Chris of LiftUX reached out to me the other day and wanted me to let everyone know that they are hiring for the position of Senior WordPress/PHP developer. The developer would also be helping to build out themes and plugins for UpThemes.
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Senior PHP Developer Position Open – Lift
WordPress Developers That Are Hiring
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 Links to jobs that require bidding will not be published.
Extensive Checklist For WordPress 3.3 That All Developers Should Check
Andrew Nacin who is one of the core developers of WordPress has published an extensive field guide for developers regarding WordPress 3.3. The guide contains links to relevant articles and discussions on the WordPress developers blog such as admin bar API changes, Javascript and editor changes, Help screen along with API changes, etc. All developers should take note of the links published by Andrew so you’re well prepared for the release. ∞
Validation And Sanitization Primer
Daniel Bachhuber who works with WordPress.com VIP Services has published a guide covering some key differences with data validation and sanitization. His explanation is not so technical that even I understood it for the most part. If you’re a developer, definitely give the guide a read and give Daniel some feedback. ∞
Plugin Authors And The Activation Hook
This post is an FYI to plugin developers. According to Scribu who posted on the WordPress development update blog, If you were using register_activation_hook() to also handle updates from older versions of your plugins, you will not be able to do so any more in WP 3.1: [16012]The activation hook is now fired only when the user activates the plugin and not when an automatic plugin update occurs. This is consistent with how the deactivation hook works.. There is a proposal for a register_update_hook instead within ticket 14912.
All plugin authors should read the post and the associated tickets to make sure your plugin will check for updates properly after WordPress 3.1 is released.
SilverLight Application For Exploring WordPress Hooks
Need help finding the right hook within WordPress? Thanks to PressCoders.com, the job of finding that hook just became much easier with a newly developed resource called WordPress Hook Explorer or WHeX. WHeX is an application built on top of Silverlight 4.0 which means you’ll need to have the Silverlight extension installed within your browser to take advantage of the site. With WHeX, you can browse in real-time all of the hooks within WordPress 3.0. For example, if you’re looking for all hooks dealing with comments, simply type in the word comments into the search box and you’re presented with results that show the hooktype, filename where the hook is located, line number, where at in the directory tree the hook is located, hook full text, hook description, usage, and hook ID. The application also has an index for WordPress 2.9.2 but does not go back any farther.
In the future, PressCoders plans to create an out of browser version of WHeX so that users won’t need to have a browser connected to the web to use it. To see WHeX in action, check out the following video.
DGwyer who is one of the creators of WHeX is open to feedback and requests which you can give via the following forum thread.
Special WPTavern Only PluginBuddy Sale
BackupBuddy is a great plugin. In fact, recently, it’s become even better now that it has support for Amazon S3 for off site backups and the FTPS protocol. Another staple in the PluginBuddy store is the PluginBuddy Mobile plugin. This plugin enables you to use the built-in style manager you create mobile-ready themes for iPhones or other mobile devices. Considering PluginBuddy is on a roll, now may be as good a time as ever to purchase the PluginBuddy developer suite. And here is one more good reason to do so.
Thanks to the guys over at PluginBuddy.com, I’m able to offer a special coupon code for the first 24 people that take advantage that will take 25% off the purchase price of the Developer Suite. The original price is $197 bucks but after the coupon code, the price is only $147.75. When you figure that a personal membership to BackupBuddy costs $45.00 and the personal membership for the Mobile plugin is $45.00 that’s not too far off from the discounted price which would entitle you access to one year of support and upgrades and any new PluginBuddy plugin released during the membership year. all future products developed by PluginBuddy as well as lifetime support.
If interested in this offer, use the coupon EABDB2C85B during the check out process. If you take advantage of this offer, I thank you very much as a portion of the purchase will come back to me. It’s a win win situation.
A Little Closer To Being Global
Gravatar has yet to live up to the G (Global) in its name but it’s slowly getting there. Beau Lebens has published a few more developer resources that have been submitted to the Gravatar site including a Gravatar extension to the Yii framework, extension to the TYPO 3 CMS, and a Django custom tag.
I remember in 2009 when I asked why Gravatar was not mainstream, despite the service existing for a number of years now. It’s not as if Gravatar needs to completely replace avatar systems. It just needs to be one of the choices when configuring your avatar. I was very surprised to find out that VBulletin does not have built in support for Gravatar nor is there an extension to add support for it. I’d think that there is a benefit to using Gravatars on a forum instead of uploaded custom avatars because the images are loaded from a third party service and that means less space in the database being used by all of the uploaded avatar images.
Since the avatar system still does not have global support just yet, I was happy to read the news regarding Gravatar Profiles. This definitely gives Gravatars more oomph. I wonder if support will be added to show the most recent blog posts or other things on the Gravatar profile.
WordPress Developer Chats Should Focus On Core
Peter Westwood has published a short document on the WordPress Developers Prologue site that outlines what the focus of the developer chats should be. In recent weeks, issues that are related to WordPress but not to the core code have been added to the meeting agenda providing less time to talk about core development of the software. This is the one hour during the week when all developers get together to talk about the core software, how to implement something, etc so it is imperative that the 60 minutes are put to the best use possible.
However, there is a reason why non core related subjects were added to the agenda for discussion. There is no single page that lists which items should be discussed where. Just like Automattic, the WordPress.org project is like liquid with barely any hierarchy allowing people to fulfill multiple roles. How to get in touch with the people that fulfill those roles is one of the core problems that I hope the WordPress.org website redesign solves. Until then, I highly encourage you to participate in an ongoing project I have started called the WordPress Whitepages Project. The goal is to round up all of the contact information for various aspects of the project and put it together in one big list, bringing order to chaos. The list will also include links to places where ideas and feedback can be discussed.
Once this list is complete, I’ll add it to a Codex page and then ping someone who is in control of WordPress.org and have them take a look at it to see if they would be interested in publishing the information on a centrally located page. There have been a few times where I’ve wanted to get in touch with someone about a particular issue but find myself at a crossroad with no idea on where to go. I hope this project fixes that.
Donate To Plugin Developers Day – March 1st
Vsellis who is a member of the WordPress community has put together a movement which he hopes will catch on. He is declaring that on March 1st, everyone should make a $5.00 donation to their favorite plugin or plugin-author. If you participate in this event, be sure to send out a tweet with the hash tag #WPPDD. Something like this ought to suffice, “I just donated to insert plugin name” #wppdd“. Vsellis has pledged $100 that will go to 20 different plugin developers.
It wasn’t long ago when something like this was happening on a weekly basis. In fact, it was called Donate Friday. I was heavily involved with promoting this effort. I noticed that quite a few others joined me every Friday to donate some cash to a different plugin author. After it was all said and done, I must have donated $50-$80 total. Unfortunately, I came on hard times around Halloween 2009 so I was unable to keep the donation streak going. I also noticed that others seem to quit donating as well.
Hoping this catches on as I’ll be monitoring the hash tag. I have some money available for donations so as long as I remember, a few plugin authors will get a treat on March 1st.