Displaying 1 To 30 Of 33 Comments How To Become A Top WordPress Professional Maybe if the capital P filter was removed from core it would make judging people based on their observance of CamelCase that bit easier. For example, I can’t tell from Ryan’s comment whether he despises people for their adherence to branding over spelling and grammar conventions, or whether your software has in fact stripped his comment of all meaning ;) » Posted By that girl again On December 8, 2012 @ 7:56 PM My Apologies To The WordPress Foundation Even if Jane was posting all the Wordcamp-related stuff on the wrong blog, it’s still there and still creates an apparently false impression that the WordPress foundation is/was involved in financing Wordcamps. How are we supposed to know that this isn’t the case any more, if it ever was? ESP? » Posted By that girl again On May 15, 2012 @ 6:55 PM It’s hard to place blame or hold anyone accountable when you have no idea who that person is or what project or group they belong to. You hit the nail on the head. I don’t quite see why you should have to apologise for their lack of transparency. If the wordpress foundation doesn’t want to take the blame for things it hasn’t done, perhaps it should be a little clearer about what its remit actually is, because right now its (admittedly dusty) website is still full of stuff about funding wordcamps. You can see how people might get confused by that. » Posted By that girl again On May 13, 2012 @ 9:38 PM WordPress Foundation Harming Rather Than Helping WordCamps Miroslav has a point. The WordPress foundation clearly does not WANT other Wordcamps to be on anything near the scale of the original. It would diminish the status of Matt’s own conference. Obviously that’s why Jane wanted to change the name of Wordcamp SF — so people wouldn’t complain about it being a special case. There is nothing to stop people organising large-scale conferences elsewhere, but in order to be successful they are going to have to do it outside the aegis of Wordcamp. I don’t quite know where people get the idea that the Foundation is in any way accountable to the community. It’s not a democratic or representative organisation, just the means by which Matt protects his assets and redistributes some of the largesse to arbitrarily selected beneficiaries. It’s designed to protect Matt’s interests, not yours. If you want fairness and accountability, you’re going to have to establish your own foundation based on those principles. » Posted By that girl again On May 5, 2012 @ 7:13 AM Bad Behavior In The WordPress Community @Andreas Nurbo – I’m not sure it matters all that much what stance Jane takes. Even if Kevinjohn were to send her all the evidence, what could she actually do about it? Prescribe anti-psychotic drugs for the crazy people? Ban them from using wordpress ever again? He’s better off forwarding the threats to law enforcement and adding them to his list of reasons to keep away from wordpress. Every fandom has its batshit insane contingent, and while Matt has occasionally been guilty of mobilising them to serve his own ends it’s in the nature of the batshit insane that they’re extremely difficult to control, even by those they profess to worship. Indeed, it’s not at all unusual for them to unleash the worst of their ire on the creators of the fandom, so I can see why Automattic might not want to come out too strongly against them. » Posted By that girl again On January 23, 2012 @ 3:18 PM Some Orgnizations And WordPress Just Don’t Mix @Matt – if you read the previous post in his blog, it clearly states that he used to participate in beta testing, but had to give up because the core team had a different concept of what ‘beta’ meant and too much stuff was getting broken. As for the people demanding to know where he has switched his allegiance, I very much hope that in future he’s open to using a variety of tools, rather than simply trying to shoehorn his favourite software into every environment he comes across. It doesn’t sound like the latter approach has been working out that well. » Posted By that girl again On January 10, 2012 @ 1:22 PM Crummy Advertising On WordPress.com My concern about the Federated Media deal is that US users will start serving relatively tasteful Automattic-vetted ads from which they may even be able to earn the occasional cent, while the rest of the world continues to get flashing download buttons and porn with nothing in exchange but loss of credibility. (I’m in the UK and I hardly ever see Adsense on wordpress.com any more. There are some Federated Media ads which are OK, but the obnoxious ones are coming via Adperium and Yahoo.) » Posted By that girl again On November 16, 2011 @ 9:01 AM Full-Size Carousel For Photos Now On WP.com – Plugin Being Developed Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to include the option of reverting to the conventional gallery format for those on slow connections or lower resolutions, and not everyone is happy about it. I think this is one of those features which might have been better done as a plugin first, then they would have had some extra time to tweak it and figure out a way of disabling it before rolling it out across wordpress.com. » Posted By that girl again On November 10, 2011 @ 9:21 PM Please Don’t Use The Post Title As A Hyperlink Links are a post format. If they didn’t behave differently from other posts there would be no point in defining a separate format for them. If you’re posting the link in order to discuss it with your readers, it should be a standard post or an aside, because that’s more than just a link. But I don’t see a problem with allowing people to bypass my blog and head straight to the other site if I’m not adding any actual content. » Posted By that girl again On November 6, 2011 @ 9:00 AM Kvetch came about when a bunch of WP developers decided to leave the project due to their opinions not being listened to and started up Habari. It was basically window-dressing to make it look like Matt was interested in feedback after all. It’s tough getting Automattic to do wordpress.org maintenance (it doesn’t pay the bills) so my guess is that the kvetch ‘feature’ will either stay the same indefinitely or eventually be deleted. Unless they can outsource it to volunteers, like they did with theme reviews. That could work. » Posted By that girl again On November 2, 2011 @ 12:07 PM Sorry, but you’re going to need more than $10 to run a business site on wordpress.com. If you don’t hand over an extra $30 for the no-ads upgrade, then a significant proportion of your visitors are going to see your site plastered with tacky animated ads, quite possibly for your competitors. Not such a great choice if you want your site to have a semblance of professionalism. » Posted By that girl again On October 6, 2011 @ 2:02 PM When Will Automattic Be Acquired? @Ben Ackles – yeah, it is an important point, that’s why I made it. Obviously I’m aware that Automattic and the WordPress Foundation are separate legal entities, that’s why I referred to them as such. But the wordpress.org domain currently belongs to neither of them. If Matt wished to transfer it to Automattic, he could. If he chose to transfer it to the WordPress Foundation, he could. Hell, if he wanted to sell it to Google tomorrow, he could. In theory, the Foundation, as owner of the trademark, would have the right to veto use of the wordpress.org domain by any entity other than itself. In practice, the Foundation is run by Matt and a couple of Automattic employees and I don’t think he’s likely to oppose his own decisions. In addition to that, if you search for ‘WordPress’ at the US patent and trademark office, you’ll find that while the Foundation own the WordCamp mark and the WordPress logo, the WordPress name is still listed as property of Automattic. It’s a grey area, to say the least. » Posted By that girl again On September 28, 2011 @ 8:27 PM @jobalicious – the future of wordpress.org would basically depend on what got included in the deal. Obviously Microsoft can’t buy the wordpress software, but they can buy the site where it lives.The wordpress.org domain is not currently owned by either Automattic or the WordPress Foundation: it belongs to Matt personally. This gives him the choice, when the time comes, between selling it off along with Automattic or handing it over to the non-profit foundation which currently owns the trademark. (Microsoft could probably manage without the trademark, if they had to, and might even prefer to rebrand.) If the wordpress.org site was acquired along with Automattic, the official software would probably limp on for a while, but the main focus would be on encouraging people to move their content and personal data to wordpress.com instead. Obviously the community would fork the project in response, but there’s no telling which, if any, of the forks would survive. » Posted By that girl again On September 27, 2011 @ 8:01 PM @donnacha of WordSkill – good points, so it seems a shame that ‘WordUp Edinburgh’ is being branded as such rather than ‘WordUp Scotland’ or ‘WordUp UK’. In regard to WordCamp Ireland’s site, I wonder whether that might have been a trademark issue? I would imagine that Matt has been advised to go after domains using ‘wordcamp’ in the same way as he was advised to shut down domains including ‘wordpress’. » Posted By that girl again On September 17, 2011 @ 7:16 PM The WordPress Learning Curve – How Steep Or Shallow Is It? The paradox is that as installation and upgrading have become easier, actually using the software has become harder. It’s like b2 was Paint and WP 3.2 is Photoshop: along with all the cool shiny stuff you’re going to get a much more complicated interface. WordPress newbies have got a lot more to absorb now than I did in b2 days. OK, I had to figure out FTP and they don’t, but I didn’t have to learn about three different types of taxonomy, or mess about with gravatars, or worry about getting hacked through an insecure theme or plugin. And the people on wordpress.com get terribly confused about the difference between .com and .org, what they have to pay for and what they can and cannot do with their sites. Honestly, if I was trying to get a techphobe into blogging today, I’d send them to tumblr. » Posted By that girl again On September 1, 2011 @ 12:09 PM WordPress.org Should Scare You @SiteSubscribe – I’m not knocking WP (for once); most people don’t actually need a proper CMS and can manage perfectly well with blog software with a few extras bolted on. They’re better off on WP, and sending them to Drupal is counter-productive. The more powerful a platform is, the harder it’s going to be to master in a day. Like I said, there’s no point comparing the two. They’re different platforms doing different things. » Posted By that girl again On March 26, 2011 @ 9:06 PM @SiteSubscribe – it’s like comparing apples and oranges really, isn’t it? The only thing they seem to have in common is open-source development and the rabid fanboys which accompany it. Drupal is a fully-featured complex CMS out of the box and therefore has a steeper learning curve than WordPress, which is still basically blog software with delusions of grandeur. It’s silly to make your site noob-friendly if your software isn’t. » Posted By that girl again On March 26, 2011 @ 3:22 PM No other non-Automattic Plugin developer would be allowed to host a Plugin in the Repository if it did anything remotely like this. This. Obviously Automattic have a duty to their investors to maximise their revenue streams, and making the free/donationware option hard to find is fairly standard practice, but the non-free nature of Akismet severely weakens the case for not allowing other commercial plugins (or themes, for that matter) to be hosted on wordpress.org. Also, since Automattic consider $30 adequate compensation for losing a year’s ad income on an average wordpress.com blog, asking for twice that amount to use Akismet on an average ad-hosting wordpress.org blog seems… disproportionate, shall we say? » Posted By that girl again On March 22, 2011 @ 10:59 PM WordPress.com To Self Hosted For 99 Bucks One has to think if some of the webhosts being recommended are purely because of they payout based on affiliate or referrals. Yes, they’ve replaced the old affiliate hosting page on wordpress.org with one geared more towards .com here, presumably because they wanted the revenue to go to Automattic rather than Matt personally. The customer experience after departing wordpress.com is not really their problem; they’ve already got their $99 and their referral cut. The dodginess of some of these hosts has never impacted on Automattic’s credibility before, and there’s no reason why it should now. I do think they’re taking advantage of the ignorance of their prospective customers. WP itself is fairly complex these days, and if you’re comfortable with the plethora of menus and options on wordpress.com you shouldn’t really have any trouble navigating your webhost’s control panel. Dreamhost already includes all the free wordpress.com themes in its one-click installs and it wouldn’t surprise me if the others are doing the same. I reckon I could get a carbon copy of my wordpress.com blog up and running within ten minutes, but obviously if somebody else is doing it all for you then DNS propagation is going to make it look like a much longer job ;) » Posted By that girl again On March 11, 2011 @ 10:35 PM Three More Commercial Themes Added To WordPress.com I wonder whether the purchase of PYT might include other Genesis child themes if/when they get rolled in… otherwise, $75 looks overpriced compared to the other offerings. » Posted By that girl again On March 7, 2011 @ 6:47 PM Cutline Dropped On WordPress.com In Favor Of Coraline @JLeuze - One solution that I think would be a win-win would be if they retired some of these old themes, but grandfathered them in for anyone currently using them. So the old themes would lurk in the background being used on some sites, but no longer available as an option to anyone that wasn’t already using them. I have suggested this before but they aren’t interested. I have absolutely no idea why, it seems pretty commonsensical to me. -@David - » Posted By that girl again On August 15, 2010 @ 3:37 PM Thesis Goes Split Licensed – Hell Freezes Over People who cynically steal code licensed on that understanding are no better than all the other parasites who make life harder for everyone You can’t ‘steal’ something that’s already been given to you. Misuse and exploit, yes. Steal, no. Apart from that, your comment is the best illustration of the Marxist nature of the GPL I’ve seen so far. » Posted By that girl again On July 23, 2010 @ 5:08 PM Jeffro –Comments Posted By that girl again
any chance of provoking a flamewar with Matt so we can at least get rid of Sweet Blossoms? ;)
the question I have which you and I can’t answer is why didn’t Chris take this fight all the way to the courts to really stick by what he perceived to be the right course of action
OK, let me try and answer this. Who do you think is going to be able to afford better lawyers and be more able to bear the costs of a potentially long-running lawsuit; Matt, with the assets of Automattic and the WordPress Foundation behind him, not to mention the support of the SFLC; or Chris Pearson? I don’t recall Thesis taking millions in VC funding, do you?
You have to be insanely dedicated to your principles to be willing to bankrupt yourself over them. I don’t think Chris is that stupid. I also don’t think he cares that much. Plus he would have needed to eliminate any code copy/pasted from WP core files to have a serious chance of prevailing in court; more time and money that would be better spent on his actual business. Looked at from a business perspective, he didn’t really have a choice. Nobody likes giving in to bullying and threats, but in the real world the guy with the most money gets to call the shots.
» Posted By that girl again On July 23, 2010 @ 10:32 AM
@Andreas Nurbo – if a theme is released under GPL (which it needs to be, in order to be included on the wordpress.org repository), then credit links are optional, regardless of what the author says. (Where things get knotty is when the designer has used CC-licensed resources in their theme. I don’t personally believe it can be legal to relicence other people’s content without their say so, but even if it’s legal it’s certainly unethical.)
However, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. Credit links, as well as being a form of thank you to the designer and an acknowledgement that the blogger didn’t do everything themselves, are often the only way of telling readers where the theme comes from and where they can download it for themselves. If people are that bothered by crediting theme designers, they can make their own themes. Problem solved.
Historically, plugin developers have been far more likely to be hardcore GPL advocates than theme developers and that’s why plugin linkbacks never really gained traction. I would have no problem including plugin-related links on the front end of a site if that was what the developers wanted. They give me a useful plugin, I give them a link in exchange. It seems fair enough to me, though of course there is always going to be a minority of users demanding something for nothing.
» Posted By that girl again On February 20, 2010 @ 2:46 PM
WordPress Dev Chat For 1-07-10
The idea of Matt designing the new default theme is much funnier than the post editor joke.
» Posted By that girl again On January 8, 2010 @ 6:13 PM
Who’s in charge of the wordpress.org site? Automattic. Who gets the affiliate dollars when people pick a host from the wordpress.org site? Automattic. Who’s responsible for the direction of wordpress development? Automattic. Who’s got a new VP charged with ‘user growth and retention’? That’s right. Automattic.
I’m sure community members will continue to help out those who need it, but unless they are running around actively promoting wordpress to inexperienced users it’s really not their responsibility. If lack of support for novice users ever affects growth of the software, Automattic will eventually take action, even if it’s only to redirect them all to wordpress.com.
» Posted By that girl again On October 21, 2009 @ 3:55 PM
Plugin Repository And Commercial Plugins
So, still no plugin equivalent to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial and a definite ‘no’ to it happening at any time in the future?
If I were a plugin developer I’d be pretty pissed that theme developers were getting special treatment, but then given the shoddy way theme developers have been treated in the past it’s swings and roundabouts, really.
» Posted By that girl again On September 4, 2009 @ 12:06 PM
I’m Boycotting The Spread Of FUD
I still don’t understand why the Studiopress model of licensing the product as GPL but charging for downloads and support is apparently OK for themes but not for plugins.
Did it honestly not occur to anyone, when they were busy bribing commercial theme developers with the promise of official promotion in exchange for going GPL, that plugin developers might perceive this as preferential treatment? I know that the plugin guys didn’t need to be bribed because their work is mostly GPL anyway, and they’re not generally as commercially-orientated as designers, but if theme developers have the option of selling their work with the support of wordpress.org then so should plugin developers. It’s only fair.
(Also, if Automattic are allowed to distribute freemium plugins/services through wordpress.org then everyone else should be allowed to as well, otherwise you have to expect occasional accusations of profiteering and hypocrisy.)
» Posted By that girl again On July 29, 2009 @ 3:57 PM
The full set of smilies is finally back on wordpress.com. Yay. I just hope that the people who embraced the anaemic Tango smilies aren’t being deprived of their monkeys and angels now. ;)
Hopefully Automattic will learn from this that screwing around with people’s content is a Really Bad Idea. Just because you’re playing with the idea of changing something in core, it doesn’t always follow that the same changes are necessary or appropriate for wordpress.com.
» Posted By that girl again On July 22, 2009 @ 5:13 PM
«« Back To Stats PageUnfortunately, we on .com are still exactly where we were, stuck with a set of replacement smilies that nobody bothered to ask or warn us about, and content whose meaning has been subtly altered by the substitution of another emoticon (an eyeroll is NOT a raspberry, unless you are particularly socially challenged); twiddling our thumbs until somebody can code a fix for something that wasn’t broken.
To replace our smilies, we would have to edit every individual post containing them; and even then, we’re stuck with what we’re given in comments. If nothing else, it’s been a salutary reminder that you can’t consider your content your own unless you’re hosting it yourself.
» Posted By that girl again On July 13, 2009 @ 4:12 PM