Some folks in the WordPress community were bummed when they found out that Alex King, the guy behind Crowd Favorite announced that he was going to shut down his side project, WordPress HelpCenter because it never gained the traction with developers that Alex was aiming for. This also provided Alex more of an opportunity to concentrate on CrowdFavorite.
WP Help Center Reopens March 14th
As you can see from the image above, the WordPress HelpCenter will be opening its doors again on March 14th under new management. Nathan Garza who has worked with Crowd Favorite will be the new owner of the Help Center while Alex King will be affiliated with the site by being on the board of advisers. Alex states that he won’t be involved in the day-to-day operations of the site and hopes that his experience will be useful for Nathan.
If you used the WordPress HelpCenter in the past, keep an eye out for the reopening as there is a possibility that the business will be structured differently than it’s initial offering.
In this episode, I had the chance to welcome Alex King back to the show to talk about the WPHelpCenter, his Carrington theme framework and last but not least, his take on PremiumMod as well as his thoughts on building a business around GPL software such as WordPress. When I published my review of WPHelpCenter when it launched in April of this year, I had my doubts as to whether there would be demand for it considering the numerous outlets for support that exist within the community. After talking with Alex King within this interview, it’s clear that there is demand for such a service and it’s doing well.
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WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Last weeks poll question was: Should WordPress Change The Blog Nomenclature Within The Backend?
Out of a total of 103 votes, 92 of you said Yes while 11 people voted No.
Jeff – WP Manage Plugins – WP Manage Plugins, is an easy way to give you more control over the plugins section of WordPress. This plugin enables users to disable upgrade notices for specific plugins, hide the plugins page from all users except yourself, hide the wp manage plugins settings page from all users except yourself, automatically email the site admin when any plugin is added/activated/deactivated and much more.
Last Weeks WordPress Trivia Question:
Which forum software was the first to use CSS based layouts rather than tables?
WordPress Trivia Answer:
bbPress. bbPress was originally written by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, after he could not find software available at the time that fit his needs. bbPress was the first forum software to utilize a CSS-based layout, rather than the tabular layouts of other forum software available at the time.
This Weeks Trivia Question
What powers the WordPress.org website?
Announcements:
Aaron Brazell aka Technosailor will be on the show next week to discuss his work with WordPress as well as his new book, The WordPress Bible.
The Carrington framework by Alex King and Crowd Favorite has published an extensive question and answer post on their development blog. The post covers everything from what the Carrington theme framework is all about, what makes it different from other frameworks, and the philosophy behind the framework.
While a number of developers and theme authors have dug into the documentation and example themes and learned how to use Carrington, we’d like to make it a little more accessible to others. We’d also like to clear up some misconceptions about the Carrington framework vs. other WordPress theme frameworks.
One of the most interesting questions in the post asks if Carrington is not a parent theme.
No, it’s not a parent theme and it isn’t intended to be. I think it’s really unfortunate that people decided to call parent themes theme frameworks. They aren’t frameworks in the standard development sense, they are parent themes that support child themes to override certain components of them.
You know, I don’t understand how that term Parent theme for frameworks came about anyways. If any theme can be a framework, it makes the whole thing a moot point. I understand Parent/Child theme relationships, but Parent themes as frameworks? Sure, Thematic, Hybrid and some other frameworks do use their framework theme as a Parent theme which then has a Child theme built from the parent. Boy, the more I talk about it, the more I think we need a WordPress Theme family tree!
Just wanted to pass a note along that my review of the new WordPress HelpCenter has been published on WPCandy.com. In this review, I share my opinions as well as my experience I had when I decided to give them a call and ask an easy question to see if I could get an answer within three minutes.
Also, we have an ongoing thread on the forum discussing this new service which you can contribute to if you desire.
Crowd Favorite which is the company founded by Alex King is looking to grow the team by hiring a good developer. While most companies are downsizing, good to see someone hiring even if it’s just one person. At any rate, here are the deets on the position.
Wants to work on cool projects, including many that involve WordPress.
Experience building web applications.
Experience with Open Source.
Enjoys developing in PHP.
You can check out the full job posting here. Working with Alex King as well as many WordPress related projects? Sounds like a cool deal to me.
In this episode, I had the chance to welcome Alex King back to the show to talk about the 
