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Using WPTavern To Share Your Knowledge With The World

Using WPTavern To Share Your Knowledge With The World

By Jeffro on May 13, 2013

WordPress WorldWhile the Tavern is definitely back in business, there is one specific goal I have in mind that I would like to accomplish. That goal is changing the content direction of the site so that it’s not created by one person, all the time. There are so many smart WordPress people throughout the overall community and I would like to personally extend an invitation to share your knowledge here on WPTavern.com. Whether it’s bbPress, BuddyPress, GlotPress, a theme review, plugin review, or an interesting set of questions you would like to pose to the WordPress community, please consider WPTavern as an avenue for publishing. I’ll give you a few reasons why.

The first is that WPTavern has a world-wide audience. Having articles linked within the Dashboard is not only a big responsibility, but it has opened the flood gates to the different types of people accessing the content presented on this site from across the world. Through referrer links, I’ve been able to discover so many different websites thanks to people clinking the links from within their dashboard. WPTavern.com is like a giant megaphone that when used correctly, becomes a wonderful thing.

In the near future, WPTavern will become an authoritative website. It’s not about publishing 100 articles a day, but publishing content that is interesting and, providing research/back story to that content. I like to think of WPTavern as an ongoing diary as to what is happening within the world of WordPress. However I’m opening up this diary/platform to the community. There will be caveats of course such as all content passes before me before it’s published. Guest authors will receive a Contributor level account to make things easier for the author to manage their posts.

If you look around, you’ll notice that there are no ads on this site. WPTavern.com is not about generating revenue. It’s about becoming the second largest WordPress community of users and enthusiasts on the web. Of course, the first is WordPress.org itself but the long-term goal for this site is to become an alternative community with an integral bridge to the WordPress project. WordPress.org is not right for everyone whether it be the attitude of people, the atmosphere, or any number of reasons which is why having another place to go is beneficial. In the early days of WPTavern, this website was on pace to become one of the largest parts of the WordPress community with a bustling commenting section, an active forum, and all sorts of different interactions taking place that at times, influenced some of the decisions that were made with the core of WordPress.

There were plenty of times in the past where members of the WPTavern community tried to nominate me to become some sort of WordPress.org community liaison or an employee of Automattic. With the relaunch of WPTavern, I am now in the position at least with this domain to become that community liaison. In the near future, this site will be sporting a new design, bbPress and finally, run BuddyPress. A tavern is a place where people gather to talk and have a good time which is exactly the kind of atmosphere I’ll be promoting here.

If you’re interested in contributing an article to this site, please get in touch with me via the contact form or through twitter @WPTavern.

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Up To The Community To Improve Theme Demo Data

Up To The Community To Improve Theme Demo Data

By Jeffro on May 8, 2013

Post Status LogoBrian Krogsgard of Poststat.us has raised an issue that I never considered concerning the demo content displayed within themes on the theme repository. While commercial theme demos do a great job showing off what a theme is capable of doing, for at least some themes on the repository, the demo content ruins the look of a theme. As Brian pointed out, look at Pinboard as an example. Looks great in the screenshot but is terrible using the WP.org demo content. The Pinboard theme needs to be configured with featured images and such before it can look the way it does in the screenshot. The blog demo content doesn’t suit Pinboard out of the box.

This got me thinking. How many themes on WordPress.org are considered to look bad simply because of the demo content? Quite a discussion was had on Brian’s post on what could be done to solve the problem with Otto responding within the comments that this issue was discussed at last years WordPress Community Summit. Because of the issues involved with monitoring and such, theme authors will most likely never be able to add a custom demo link to their theme page. It’s also likely that theme authors will not be given control over the demo content displayed within the theme. However, Otto has suggested the following for theme authors that want better default demo data:

So, theme authors: Get together, make a site somewhere, start to put some demo data on it. Work together to create it. Argue about it. Pick fights. Whatever. ;)

Come up with a good community-made set of demo data, and I assure you that I, for one, will certainly pay attention. This is something that can be easily community-driven and created. Once we have a site with the data, then it’s a simple matter of an export/import to get it onto the previewer. Well, not quite that simple, but still pretty simple.

So if anyone puts together an area to start working on this project, get in touch with me so I can pass the word.

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WordPress And How It Changed Content Management

WordPress And How It Changed Content Management

By Jeffro on January 16, 2012

WordPress did not create the concept of content management. Such systems have been around since before the internet was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. But true innovation rarely effects the greatest change. WordPress took an existing concept, made it highly useable, and introduced it to the masses (free of charge).

Via ManageWP – How WordPress Changed Content Management

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Two WordPress Migration Tips

Two WordPress Migration Tips

By Jeffro on April 27, 2009

Over the course of this past weekend, I migrated content from one domain to another. My biggest concern regarding the migration was all of the backlinks that the site had received plus the Search Engine pointers which would exist for some time to come. Thankfully, I discovered two things which made the migration very easy.

First, I came across a plugin called Update URLs. This plugin created by Velvet Blues is really simple to use. Since I was moving my content from one domain to another and quite a few URLs within the content were hard coded to images, I needed a quick and easy way to simply replace the site URL. That’s exactly what Update URLs enables me to do as it provides a box for the OLD url and then the NEW url. Once I set that up, I click the button and like magic, all hardcoded site url links are changed.

My second tip is an htaccess modifcation that drove me bonkers until community member Mark McWilliams pointed me to an article which contained the exact bit of code I needed. What I wanted to do was make sure that if someone were to visit /articlename it would automatically redirect them to http://jeffc.me/articlename that way, all backlinks are kept in tact until the domain expires. While I’ll eventually lose some link love because not all backlinked sites will update the link, doing this provides me enough time to hopefully have Google change the URL in their search engine result pages

In the article, this is the bit of code which provided what I needed:

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This code works wonders and will buy the time I need to get my backlinks in order. Thanks Mark for helping me out and I hope this comes in handy for someone else down the road. Thanks to the WXR format or WordPress Extended RSS file which easily exports my comments, file attachments including images, posts, pages, etc, moving the actual content was the easiest part.

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