WPWeekly Episode 39 – Special Interview With Michael Pick

WPWeekly Episode 39 – Special Interview With Michael Pick

By Jeffro on January 28, 2009

wordpressweekly1On the evening of Tuesday, January 27th, I had the pleasure to converse with Michael Pick, an employee of Automattic and also the guy behind the newly launched WordPress.TV. WordPress.TV is a new website which aggregates all sorts of WordPress content in video form. The site has already made a name for itself by showcasing many of the videos from recent WordCamps. Here is just a sampling of what we discussed during the show.

Here are some of the questions we covered on the show:

  1. What is the purpose of WordPress.TV?
  2. How did WordPress.TV reach fruition?
  3. Will WordPress.TV feature content created by people other than Automattic?
  4. What do you plan on doing with videos that seemingly disappear?
  5. Can someone suggest a video that is produced with a language other than English?
  6. If there were any plans to let the videos be downloadable or even a podcast?
  7. Are WordPress.tv videos released under the GPL? Would love to use this stuff for company training videos

Near the end of the show, I let my curiosity get the best of me.

Plug For A Podcast: Plugins Podcast is a podcast which aims to cover one WordPress plugin a week with occasional interviews of plugin developers as well as heavy plugin users. Episodes range between 10-15 minutes and are in mp3 format. Angelo already has a podcast available on the pluginspodcast.com website where he discusses the CForms2 Custom Forms plugin. So if you’re a plugin junkie, this sounds like the show for you.

Announcements: This Friday will be Keith Murray’s last episode as co-host of the show. Please stop by for the going away party as we send Keith off to greener pastures.

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode:47 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode39.mp3

Listen To Episode #39:

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Image courtesy of semperfiwebdesign

All In One SEO Hits One Million

By Jeffro on January 27, 2009

Just wanted to give a quick congratulations to Michael Torbert also known as hallsofmontezuma as the All In One SEO Pack has reached over 1,000,000 downloads. While Michael can’t lay claim to every single one of those downloads considering he picked up development for the plugin not too long ago, reaching one million downloads is still quite a milestone.

Image courtesy of semperfiwebdesign

Image courtesy of semperfiwebdesign

You would think that by now, WordPress would have added most of the functionality provided by the plugin into the core. But so far, that hasn’t happened yet and I’d like for it to stay that way. I think the AIO SEO Pack serves the needs of SEO perfectly fine as a plugin rather than being bundled into the core of WordPress.

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What WordPress Needs From Its New Community Leader

What WordPress Needs From Its New Community Leader

By Jeffro on January 27, 2009

The following guest post has been written by Andrew Rickmann who operates the Fun With WordPress website.

Not too long ago, on a domain not so far away, there was a disturbance in the community. It wasn’t the first, it won’t be the last, but it proved to me that a large distributed community like the WordPress community needs more than a project leader, more than a figure-head, and more than a great pool of evangelists. What WordPress needs is a community voice.

The voice of our community needs to be many things. First of all he needs to be respected, not for his mad coding skills, or his design acumen, but for his choice to look at things from a rational and considered perspective. He needs to know when the users are getting a raw deal from the developers, and when the developers are entirely correct in their expectation that users should go a little further to get what they want.

Secondly, while we shouldn’t rule out coding skills, he should be a user first, and a hacker last. He really needs to understand the frustration of getting a theme that doesn’t work, or following instructions that output something wrong, and not knowing how to fix it. This is a regular experience for all users, but where some people see this as a challenge to be solved we need someone who will simply say “hold on, I want this fixed“.

Third, he needs to be able to bring people together. Those people may be Matt and the users, or one user and another, or the community as a whole, but when there is a kerfuffle he needs to stop it in its tracks, strip away the emotions and religious intensity that so often surrounds such things, and help us get to the facts. He needs to mediate: a community peace envoy, if you wish to put it that way.

And of course he needs an appropriate platform from which to do that.

Finally, of course, he needs to love WordPress and the community he serves. He needs to find the new things fascinating sure, but he needs to care about what exists now. It is no good his being an uber-early adopter who quickly moves on to the next new project, he needs to use the mainstream every day and see the greatness in it, not get bored and hanker after progress.

So what does this all amount to in the real world? Well, for sure, it rules me out in so many ways. They say the best leaders are the people who don’t want to lead; I don’t know if that is true or not, but in this case I suspect it is. We have in our midst someone who never set out be a servant of the community. He never asked to be our voice, he just wanted to make a living from what he loved.

He built up his reputation by writing, by asking questions, by talking to the people who run the great ship WordPress, and putting to them the questions that we all had. Time and time again he has shown us new developments as well as great things about old developments. He has faced down Matt and asked “what the heck is going on with this?” and, more importantly, “What’s your favorite cheese?“. He has connected people. Promoted the views of users and hackers alike. And, through it all remained self deprecating, and one of us: the lowly users.

WP Tavern is already proving to be a great extension of this work. As I write this the very first post on the blog has 33 comments, the forum has 50 members and 750 posts, the first just ten days ago, and it hasn’t even been formally launched yet. Anyone who doubts that we have found our voice needs to come and be a part of this. It is only the beginning.

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Change Those FeedSmith FeedBurner Settings

Change Those FeedSmith FeedBurner Settings

By Jeffro on January 25, 2009

Do you use the FeedBurner Feedsmith plugin for WordPress which consolidates all of the various Feed URLs generated by WordPress into one FeedBurner feed? If so, you’ll need to update that plugins settings once you move your account over from FeedBurner to Google. If you don’t, your sites visitors will end up subscribing to a feed that doesn’t exist.

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WordPress.org Registration Form

Is WordPress Porn A Good Idea?

By Jeffro on January 25, 2009

A quick look at the most recently submitted WordPress ideas and it appears as though spam has once again been able to creep onto the site. However, the ideas section is not the only one to feel the onslaught of spam. The WordPress Hackers mailing list as well as the Testers mailing list every now and then gets a few spam messages. But more notably, the WordPress.org forum appears to receive spam posts every day. Unlike most other forums or registration forms, the one used on WordPress.org does not contain any CAPTCHA images or any anti-spam measures. This could be the reason behind the spam getting through which is then seen by quite a few people. Although I must say, the administrators/moderators do a great job of tracking that stuff down and keeping it at bay but they can’t catch them all, at least initially.

WordPress.org Registration Form

WordPress.org Registration Form

To top things off, both the Ideas and WordPress.org Support forum don’t provide much in the way of post reporting. At least in the forum, if you come across inappropriate content, you’re supposed to flag that thread by adding the tag ‘modlook‘. This seems to have worked thus far but the technique requires that end users read the Forum Rules Forum Post which outlines this method. But who reads rules now a days? Perhaps a REPORT button which is added to every forum thread or post which automates the task of adding the modlook tag would work out better with regards to community moderation?

With regards to the WordPress Ideas site, there is no RULES page which explains the type of content that can be added to that section of the site although each idea can have tags attached to it. Suffice to say, end users can add the modlook tag to ideas which need moderation but again, this requires prior knowledge on the end users part. Something a simple graphic button that says REPORT might be able to handle better. At least one member has proposed an idea similar to the one I just described which can be read here.

While I don’t venture into the Ideas site or the WordPress.org Forums as much as I’d like, it’s a bit concerning to visit those pages and see anywhere between 1-5 spam posts.

By the way, at least one person thought Pornamzon was a poor idea. See for yourself.

One Star For Porn Idea

One Star For Porn Idea

Now I ask that you join in on the conversation by offering your thoughts on the spam problem the various WordPress sites/mailing lists are dealing with. What are some of your ideas on how the team could better handle the situation?

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Innovative Use Of Private Pages

Innovative Use Of Private Pages

By Jeffro on January 24, 2009

Community member Itsananderson recently published a link on the forum to a blog post he wrote explaining how to use Pages in WordPress to allow end users the ability to edit their 404 template page with the Page editor instead of manually editing a 404.php template file. Like Anderson’s post title, this enables even your Grandma to manage 404 error pages within WordPress.

I have yet to come across a theme which uses this method to edit template files although I wonder how useful it would be for template files outside of the 404 page? Have you seen private pages used in this way before?

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PluginsPodcast – A Podcast All About Plugins

PluginsPodcast – A Podcast All About Plugins

By Jeffro on January 24, 2009

Just the other day, I received an email from Angelo Mandato letting me know that he was producing a WordPress podcast called simply enough, PluginsPodcast. The show aims to review a plugin each week with occasional interviews with plugin developers, heavy plugin users and much more. Shows last between 10-15 minutes and are in MP3 format. So far, Angelo has produced episodes for his very own BluBrry Powerpress podcasting plugin, Peters custom anti spam and CForms2.

I took a listen to Angelos overview of the BlurBrry Powerpress plugin and enjoyed the high audio quality. Considering the short nature of these episodes, I believe many of you will be adding this new podcast to your Itunes subscriptions as I did because just about the entire WordPress community loves plugins.

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WPWeekly Episode 38 – WP E-Commerce – Interview With Dan Milward

WPWeekly Episode 38 – WP E-Commerce – Interview With Dan Milward

By Jeffro on January 24, 2009

wordpressweekly1Continuing with the theme of E-Commerce, this week I had the chance to interview Dan Milward who is the man in charge of the WP E-Commerce plugin. During the hour long conversation, we discussed the feature set of WP E-Commerce, e commerce in general, what its been like to operate a business in and around WordPress and much more. If you have used WP E-Commerce in the past or are just interested in hearing what Dan has to say regarding the plugin, definitely tune in to this episode.

Disclaimer: This interview was not purchased or is sponsored in any way.

Here are some of the questions we covered on the show:

  1. What are the differences between the free version of the plugin and the gold cart solution?
  2. In your opinion, why has WP E-commerce become synonymous with WordPress and E Commerce?
  3. What are your thoughts on the GPL?
  4. How has it been like for you and Instinct to run a business based on and around WordPress?
  5. How well does WP-E-commerce work with WordPress MU?

Announcements: Next week will be Keith Murray’s last episode as co-host of the show. Please stop by for the going away party as we send Keith off to greener pastures.

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 1 Hour 12 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode38.mp3

Listen To Episode #38:

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WordPress Needs To Revise Post Revisions

WordPress Needs To Revise Post Revisions

By Jeffro on January 23, 2009

When WordPress 2.6 was released on July 15, 2008 one of the new features to hit the core was something called Post Revisions. Post revisions keep track of changes made to a post or page and stores a copy of that page or post before the revision so in case you make a huge mistake or want to see the progression of your content, the post revisions will be right there for you to choose. While having post revisions is all fine and dandy, providing no way for the end user to actually control this feature is not.

With the recently installed version of WordPress for WPTavern, I noticed that post revisions were starting to rack up. Upon doing a Google search, I discovered that I could easily disable post revisions from occurring if I added the following code to my WP-Config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);

For some reason, this code didn’t work. Also as part of my Google search, I came across a forum thread on the WordPress.org forums from six months ago specifically about the topic of post revisions as others didn’t like the feature as well and wanted to turn it off. In the forum thread, there was an argument against adding more checkboxes and features into the backend of WordPress and how there was no negative impact with simply leaving Post Revisions turned on. Well, I can attest to the fact that when I deleted the post revisions that were made on another blog of mine from the database, the size of the database shrank considerably. While the revisions may be made up of only text, hundreds of them eventually add up. No need to convince me of compression and how well the revisions are written, I simply don’t want my database filling up with that kind of stuff.

So while reading the thread, I read about a ticket that was filed in the WordPress Trac system to address some of the issues pertaining to the feature but the ticket was closed with a resolution of Won’t Fix while the milestone was deleted. The ticket also contained a response from DD32 with a link to a post-revision plugin he had created. Instead of using his plugin, I came across another one called Revision Control which has enabled me to not only keep post revisions turned on, but I can also limit the maximum number of revisions a post/page should have. This is good enough for me to keep the post revision feature turned on.

Revision Control Plugin In Action

Here is the part that I find concerning. WordPress has options for just about every feature an end user would interact with on a daily basis. Post revisions has no configuration options. Why not just add a revision section within the WRITING settings which contained options to limit the maximum amount of revisions, enable or disable post revisions, choose between post revisions for posts and pages, and that’s it. For me to install a plugin to provide the type of functionality that should have originally came bundled with that feature is concerning to say the least. One could argue that the way in which post revisions has been added could be equated to having that feature rammed down their throats. Granted, adding one line of code to the Config file of WordPress is not hard, it is not something that should have to be done.

I would open a Trac ticket to request that the features provided by the plugin I mentioned above be added to the core for the Post Revision feature, seeing the previous Trac ticket filed as WON’T FIX is a bit of a downer but thanks to the community around the project and its open source nature along with its popularity, when there is a problem, plugin developers do a great job solving them.

Feedback:

So what do you think of the post revisions feature? Do you use it? How do you feel about not having any way to control how the feature works from the Administration panel?

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Welcome To The WordPress Tavern

Welcome To The WordPress Tavern

By Jeffro on January 23, 2009

Hello there! Welcome to the WordPress Tavern. Yet another WordPress centric website although with a few differences. For starters, this website is authored by me, Jeff Chandler. For those who don’t know me, I’ve written for WordPress websites such as WPHacks.com, WeblogToolsCollection.com and others. I also host the mildly popular WordPress Weekly podcast. I got started using WordPress back in June of 2007. Here is a quick snippet of history as to how I came about using WordPress.

I purchased everything I needed during the month of May. This included a domain, hosting, and a few other tidbits. I had a general idea as to what I wanted to accomplish with the site and the way I wanted it to look, but I had no idea on where to begin. WordPress was suggested to me numerous times and even Pete suggested that I use WordPress, so that’s what I did. Initially, I couldn’t for the life of me, figure out the templating system within WordPress. I gave up and decided to use Joomla, as I had a good amount of experience with the CMS. I quickly realized, Joomla was too much of what I needed. I ended up giving WordPress a second try and since then, I have never looked back.

Another WordPress Site?

So you might be asking yourself, why another site dedicated to WordPress? Well, the site is not exclusively centered around WordPress but rather, WordPress is the core. I plan on covering the entire spectrum of projects under the Automattic umbrella such as BBPress, WordPress.com, BuddyPress, WordPress MU (Multi User), and much more. This site will also feature content that has been created by the WPTavern community as well as the WordPress community.

Community

Speaking of community, we already have a rocking forum online and accessible to the public which I highly encourage you to register an account with and partake in the interesting discussions taking place on a daily basis. Registered users also have access to the Chatbox found within the forum where many people within the community stop by and chit chat throughout the day.

Advertising

Now, I have big plans for this website. Ultimately, I have three goals for WPTavern. The first is to be successful. The second is to foster a community. The third is to make this my sole source of income. Speaking of the third point, their are no advertisements on the site or the forum just yet but they are on the way. In the coming days, weeks, I’ll be adding advertising spots to the forum and the site. I have a good idea on advertising methods which are annoying and those that are not so annoying. I can guarantee you that I won’t be using ads which popup or flash at you. Instead, I plan on using graphic banner ads, the 125X125 kind mixed in possibly with some 468X60 banner slots. Of course, as the WPTavern project progresses, things will most likely change.

The site is in beta form so if you come across a styling issue, an error, or notice something just isn’t working, please contact me via the contact form on this site.

I’ll be publishing information over the next few days which highlights various happenings around the site, explanations of certain features, and much more. Until then, thank you for stepping inside the WordPress Tavern and remember, the drinks are always on the house. Sit back, relax, and engage in thoughtful discussions about this awesome piece of open source software known as WordPress.

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