Displaying 1 To 30 Of 69 Comments Secrets Revealed: WLTC and WPTavern This just confirms my initial assumption when Jeff said the Tavern had been sold. I figured it was you. I think it’s great. A really nice gesture to reward the owners of 2 sites that provided a lot of value to the community in their own ways. » Posted By Carl Hancock On May 20, 2013 @ 8:07 PM Do You Mistrust A Company That Misspells WordPress? I find the whole WordPress spelling witch hunt comical. Serious waste of time debating the absurdity of discounting something based on not capitalizing a P in the middle of a single word. Our company name is “rocketgenius”. All lower case. But everyone in the community spells it “Rocketgenius” or “RocketGenius” or “Rocket Genius”. Do we care? Do we bitch at people over it? do we discount people because of it? No. It’s simply not that important as long as they know who we are. People make an assumption that to be good at WordPress development you need to be wired into this community and be aware of things like this otherwise you must not know what you are doing and therefore you and what you do should be discounted. ABSURD. Case in point. The lead developer of Gravity Forms and rocketgenius co-founder Alex Cancado. He’s not involved in the community. You don’t see him much on twitter, he doesn’t read any of these WordPress blogs. He works and then he gors home and spends tome with his family. He wouldn’t know WordPress is supposed to have a capital P if it wasn’t for me mentioning it because of community stupidity that surrounds it. Does that mean you should discount him? Does that mean he doesn’t know what he’s doing? He only built one of the most successful commercial plugins in existence. So despite the fact he wouldn’t think to capitalize the P in WordPress he’s still a better programmer than you. Remember that next time you bitch or discount someone for not capitalizing the P. » Posted By Carl Hancock On May 17, 2013 @ 10:00 AM At 10 Years Old, Is It Time To Fork? I think at this point WordPress is so ubiquitous that a fork isn’t recommended and more importantly would probably not succeed. Entirely new solutions like Ghost have a better chance of gaining some traction starting from scratch rather than forking WordPress. But it’s still a tough row to hoe. This isn’t exactly a space lacking solutions. There’s tons of blogging apps and CMS apps out there. But Ghost is very promising and it’s garnered a lot of attention which will give it a huge leg up when it comes to gaining some traction. As for core plugins… I didn’t expect them to gain traction. So it’s progressed exactly how I thought it would. Good plugins are products themselves. To do them right if it’s anything other than extremely basic functionality is going to take dedication and lot’s of effort. Dedication that would be better focused on the core rather than a plugin given it’s development not being done for money. But I do agree that the best usage for Core Plugins would be to remove functionality from core itself and provide it as a plugin. » Posted By Carl Hancock On May 8, 2013 @ 5:49 PM Automattic Makes Second Investment – WPEngine @Kevin Muldoon – You completely missed the point. I never said anyone using low cost hosting is doing something wrong. I said if you rely on WordPress for your business and think $50 or more is too much for hosting than you are doing something wrong. That doesn’t mean a low cost host won’t do the job. It means when the time comes to step up to more expensive hosting you balk because of the price… you are doing something wrong. Retread what I said rather than twisting my words and taking it as some sort of personal attack. I clearly stated we used BlueHost, as cheap as it comes, and it was great. BUT the time did come when the low cost solution was hurting our business and we had to step up and switch to a higher end solution. Low cost hosting will only take you so far if your site is truly successful. As for support with higher end hosts, as with anything there are good companies and there are bad companies. I know from personal experience that FireHost provides the highest quality hosting and support I’ve experienced and I’ve been doing this for 16 years. There is a reason why companies like WPEngine and Page.ly stake their success as hosting companies on partnering with FireHost. A bad partner could kill your business in that situation. Ultimately if you find $50 or $100 too much, who cares? You obviously aren’t their target audience. There are plenty of customers out there that will value what they offer and have no problem paying the premium. There are enough solutions available to keep all kinds of customers happy. » Posted By Carl Hancock On November 17, 2011 @ 12:02 AM @Kevin Muldoon – if there is one thing I’ve learned while supporting a very popular commercial plugin for WordPress used on over 250,000 sites it’s that there are a lot of very bad web hosts and in my experience you typically get what you paid for. There are exceptions, but in general the low cost hosts can end up costing you time and money with annoying issues. If you rely on WordPress as a vital part of your business and find $50 or even $100 a month too much for hosting than you may be doing something wrong. For non-business sites, hobby sites and early stage business sites the low cost hosts can do the job. But if you start getting a lot of traffic, require more server resources or require more reliable service for mission critical uptime and responsive support you’ll want to stay away from the cheap hosts. We’ve BlueHost and had a good experience, but eventually we hit a wall and our server resource needs could not be met. We switched to FireHost and went from paying next to nothing per month to a few hundred per month. But we wouldn’t do it any differently. FireHost is as rock solid as it gets. Which is why services such as WPEngine and Page.ly rely on them for their infrastructure. Depending on your needs those are the 3 hosts I’d recommend. Page.ly, WPEngine and FireHost. » Posted By Carl Hancock On November 16, 2011 @ 10:44 PM WPEngine’s pricing is reasonable. Their target audience are businesses using WordPress and full time bloggers. We pay much more than that per month with FireHost, which I believe is who WPEngine itself uses. Page.ly does too. FireHost is excellent. WordPress hosts built on top of FireHost give you the rock solid hosting of FireHost at a lower cost. » Posted By Carl Hancock On November 16, 2011 @ 8:01 PM How eMusic Transitioned From Clunky CMS To WordPress @Jeffro – Nope. I was not aware. We’re always pleasantly surprised when we stumble upon sites that use Gravity Forms that we didn’t already know about. » Posted By Carl Hancock On October 3, 2011 @ 3:16 PM I especially liked the part where they mentioned Gravity Forms and how their team loves it. » Posted By Carl Hancock On October 3, 2011 @ 3:06 PM When Will Automattic Be Acquired? @donnacha of WordSkill – I agree completely. I think that if anyone were to ever buy WordPress, Facebook would make the most sense as a suitor. Google has Blogger, Microsoft already got out of the blog game when it transitioned it’s Live blogs to WordPress… FaceBook doesn’t have a blogging platform. That isn’t to say they couldn’t purchase one, but then again they could just buy Automattic and merge both WordPress.com identities and Gravatar’s into Facebook single sign on. They would make the most likely buyer in the current technology landscape and they have the financial means to pull it off. » Posted By Carl Hancock On September 28, 2011 @ 5:48 PM @Coen Jacobs – Agreed. It would impact the WordPress project itself and could bring the end of a lot of Automattic funded free labor on the project. But it doesn’t mean whoever acquires Automattic “owns” WordPress and plenty of contributors aren’t Automattic employees, including some very active core contributors such as Nacin and Jaquith. @Jobalicious – I guess you didn’t read my response above. Ultimately it’s not entirely up to Matt. It’s up to what the investors behind Automattic’s venture capital funding want to do. » Posted By Carl Hancock On September 27, 2011 @ 6:30 PM @Jeffro – That isn’t how venture capital funding works. They don’t give you millions of dollars because they are nice people. While smaller angel investments typically do not see a large chunk of ownership change hands, venture capital investments typically do. I can assure you that the almost $30 million that Automattic raised in their last venture capital funding round involved ownership in the company. It’s also been mentioned that a chunk of that money went directly to Automattic’s founders to buy out some of their ownership and enable them to “cash out” early. Translation: Matt pocketed a nice chunk of that $30 million and cashed out some of his shares. You can read more here: http://gigaom.com/2008/01/22/wordpresscom-creator-raises-29m/ So ultimately if Automattic’s investors wanted an exit, you can be sure they would get one. » Posted By Carl Hancock On September 27, 2011 @ 3:38 PM Unfortunately after taking VC funding it’s not up to Matt. It’s up to the investors. Eventually they will expect a return on their investment and that typically comes via an acquisition exit. Ultimately does it really matter? WordPress the software is open source GPL and even if Automattic is acquired, Matt will continue at the helm of the WordPress Foundation which is a separate organization. » Posted By Carl Hancock On September 27, 2011 @ 2:37 PM bbPress 2.0 Stable Now Available You can’t browse and install bbPress plugins because the existing bbPress plugins don’t work with bbPress 2.0 and there won’t be a bbPress plugin repository for the new version because it is a WordPress plugin now. Any bbPress enhancement plugins are now simply going to be WordPress plugins you install from the main WordPress plugin installer that enhance bbPress. So you can browse and install bbPress enhancements right now by browsing the WordPress.org plugin repository via the WordPress plugin installer. But there probably isn’t any available yet since it’s so new. » Posted By Carl Hancock On September 23, 2011 @ 9:49 AM Review Of GravityForms – Could Creating Forms Be Any More Kick Ass? @Deborah – What you asked on Twitter is what options there were on reCAPTCHA *AND* if tabindex could be disabled. We said the only options on the field is which skin/color you want to use and that tabindex CAN be disabled but not in the admin. So you must be confusing the answers to your two questions. Either way we never said reCAPTCHA was required. NO field is required on a form. A form is made up of whatever fields you decide to add, that includes captcha. If you don’t want captcha on a form, you don’t add it to the form. Your form only consists of the fields you add. What you were told could not » Posted By Carl Hancock On October 8, 2010 @ 3:33 PM What issues involving form accessibility are an issue? The forms don’t have any major accessibility issues that I am aware of. While tabindex can’t be disabled from the admin tool, it can be disabled via an API hook by adding a line of PHP to your functions.php file. Most users want tabindex which is why it is on by default. Tabindex can be customized via an API hook to adjust the tabindex order or you can choose to turn it off completely. Of course reCAPTCHA isn’t required. It’s just one of many field types. If you don’t want to use reCAPTCHA, you don’t have to use reCAPTCHA. None of the field are required. The forms are customizable so that only the fields you want to use appear on your form. » Posted By Carl Hancock On October 7, 2010 @ 11:08 PM That’s good to hear. Given the events of this week, NOTHING would surprise me anymore. » Posted By Carl Hancock On July 18, 2010 @ 10:37 AM I’d like to think it’s spoofed, but for some reason I don’t think it is. » Posted By Carl Hancock On July 17, 2010 @ 11:45 AM Automatically Correcting The WordPress Mistake @Chip Bennett – The vast majority of the user community doesn’t even know it happens. But I’m guessing users such as school newspapers, magazines, newspapers, etc. wouldn’t be too thrilled with the idea that their CMS would dictate how their editorial content is displayed. I completely get that it’s just one word and it doesn’t change anything else. But I think what people have an issue with is the idea of the CMS changing ANY of their editorial content. It’s more of a principal thing than anything else. The fact is plenty of developers are also upset over the change. Developers who care enough about WordPress development to subscribe to and follow the wp-hackers list. The diehards. It is those developers that are also having their concerns brushed aside. Are they a vocal minority? Sure. But brushing their concerns aside and waiting for it to all blow over just alienates them. What happens when you begin alienating the developers that contribute to the project? Eventually they will quit contributing to the project. » Posted By Carl Hancock On July 6, 2010 @ 3:17 PM I’d have to say that while I completely understand why they did it, I disagree with it. It’s the type of feature that is fun to joke about in a dev chat, but not something you actually want to implement when you have millions of users. Implementing it on WordPress.com is different as it is a closed hosted environment. Content should be free right? Isn’t the mission of the open source WordPress project to democratize publishing? I guess it’s all about democratizing publishing as long as you spell things the way they tell you to. I’m not going to lose sleep over it like some people on the hacker mailing list. But I don’t agree with it. » Posted By Carl Hancock On July 6, 2010 @ 2:48 PM VideoPress Undergoes Major Update I also wish VideoPress sign up wasn’t tied to a WordPress.com account. While I understand it is integrated with WordPress.com, it should be treated more like PollDaddy as a separate business unit. Plenty of people need video solutions for their web sites so why not have it be standalone WITH integration within WordPress.com rather than requiring a user sign up for it via a WordPress.com account upgrade? VideoPress is perfect for businesses and plenty of them have their own sites, they aren’t necessarily using WordPress.com. Now I understand they can just sign up for a WordPress.com account and then sign up for VideoPress but that seems so unnecessary when the goal is to make publishing videos easier and quicker. » Posted By Carl Hancock On July 1, 2010 @ 6:30 PM What they need is HTML5 support for iPhone/iPad devices. If they are storing the data as H.264 MP4 already they should be able to do that. Detect the browser and display the appropriate video embed code (flash for most, html5 for iphone/ipad/etc.). » Posted By Carl Hancock On July 1, 2010 @ 10:55 AM Jason Schuller And The ThemeGarden Marketplace It will most likely be tainted in the eyes of the WP “elite”, but frankly who cares. It won’t prevent it from being a success nor will his sales suffer because of it. You don’t need the support of the WordPress “elite” to be successful. The entire commercial theme and plugin market is proof of that. So if they have nothing better to do, let them get their panties in a bunch over it. Ultimately it won’t matter to ThemeGarden or Press75. The high school like politics surrounding the entire licensing issue is so juvenile. » Posted By Carl Hancock On June 14, 2010 @ 1:32 PM WooThemes Has And Will Continue To Get Credit Was the menu system in WordPress 3.0 inspired by WooNav? Of course. Everybody knows that. Is the code in the menu system in WordPress 3.0 the same code that was in WooNav? Not at all. It was completely rewritten from the ground up. Pretty much nothing remains of the original WooNav codebase. The code, data structure and UI was all entirely redone. John O’Nolan was being generous when he said 90% of the code was rewritten. I would say 99% of the code is more accurate. There might be some function names that are the same, but everything else (including the code in those functions) is completely new. I’m not sure how lavish credit can be heaped on Woo for the contribution considering what they contributed ended up being rewritten to the point that it is an entirely new piece of code. I think they have received a sufficient amount of credit for inspiring the functionality. But they shouldn’t get credit for the code, because it’s not the same code anymore. » Posted By Carl Hancock On June 1, 2010 @ 5:37 PM I’d have to second this. I may disagree with or criticize decisions made by those running the WordPress.org project but i’m not going to call for their jobs or attack them personally. Jane isn’t evil, even if her hair is sometimes red… or violet. » Posted By Carl Hancock On May 28, 2010 @ 11:30 PM If they had gone with H.264 MP4 instead of Ogg they could be serving up videos for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad *right now*. So while i’m all for open, this is an instance where I would have went the other way. As it is they will have to make H.264 MP4 versions of the videos anyway in order to support these devices unless Apple adds Ogg support. But as was pointed out, this looks like a relatively easy fix for the guys at VideoPress to make. They just need to implement better duplicate filename handling. VideoPress is a cool service so I imagine it’s only going to continue getting better as the guys at Automattic continue working on it. » Posted By Carl Hancock On May 27, 2010 @ 5:24 PM @Viper007Bond – Of course it is. Everything in WordPress is a work in progress. Which is why new versions are released to continue to make it better and better. It is also why discussion along with constructive criticism is a good thing. Because it helps in new ideas and suggestions that can help contribute to making the platform even better. » Posted By Carl Hancock On April 27, 2010 @ 9:07 PM I agree. The new UI doesn’t flow nearly as well as the original Woo UI. The new UI is not so fantastic. Swap the position of the menu content and the “tools” so the toolbar is on the right. The tabs are also problematic because they aren’t going to scale. The best way to handle this would have been to handle Menus like Categories, Tags, Posts, etc. Where you go to Menus and you have a list of all your Menus. You either click “Add New” or you edit an existing menu and then get the menu editor interface. It would be more consist with the rest of WordPress if they went this route. Here was a quick UI mockup that I had shown on the UI dev blog when this change was being discussed: The tabs are also large and chunky. I know these are the same tabs that were introduced elsewhere in the UI, but they just don’t fit in here or anywhere else they are used. That being said, the functionality is FANTASTIC! Kudos to Ptah Dunbar and Filosofo for all the hard work! » Posted By Carl Hancock On April 27, 2010 @ 7:11 PM No More Unlimited Support Or Upgrades For GravityForms After May 1st Multi-page forms will be coming as part of either the 1.4 or 1.5 release later this summer. Which release it falls in will depend on which release we include field calculations and the payment processing add-on for PayPal integration. So it depends on which of those major features (among others) we include in the 1.4 release. The one that doesn’t make in 1.4 will be introduced in the 1.5 release. We have a laundry list of both core plugin features we plan on implementing as well as add-ons for various 3rd party service for easy integration. » Posted By Carl Hancock On April 14, 2010 @ 8:26 PM Cuba And The Goal Of WordPress I agree with 37Signals and their views on Mission Statements. Don’t bother with one. 99% of the time they are useless words on a page and nothing more. WordPress is something different to different people. To me WordPress isn’t some grandiose world changing thing. It’s simply a content management system (yes, it is a content management system) that I really enjoy working with. To other people it is bigger than that. That’s okay. That is the beauty of the community. It’s means different things to different people. There is nothing wrong with that. » Posted By Carl Hancock On April 2, 2010 @ 4:42 PM Classic And Kubrick Have Left The Building Good riddance, don’t let the door hit you on the way out… » Posted By Carl Hancock On March 29, 2010 @ 2:25 PMComments Posted By Carl Hancock
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