities as a publishing platform. For people new to WordPress or unfamiliar with the extent of its capabilities, the Showcase shows them some of the most notable, successful, and coolest uses of WordPress around the Internet. Approximately 400 sites are featured in the Showcase and the idea (and hopefully the reality) is that the sites in the Showcase are the best of the best.

For website owners, developers, designers, or business people, the Showcase can help give you instant credibility, some great link juice, a nice traffic boost, or even a personal ego boost. Regardless of your reasons for submitting your site to the Showcase, doing so isn’t difficult or time consuming.

Sites that want to be added to the Showcase need to meet one or more of the four submission criteria, which are as follows:

  • Using WordPress in a unique or innovative way.
  • Attracting tens of thousands of regular readers.
  • Being written by someone famous or especially notable in his or her particular field.
  • Representing a notable organization, government entity, or corporation as an official blog or web site.

If your site fits just one of the criterion, then it’s fine and definitely “Showcase-worthy”. Meeting all four is great (and entirely possible), but not required by any means.

Once you’ve read the criteria and have an idea on how to articulate why your site meets one of more of the items, then just head over to the WordPress Showcase Submission Page, fill out the form, and click submit site. The form asks a few simple questions and takes about two minutes to fill out. Sites that are added will be notified via email within a week or so of the original submission.

If you have any questions about the Showcase, what is and isn’t “Showcase-worthy”, or anything else, head over to this forum topic at the WordPress Tavern Forum and ask. I’ll be monitoring the topic and answering questions as they come up.

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What Can You Do With WordPress MU?

What Can You Do With WordPress MU?

By Jeffro on June 17, 2009

AndreaThis is a guest blog post written by Andrea, you can catch her work at, WPMUTutorials.com. You can also follow her on Twitter

With the recent news coming out of WordCamp San Fransisco, and even the buzz from WordCamp RDU, interest is high in WordPressMU, the multi-blog version of single WordPress. We don’t know when, exactly, the merge of the two will be rolled into one package and released, but more code is being blended almost every day.

In case you haven’t checked out WordPressMU, not only is it the software that powers wordpress.com, and has a much talked about plugin suite called BuddyPress, it is flexible enough to power multiple blogs on separate domains.

So what can you do with WordPressMU, that you will soon be able to do with WordPress itself?

Power your own blog network with sub-blogs in the form of blogname.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blogname. The can lead to extensive navigational possibilities that were previously only accomplished by multiple installs or tricky uses of categories.

Power multiple blogs, each off their own domain, on one codebase with one database. No hacks, no tricky configs, no extra files laying around.

Set up a great development site for clients. Instead of a separate install, or working on one at a time, give each client their own working blogs. You can restrict access to certain users who are only logged in and assigned to that particular blog via privacy plugins.

Have super powers. In MU, there’s a default admin user created on installation. This admin is known as the Site Admin and can get in the backend of any blog and edit any information at any time, regardless of blog assignment. You can even add users as co-site admins.

Have multiple Sites in one install. More so than just a separate domain, each Site within a MU install is able to have their own blogs. So you can have MU within MU.

Adding another blog is as simple as revisiting the signup page, or filling out three fields in the backend and clicking a button. Presto! Another blog is created with all the themes you allow access to, and all the plugins already installed.

One thing to remember is that since you are working with one codebase and multiple blogs, they are all stored virtually in the database. The files on the server will be pretty familiar – there’s one theme folder, one plugins folder and a mu-plugins folder for auto-executed plugins. These are plugins that are always on and don’t show in the Plugins menu in the backend. Not all plugins will run from this folder. Since there’s one folder for each, all blogs will share everything in them. Each blog does have their own folders for blog-specific uploads, however.

What does this mean for the general WordPress community? I think it’s huge and exciting news that really pulls WordPress to the forefront of a great website – not “just” a blog, we can all have easy access to truly push-button publishing. Or more blogs, as it will be all rolled in.

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WordPress 2.8.1 Beta By End Of The Week

WordPress 2.8.1 Beta By End Of The Week

By Jeffro on June 17, 2009

So the WordPress development chat in the dev channel on IRC just took place and here is a brief rundown of the information presented within.

  • WordPress 2.8.1 Beta aimed to be release by the end of this week
  • WordPress 2.9 Target date is October 31st
  • Some fixes to high impact bugs are in.
  • Investigate lengthening RC periods depending on RC download numbers
  • Promote upgrading to RCs more
  • Note that we need help testing with the bazillion plugins in existence

The one thing I took out of the chat is the underlying problem that there are simply too few testers. There needs to be more testing on a scale that matches the kind of environments people use WordPress in when a stable version is released. The same core group of people testing each version are beginning to miss things that other people may have found otherwise. Also, more RC testing on established sites that have plugins would be great as it would provide early detection of plugins which might break due to the new version.

I believe the chat for next week will be focused on WordPress 2.9.

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Cashing In On WordPress Plugin Development

Cashing In On WordPress Plugin Development

By Jeffro on June 17, 2009

dollarsignKevin Eklund who operates ToMuse.com published a thought provoking article the other day which has become yet another piece of this puzzle known as ‘How To Make Money Making WordPress Plugins‘. On the WordPress Tavern forum, this is a topic that we have been discussing in different incarnations for a few months now. Here are a few examples:

Kevin provides a few different statistic samples based on his discussions with some popular plugin authors and it’s easy to see that donations alone do not equate into a favorable business model for plugin authors. I’ve spoken with Michael Torbert who is the author of the top downloaded plugin on the WordPress Repository, All In One SEO Pack and he has told me that the amount he receives in donations would not be enough to make a living on. Kevin then goes on to provide some alternative business models that plugin authors can use to bring in revenue to support their work.

One suggestion that has been brought up a few times by different people is to turn the WordPress.org plugin repository into something like the Apple App store where plugins can be purchased for a very cheap price. Another option is to place a $1.00 required donation on all plugins in the repository. I understand how this could be a good thing as plugin authors would definitely make a nice chunk of change if everyone who had downloaded their plugin donated just $1.00 but if something like this were to be forced upon users, I can already see a number of people with pitchforks lining up to protest. But, if this were accomplished by someone creating an app like store completely independent of the plugin repository, I’m all for that.

One thing I don’t want to see happen in the WordPress ecosystem is something I remember from my days using Joomla. It could be vastly different today than a few years ago but I remember that whenever I wanted to do something cool with Joomla either through an extension or a theme, I had to pay for it. Usually a good chunk of change. In the end, this became a major turnoff as it seemed like so many cool developers were in it for the money. Money I eventually ran out of.

I can completely understand why plugin developers should be compensated for their time and effort. I’m not against that. I am against certain ideas on how this can be accomplished but they mostly pertain to anything dealing with the official plugin repository. The good news is, there are a few examples of plugin authors who abide by the GPL and who are making a living at it. Two of those examples off the top of my head are both e commerce solutions. Dan Milward of WP E-Commerce and Jonathan Davis with the Shopp Plugin. Dan has the free plugin available in the WordPress repository while Jonathan’s plugin is not. I’ve spoken with Jonathan about how well his business is doing and so far, it’s way above all of his expectations. I have not spoken with Dan but from the outside looking in, he is doing pretty well himself. After all, WP Ecommerce has been around a long time so he must be doing something right.

Over the past two years, there have been countless debates on trying to get commercial theme authors to align themselves with the GPL as part of their business model. It’s been a tough struggle but thanks to pioneers such as Brian Gardner, those folks are starting to come around. I really hope that we are not entering a new time period where the same debates regarding the GPL and themes encompass plugins.

I believe that the best model for plugin authors is the combination model as proposed by Kevin:

A Combination Model – This would entail using any combination of the models described above. For instance, maybe instead of selling the plugin outright, the developer draws on all the other plugin business models for sustainability (i.e. donations + ads + paid support + paid upgrades).

I think if plugin authors would use a bit of creativity, I think we’ll see some cool models spring up. I’m keeping my eyes peeled on how the guys at RocketGenius handle this situation with their upcoming Gravity Forms plugin. I have no idea if it will be a commercial plugin or not but if it is, it will be interesting to see how it all works out for them.

Your Thoughts:

You can add your thoughts on this issue either in the forum where we have a bunch of threads already created or by leaving a comment.

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Lexnet Interviews Matt Mullenweg

Lexnet Interviews Matt Mullenweg

By Jeffro on June 16, 2009

lexnetSean Daily who does the TEC Podcasts for the Lexnet Consulting Group recently published an audio interview he conducted with Matt Mullenweg. The 15 minute interview talks about what’s new in WordPress 2.8, the merger between WordPress.org and WordPress MU, the future of Matt and WordPress and a few other tidbits. The one thing I take away from this interview is the following quote from Matt.

If I had a billion dollars, I would want to do exactly what I’m doing today

Pretty cool.

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New User Features in WordPress 2.8

New User Features in WordPress 2.8

By Jeffro on June 15, 2009

JDHartleyThis is a guest blog post written by JD Hartley, author of the blog, JDH23.com. You can also follow him on Twitter.

With WordPress 2.8 out, many people are loving the new drag and drop widget page, plus the faster-loading-by-compression backend (have you noticed yet?).

But there are some features we shouldn’t let go unnoticed for too long. There are also some great new features for administrators involving the users section.

Heading: A new notification
The one that first caught my eye when I logged in on a brand new blog I was setting up today was a message telling me that I was using a WordPress auto-generated password.

change-password

Pretty cool, right? Although the auto generated ones seem pretty secure, they are REALLY easy to forget… hopefully you remember to change yours with this reminder. But if by some strange skill you can remember it and the message annoys you, you can turn it off too.

Heading: New User features
I usually delete my admin account so I can have a different username (plus it is good for security). So I went over to create my new account. And there I discovered three new features added in WordPress 2.8:

1) Password Strength Meter
The first one that caught my eye was the password strength meter. I have seen it when I edit my profile, but now it is there when I create and edit a user as an administrator. I really like this one because I often create blogs that are sealed off of new registration, and people create their account in person by using my laptop.

password-strength-meter

2) Send Password to User
The next one was the “Send password” feature. This will send an email to the user with their new password, much like it does when WordPress auto assigns one to them on a normal registration. Now the person knows you have registered them a new account and they have all of their information to log in with.

send-password

3) Premium Subscriber
premium-subscriber WordPress 2.8 also introduces a new user role (such as Administrator, Author, Subscriber, etc), called a Premium Subscriber. There is no reference in the Codex or trac yet, but hopefully someone will shed some light on this eventually. I logged in as one of these Premium Subscribers and it appears to be exactly like a Subscriber permission-wise. My guess is that this role was put here for plugins that want to distinguish between normal people and special people. Sounds cool to me.

*NOTE* I have verified by checking the 2.8 install on WPTavern.com and I do not see a premium subscriber role. Sounds like JD is using a plugin or something that adds that role.

Heading: Time Zone updates
After exploring some more, I went to change my time zone so it was in Central Time. As long as I can remember, there has been a little note in that section where they have promised us that they would make that feature better someday.  Well, it looks like that day has come.

city-near-you

In WordPress 2.8, there is a new feature called “Choose a city near you”. They added a rather lengthy list of cities from around the world (including Longyearbyen, which is in Svalbard, quite north of Europe and Asia).  You can also just choose a GMT +- time if you would not like to scroll through the huge list of cities.

Conclusion:

Most people will only use these new features a few times on their blog, but I thought it would be nice to just show them and make sure they aren’t lost in the new features of WordPress. Hope you like them.

Out of curiosity: Which feature are you going to use most? Which is most important to you? Any ideas of where they should improve this area of the backend more?

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Plugins And The Lack Of Change Logs

Plugins And The Lack Of Change Logs

By Jeffro on June 15, 2009

The other day, I noticed I had about 9 plugins that needed to be upgraded. So I browsed to the plugin management page in WordPress 2.8 and noticed the link to view the details regarding the new plugin version as I figure that will tell me why I should upgrade. Once I click on this link, I get a lightbox popup showing me the same view I would see if I were looking at this plugin on the WordPress.org plugin repository. Tabs to see the description, installation, screenshots, Faq and other notes. No Change Log link.

nochangelog

So, I end up clicking on the plugin homepage link which takes me to where ever this plugin calls home on the net which is typically a post on a blog announcing its release or in some instances, a page dedicated to the plugin. Often times though, the plugin homepage link takes me to the root of the site and I end up having to dig around and search until I find a post about the version in question. What an aggravating experience.

I do have a bit of good news though. Some plugin authors actually provide changelogs within the description tab of the plugin. Others provide a direct link to a page which contains the changelog which is better than nothing.

changeloglink

I’m not a plugin developer so I’m not sure if this is possible but, the best solution would be to include a Change Log link along with the other links such as description, installation, etc. I’ll have a hard time believing this doesn’t make any sense but plugins now a days are coming out with new versions where I can’t easily see what has been changed and before you know it, some option has been added and turned on by default without my knowledge.

I’m interested to know what your thoughts are on this issue.

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Can I See Your ID?

Can I See Your ID?

By Jeffro on June 12, 2009

In one of the after shows for WordPress Weekly, I discussed with Brad Potter and Michael Torbert that I would like to see an additional column of information be added to the WordPress backend that would show the Unique ID number of a post or category. The reason being, this type of information is not available in plain site and it seems like many themes have options which require you to know the ID number of something before you can show, hide, or manipulate that data.

It’s true that the ID number can be located by simply hovering the mouse cursor over a post or category when in the backend of WordPress, but I’d like to see that information presented in plain site. Actually, I wouldn’t mind if their was a Screen Option called ID# which would show or hide the column.

The argument against this idea is that a large majority of the WordPress userbase does not need to know this information. At least, not have it available in plain site. The other argument against this idea is that, it’s not a problem until a theme or plugin requires you to know this knowledge. Last but not least, the information is readily available by hovering over a link which means you can still figure out the UID without adding UI to the backend.

So despite hearing the other side of the argument already, I wanted to throw this out there to see what you thought. As it stands, some of the more advanced themes and plugins use this UID information, so is it up to those guys to create a solution which doesn’t require me to figure out a UID for a category or post? Or, by using these more advanced plugins/themes, is it up to me to figure out that I can get the information by hovering over the link? In the end, is this a non-issue, or does it have merit?

Funny thing is, older versions of WordPress actually showed this information in plain view.

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June 10th The Target For 2.8

June 10th The Target For 2.8

By Jeffro on June 3, 2009

wordpresslogoIn the WordPress Developers channel on IRC today, Ryan Boren announced that the target date for the release of WordPress 2.8 is June 10th. There are a couple other things that were announced as well:

  • WP 2.9 will require MySQL 4.1.2 or greater.  This is raised from the current requirement of 4.0.
  • Checks will be added to the automatic upgrader that will prevent upgrading to 2.9 if  MySQL < 4.1.2 is being used.  The upgrader will also issue a notice that suggests asking the host to upgrade MySQL to meet the minimum requirement.
  • In order to promote migration to PHP 5, the upgrader will suggest that those running
    PHP 4 switch to PHP 5. A link to a Codex page describing how to switch for various hosts should be provided.
  • The new weekly IRC meetup time will be every Wednesday at 9pm UTC.

As an aside, I noticed this thread in the hackers mailing list archive which contained not only a link to the 10,000th ticket to be opened and closed in Trac, but also contained a neat tidbit of trivia.

2.8 is the one with the most tickets opened (815, which if memory serves me well is the first time a milestone passes the 800 line), and more importantly with the most tickets closed (758 and counting).

Usually milestones end their lifetime with a couple dozens (if not a couple hundreds, most often) of unresolved tickets, which are then swept under the rug of the next minor or major version.

But this time, thanks to extensions to the release date (and I’m thinking also the tireless participation of external developers, among which one of the most notable is Denis de Bernardy, who devoted himself full-time to tickets-resolving ever since the 24-hour-marathon (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9758#comment:10), we’ve seen a steady decrease in number of open tickets, even thought this major release has seen more open tickets than any other previous release: we’re at 758 closed tickets already, and the closest to that is v2.5 with 750 closed tickets, then v2.7 with 668 closed tickets.

If you continue reading into that archived post, you’ll see that based on Xavier’s opinion, going six months without a major release proved beneficial to getting the ticket situation under control. Hopefully with 2.9 and beyond, the core devs and contributors can keep pace with the progress they have made with 2.8. I’d also like to extend Xavier’s thanks to the core developers, external developers, reviewers, testers, and people who participate in in-depth discussions to figure out the best way to solve a particular problem.

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To Merge Or Not To Merge?

To Merge Or Not To Merge?

By Jeffro on June 2, 2009

Well, what can I say other than plenty of other people throughout the community picked up on the same message I did from WordCamp San Francisco regarding the merging of WordPress.org and WordPress MU. In fact, there is even a slide that goes with the presentation that says: WPMU and WordPress.org … merging. After that slide was presented, take a look at what anyone paying attention saw on Twitter.

#wordcampsf WordPress MU and wordpress.org are merging. For those of you who are into MU, these must be interesting news.

WPMU and WordPress.org are merging! The codebases are being combined. (per @photomatt) #WordCamp

This was on top of all the websites that reported on the same thing announcing that perhaps by the time WordPress 3.0 would ship (speculation regarding version number) that the codebases between WordPress MU and WordPress would be merged.

Today, we learn from Lorelle on the BlogHerald.com that we possibly tuned into the wrong message. According to Lorelle:

While I’m waiting confirmation, my understanding from Matt’s announcement is that the long time home of all things WordPress, known by many as the WordPress dot org site, will become a WordPressMU site, with nothing impacting the downloadable versions of WordPress.

So, I dived into the WordPress Developers IRC channel to see if anyone had any inside knowledge on the announcement. Most of the people who responded didn’t quite have the answers I was looking for, that is until Donncha chimed in. I ended up having a little conversation with him to see if I could get the details regarding the announcement and this is what he had to say:

donncha – Sure, MU will be merged into WP. That’s basically the whole story
jeffr0 – Majority of people believe a merging of the two projects. WordPress and WordPress MU into one project with a rumored completion of WordPress 3.0. Now posts like Lorelle’s on the blogherald are creeping up suggesting no, WordPress.org will be powered by WordPress MU or something like that. No one knows anything
donncha – It’s just MU -> WP. Everything else is speculation.
jeffr0 – So WPMU becomes WP and that’s that?
donncha – basically, yes.

So how it will happen or when is still up in the air but at least it looks like most of us who jumped the gun and believed that the announcement meant the merging of both projects into one was correct. However, it will be interesting to see what Lorelle comes up with after she receives her confirmation to see if her post changes to match Donncha’s answers.

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