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 WordPress Song by Grumo from Grumo Media on Vimeo.
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 WordPress Song by Grumo from Grumo Media on Vimeo.
Making the rounds on Twitter today is a WordPress plugin called Dashboard Site Preview that allows you to preview your website from the WordPress dashboard. The plugin was created by 10 year old, Jesse Friedman who goes by jesseenterprises on WordPress.org. According to Brad Williams, this guy attended WordCamp Philly in 2011 and used what he learned at that event to create this plugin.
Dashboard Site Preview adds a widget to your dashboard which is a simple iframe that shows you the front-end of the website. For widescreen monitors, you can maximize the use of the preview by setting the dashboard to display widgets in 1 column.
Not quite sure if this will save time when compared to other methods such as displaying the front end within another browser tab or within a browser window on a secondary monitor. However, this plugin excels at being a great learning experience for Jesse. I don’t know about you but I think it’s very encouraging to see younger folks getting involved with coding. After all, Matt Mullenweg believes that scripting is the new literacy.
Lester ‘Gamerz’ Chan was recently interviewed by Singapore magazine, GoDigital. You’ll have to use your mouse to scroll through the first few pages to get to the interview but once there, you’ll read some great insight into who Lester is as a person. Here are a couple of tidbits I took away from the interview.
Lester became involved with WordPress before there was a WordPress. That is to say, he worked with B2 which is the predecessor to WordPress and what WordPress is based on.
His personal site, Lesterchan.net is one of the top three websites in Singapore.
He will continue to maintain his plugins for security purposes.
He has the same shoe size as me. (11)
While the magazine is flash based, I managed to take a screenshot of the first page of the interview to help give you a taste of what’s inside.
How many of his plugins are you using on your site? Here on the Tavern, we’re using WP-Polls, WP-PageNavi, and WP-Stats.
How many of you still update your themes footer every year to change the copyright date? Thanks to a small snippet of code, you can add this to your footer.php file which will negate the need to manually change the copyright information every year. The code snippet is php the_time(‘Y’) An excellent primer for how to use this snippet within the footer.php file is explained via Lorelle VanFossen.
The independent web is growing quite a bit. Although we have these great cloud servers for WordPress, the software that people run and install themselves is still as popular as ever. Our services are bringing more people online, but they’re also bringing more people who want to own their own space on the web–they want to own a house instead of rent an apartment. When we were first starting out, I thought, “Downloading and uploading software, managing databases, no one wants to do that.” But it turns out, a lot of people do.
Posts like these from Matt Mullenweg are always fun to read. Via Open Web FTW on GigaOm.
Yesterday, I received an email from a freelancer who wanted to know if I had any places I could point him to to get more WordPress gigs. The economy is still bad, people are still collecting unemployment, looking for work, but the one constant I’ve noticed is that there is always a need for a WordPress developer either through an established firm or helping out with a specific project. I reached out to those who follow me on Twitter and requested that if they were currently hiring WordPress developers to send me a reply back along with a link to the job offering. Here are the folks that replied back to me.
Page.ly – A dedicated WordPress specific hosting company
While not available on the site just yet, Marshall Oram responded that they are looking to fill a full-time position at their office located in Phoenixville, PA. If interested, contact him via his email address.
Metaltoad – Metal Toad Media is a digital strategy agency looking hard for Drupal and WordPress developers.
B5Media – Full-time position located in Toronto, Canada. These guys manage some popular websites!
Ravidreams – WordPress services company looking for dedicated individuals who eat, sleep, and breath WordPress.
10Up – Jake Goldman mentioned on Twitter that they have recently hired employee #7 and are looking for #8 which could be you!.
I can guarantee you that there are definitely more WordPress gigs out there to be had. I see requests for them all the time on Twitter. If you’re a company that needs WordPress freelancers or looking to fulfill a position, feel free to publish a link to your job offering within the comments. Links to jobs that require bidding will not be published.
Looks like Drearmeda who is one of the guys behind Sucuri.net has placed some WordPress ink on his arm. He’s certainly not the first to get a WordPress logo as a tattoo and probably won’t be the last. While it’s cool to see this kind of enthusiasm for the software, some people might look at this as going over the top. I don’t think something like this symbolizes the community as turning into a cult around WordPress. It’s just a persons unique way of showing their enthusiasm for the software, which doesn’t bother me a bit. Does it bother or worry you to see a software logo tattooed on someone’s body?
Developers are going to want to add this page to their list of resources. Dominik Schilling has written a guest post for WPEngineer.com that covers a wide range of constants that can be used with WordPress. I’ve used and seen many of those constants defined within the WP Config file. It’s pretty cool to see such a wide range of constants available to change the behaviour of WordPress all in one place. ∞
Created two months ago, the WordPress.org support forums has added a new section specifically for those that install and or use WordPress on a localhost. Installing WordPress onto a PC or Mac that can be used locally without an internet connection can at times become quite the endeavor. Thankfully, there are software suites such as WAMPServer and XAMPP that make the process of installing all of the necessary software to turn a machine into a web server very easy.
The following link has an assortment of community created tutorials for various setups to install WordPress on your local machine. There are also a number of links published within the WordPress Installation Techniques Codex Article.
Intriguing interview conducted by Gihyo.jp which is a Japanese focused developer resource site.
As your experience straddles both, where do you think open source excels? And where is it weak?
The open source model is probably best in the world at bringing together hundreds of people, from casual passersby to those who are deeply involved, to make constant, incremental improvement to core software. For projects with a clear goal―like the Linux kernel or Wikipedia―having an efficient method for people to contribute outstrips anything any proprietary company could do. The weaknesses are that it’s harder to make radical changes and do design. And those two are very much related. Open source is best at incremental improvements of things you already do, as well as responding to user requests. But with open source, it’s a lot harder to move the community to do something that users have never imagined they want. The problem is not impossible to overcome. But it means that whoever is leading the change must lay out the case as a compelling direction for the future―and to do it before a single line of code is written.
I can imagine those who have witnessed the development of WordPress for at least the past two years may take exception to the last sentence in that quote. In my opinion, that is not how most WordPress development works. I might as well cite the classic example known as the Capital_P Dangit function. The so called compelling direction was laid out after the change was added to WordPress 3.0. The change occurred without a trac ticket attached to it which further illustrates the point that sometimes, the compelling case to add something to WordPress never happens before one line of code is written.
While I’d definitely like to see dialogue occur between users and developers on certain proposed features before one line of code is written, it’s often been said to me that we’ll end up talking in circles with no lines of code ever being written. It’s easier to talk than code. So where does the balance come into play? WordPress history shows us that plugins appear to be the balance makers. Additions or reverts to core are often remedied by someone releasing a plugin, after the fact. This is the road WordPress development has chosen to go down more often than not. It’s definitely annoying at times but I’m happy to see that WordPress has such a large user base that someone, somewhere, will most likely develop a plugin to right the wrongs of WordPress. Those wrongs are considered from a per user basis as even I realize WordPress can’t hit the sweet spots for all users.
In the life of WordPress, there are both good and bad milestones. One year later, I still consider the addition of the Capital P function as a big mistake that will go down in my history book as a bad milestone. I chose to use this example as it best reflects the complete opposite of Matt’s response to the original question. I’m hoping that things change and that at some point, what Matt says becomes the norm for how WordPress development works, not the other way around. We need to see more events like this complete with published results and open discussion about those results.
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