WordPress Tavern

StudioPress Sold To Copyblogger?

Jeffro — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:25:11 +0000

Not too long ago, Aaron Brazell published an interview with Copybloggers, Brian Clark where he explains the reasons for why he left DIY Themes. In that interview, there was no mention of StudioPress or Brian Gardner in relation to the future for Brian Clark. Fast forward to today and if you take a look at the footer on StudioPress.com, you’ll see the following:

© Copyright 2010 Copyblogger Media LLC · StudioPress™ is a trademark of Copyblogger Media LLC

Interesting to say the least. While I don’t know any of the details involving the deal that has gone down, the trademark of StudioPress is now owned by Copyblogger Media LLC which leads me to believe that either some of the assets, the entire company, or a majority of the company has been sold to Brian Clark. Just like you, I’ll have to sit back and wait for the official word on the details involving the deal but it would not surprise me at all if Brian Gardner has sold the company to start a new venture. Brian just seems like the type of guy that has his hands in all sorts of cookie jars and is always experimenting with ideas.

Let the speculation fly.

*Update* – StudioPress has published an official post announcing details of the merger..

Also noteworthy is that the company was NOT sold, but rather merged with other companies to form a new company.

WPTavern Is My Home And You’re Just A Guest

Jeffro — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:42:00 +0000

I think it’s time that not only do I inform new readers but remind long time visitors that this site is my home and you’re just a guest. The WPTavern.com about page does a decent job of explaining how this site came to be and what its purpose is. WPTavern is still a project but let me explain a few things. For starters, I am not a journalist. I’ve never taken a journalist class and my role is not to be the journalist of WordPress. WPTavern is an enthusiast community about WordPress. It’s comprised of fans of the software, one of them being me. So whatever standards of journalistic quality you’d like to hold me to, get rid of them, they mean nothing.

What I do here is routinely take a look at the WordPress horizon and write about what I see. Things that are interesting to me or that I have a comment/opinion on end up as forum or blog posts. I am not officially endorsed by WordPress.org or Automattic although I do receive monetary support through display advertising by Automattic. Am I a fan boy of WordPress? My answer to that is no and my track record which is available through the WPTavern.com post archive will illustrate this. I am a person that can be swayed from one side to the other. One day, I think something is a great idea and after further discussion, I might think it’s the worst idea ever. That’s just who I am. A fan boy in my opinion is someone who tows the line and only thinks unilaterally in favor of the platform or key figure. That’s not me.

I have to admit, I think I had more fun with this hobby of writing about WordPress and what people were doing with it when I didn’t know anyone personally. For the past 2 years, I’ve worked pretty hard not to burn any bridges and directly go after anyone. In the past two weeks, I’ve been pretty grumpy and those bridges have ignited into flames. It’s hard to stay neutral and not burn those bridges when you look out at the horizon and see a bunch of asshats in the community you love to be a part of. But I can’t publicly call them asshats or describe what their doing to be asshattery because of this notion of taking the high road. While great in practice, it’s good to take a detour every once in a while. These past two weeks have been a detour for me and it feels pretty good to sling some mud where I feel it necessary. The WordPress community is made up of millions of people and only a fraction of those people are assholes, thank god for that. However, I think for now, my mudslinging is over with, at least in the public space.

So you may have heard from someone that I’m the voice of WordPress, a voice of reason, or some other title. The truth is, I didn’t ask for any of those titles and I don’t try to live up to any of them. My interviews, the way I write and the things I do regarding WordPress all stem from my own curiosity.

Over time, my goal and direction for WPTavern has changed. The past two months have been a financial break down. I’ve been working to turn WPTavern into a full-time job, a great source of income for me. It’s not working. There are numerous times in which I’ve looked at the amount of time and work I’ve put into this site, the podcast, etc and wondered if I should continue, at least at trying to make a full-time gig out of it. The choice is becoming increasingly clear in that the answer is no. So I’m currently thinking about revamping my mindset and using WPTavern as my second part-time job that brings in extra money versus having it be my primary source of income. Basically, turn the site and podcast back into a hobby that occasionally pays money. At least this way, the stress of trying to please others first rather than myself will decrease and I don’t need to worry so much about page views or artificial limitations that people have placed on me. I have thought about selling the site or disbanding it but I’m still a distant way from pulling the trigger. After all, the forum is doing very well, the site is still a good resource for many people, and I still enjoy writing about the software.

So while the drinks are still on the house, any liquid that does not make it from the cup to the mouth will be considered alcohol abuse and you’ll be charged a hefty fine.

WPTavern VIP Is No More

Jeffro — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:51:49 +0000

Today, I’ve disbanded the WPTavern VIP Program that I launched at the end of May. Everyone that was a part of the program was sent a pro-rated refund. I’ve been keeping tabs on this particular section of the forum and it was under utilized. I’ll take some of the blame for that. While I did keep up with the coupon portion, I didn’t put effort into the other areas of the program. To really get that section going, I would had to put forth extra effort and work which would take away from the site in general. I’m one man when in reality I need 5. I also didn’t think the program provided any value anymore and thus, was a waste of money. I know some of you simply went through the checkout process as a means of supporting me and the site which I sincerely thank you for but you paid money to be part of a value oriented program which wasn’t delivering on a consistent basis.

So instead of letting the subscriptions expire and simply disabling the subscription process, I wanted to get this out of the way as quick as possible. For those of you that subscribed and your money situation is bleak, think of this as a mini stimulus package!

Forum VIP Membership Now Available

Core Committer Peter Westwood Joins Automattic

Jeffro — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:00:05 +0000

Peter Westwood who is a core comitter for the WordPress.org project and has been involved with the community for the majority of the projects existence has announced on his personal blog that he now become the newest member of the Automattic team as a “Happiness Gardener”. I’ve lost count but for the conspiracy theorists out there, this now makes one more Automattic employee with committ access.

This level of enjoyment has led me to consider at a number of points in time whether or not I should switch job and work full-time on WordPress.org as a freelance consultant or as an Automattician. In the end it felt like the right thing for me to do was to apply to be an Automattician. This will hopefully ensure that I have a dependable long-term income stream and the ability to spend my spare time on the things I love: Music, Photography, Food, and of course WordPress.

Congrats on the move Peter. Look forward to getting the chance to meet you at a future WordCamp.

CodePoet.com – New Home For WordPress Consultants

Phil Simon And The New Small

Jeffro — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:00:11 +0000

Phil Simon who is an accomplished book author with two books already under his belt, Why New Systems Fail and The Next Wave of Technologies is currently in the process of receiving enough funds from the public to write and publish his new book, The New Small: How a New Breed Of Small Businesses is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies. While Phil was originally going to write a book chronicling the life of WordPress from the past to the present, that idea has switched into discussing how companies are creating some cool jobs thanks to emerging technologies. Phil will be profiling twelve different companies from different industries. When I asked Phil what this book has to do with WordPress or Automattic for that matter, this is what he told me:

There’s a whole section on FOSS such as Drupal, WP, Joombla, and other free products. The book is about how small businesses can act big and save oodles of cash.

So far, Phil has managed to raise $3,085.00 out of the $4,000 needed. There are special perks being offered to those who back the book with a certain amount of money such as your name in the acknowledgments section or an acknowledgment plus a copy of the book. Good luck Phil and I hope you reach your amount by November 2nd. I also hope to have Phil on the WordPress Weekly podcast to talk about his book once it’s been published.

New WordPress Book – WordPress 3 Site Blueprints

Gravatar Support In Thunderbird Thanks To Extension

Jeffro — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:17:43 +0000

Thanks to an extension for Thunderbird called Display Contact Photo, you can now view Gravatars within emails in Thunderbird. The Gravatar blog has a good explanation on how to setup and install the extension. I’ve installed the extension as Thunderbird is my email client of choice. So don’t be surprised to see a beer mug accompanying replies from me although I’m not sure yet if both parties need to be running the extension to see the images.

New WordPress Book – WordPress 3 Site Blueprints

Jeffro — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:00:17 +0000

I recently came across a new WordPress based book that is different from most of the ones on the market in that it provides blue prints for creating specific purpose sites using WordPress. The book is called WordPress 3 Site Blueprints and was written by Heather R. Wallace and published by Packt Publishing. The first chapter of the book covers a topic that is still very relevant, Migrating a static website to WordPress. Considering the amount of businesses still switching from static based sites to dynamic content this is definitely a use case worth knowing about. The table of contents is as follows:

Chapter 2: Building A Community Portal
Chapter 3: Building An E-commerce Website
Chapter 4: Building A Local Classified Ads Website
Chapter 5: Building A Consumer Review Website
Chapter 6: Building A Job Board Website
Chapter 7: Building A Microblogging Website
Chapter 8: Building A Local Business Directory
Chapter 9: Building A Membership Website

As you can see by the table of contents, this isn’t a beginners book nor is it a how to install themes and plugin book. Instead, the book lives up to it’s name by giving you the blueprints to build 10 different specific use websites. Before making the purchase, I encourage you to read the sample chapter which is chapter 4: building a local classified ads site.

Vote WordPress For The 2010 Open Source Awards

Jeffro — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:00:41 +0000

It’s that time of year again to nominate WordPress for the Packt Open Source Awards for 2010. Nominations were opened up on August 9th and will close on September 17th. The top five projects with the most nominations in each category will move on to the final stage of voting. Voting for the finals begins on September 27th, voting will close on November 5th, and the winners will be announced on November 15th.

In 2009, WordPress took the prize for Overall Winner while Drupal won the category for best open source PHP content management system. One of the categories setup for nominations is Most Promising Open Source Project. While you can nominate any project you wish, consider nominating BuddyPress as it’s made some great strides within the past year and is definitely an up and coming successful project.

Review Of Headway – Where SquareSpace Meets WordPress

Jeffro — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:48:52 +0000

At A Glance:

Headway is a WordPress theme framework that makes it easy for both end-users and developers alike to create killer websites. Headway is no ordinary framework however as you’ll soon find out. The theme is split GPL licensed where as the PHP code is licensed under the GPL v2. If not otherwise stated, all images, cascading style sheets, and included JavaScript are NOT GPL, and are released under the Headway Themes Proprietary Use License v1.0 unless specifically authorized by Headway Themes. Elements of the themes released under this proprietary license may not be redistributed or repackaged for use other than those allowed by the Terms of Service. The Headway personal option costs $87.00 while the developer option costs $164.00.

At the time of this review, the purchase page for Headway themes has two options, Personal and Developer. Further down on the page is a section on what you can and can’t do. The what Can’t You Do section screams anti-GPL but I’ve followed up with Grant Griffiths who has notified me that that particular page will be be updated to reflect the licensing changes that have occurred recently.

The theme version which I’ve reviewed is 1.7 Beta. The current as of August 19th stable version of Headway is 1.6.6.

Configuration And Use:

I’m really happy to see that Headway Themes is at least split licensed GPL now because this theme needs more exposure. Configuration of Headway was a breeze and contained the usual selection of options such as the Feed URL, favicon location, etc. Headway also has a comprehensive search engine optimization configuration panel where if you were to use something like AIO SEO with Headway, it might be over kill.

Headway Configuration Panel

What do you notice missing from the following screenshot? Most themes have options in the back-end that allow you to configure the number of sidebars, which side of the site those sidebars will appear on, header uploader, etc. That’s all missing from the Configuration page of Headway because this particular framework contains a Visual Editor. The visual editor has taken the place of the visual display options normally configured from the back-end of WordPress allowing the configuration page to be strictly tied to the behaviour of the theme. This is a great way to solve the dilemma of hundreds of options to configure for the theme.

By far, the visual editor is the bread and butter of Headway. The only thing I’ve seen that I can compare the visual editor to is SquareSpace and the editor they provide for creating designs.

For at least the past two years, I’ve talked about the idea of being able to visually design a WordPress theme with something like a WYSIWYG type of editor. Drag a content box here, drag a sidebar there, etc. I’m really excited to see this idea see the light of day thanks to Headway. After going through the editor wizard which allows me to select a default layout e.g. sidebar right content left or sidebar left content right, color scheme of the major elements of the site, the ability to upload a header image, I’m then ready to start editing the various elements that comprise the site. I could go on and on about how awesome the visual editor is and what it entails you to do but the following video illustrates it much better than 1,000 words can.

If that type of versatility is not enough, welcome to Leafs. Leafs are sort of like widgets but more powerful and flexible. For example, Headway ships with a Text/HTML/PHP leaf that is like a WordPress Text Widget on steroids. Leafs are content boxes that exist between the header and the footer. For example, in the following screenshot, I’ve created a new Content leaf.

Instead of the default mode of a Page or single post, I’ve selected the option to use a Custom Query. This allows me to use filters and configure additional options that take the default content leaf to new leaps and bounds. This also illustrates that the developer types can have fun with the visual editor as well. Speaking of developers, Headway contains something called Easy hooks. Headway Easy Hooks provides you a simple way to add content to your site that would otherwise be impossible (without hacking, of course).

Easy Hooks For Developers

Headway has done a great job of modularizing aspects of the design such that things are broken up to the point where you can export configuration settings for specific sections and import them into another site using Headway. Among the various items that can be exported are the Headway Configuration options, SEO Settings, Visual Editor: Header, Footer, Navigation, and Site Dimensions, Visual Editor: Style, Visual Editor: Leaf Templates, and a full export/backup of the configuration of the theme which does not include leafs, layouts for any pages and widgets. This is great, especially for those that purchase a Headway developers license as they have made it incredibly easy not to repeat development work such as a cool Leaf.

Support:

Support for Headway is handled by free documentation available to anyone who wants to read/watch it located here. Highly recommended before playing around with the theme. There is also a support forum available to members only. Also note that in order to receive automatic updates of Headway, you’ll need to have a valid registration which includes a Headway Username and Password.

Conclusion:

I was head over heels when Builder by iThemes was released because it brought me closer to the concept of the WYSIWYG apporach to building a WordPress theme. However, Headway has made my vision a reality. In fact, Headway makes it FUN to design a WordPress theme/skin. Instead of editing CSS, dealing with FTP to over write files, etc, the visual editor approach that Headway provides is something I would love to see WordPress in the future get a grasp of for a default theme instead of the same old approach. I’d also love to see the Headway visual editor or something like it to end up on WordPress.com.

I don’t think I’ve said a bad thing about Headway because there was very little to find wrong with the theme. The headway team should be very proud of themselves for creating such a kick ass product.

Special Deal:

Grant has graciously provided me a coupon code to share with all WPTavern readers. When you purchase Headway, type in wptavern into the coupon area and save 20%. This coupon code expires September 1st.

WordCamp Montreal August 28th-29th

Jeffro — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:39:30 +0000

For my friends north of the border, if you’re anywhere near Montreal around the end of August, consider attending WordCamp Montreal which is a two day event focused on WordPress. The culturally diverse city transpires into WordCamp as English and French are both well represented. The cost of admission is $40.00 and includes a T-Shirt with lunch. There will also be a special deal for those in attendance with $1.00 hosting from Netfirms.

The first Montreal WordCamp took place in July 2009 and was a great success. I don’t see how the 2010 version could be any less.

WordCamp Phoenix On Friday The 13th!