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By Jeffro on April 7, 2010
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.
Posted in News | Tagged avatar, developers, global, gravatar |
By Jeffro on February 24, 2010
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.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged chat, developers, westi, wordpress
By Jeffro on February 22, 2010
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.
Posted in News | Tagged developers, donate, Plugins |
By Jeffro on July 6, 2009

This is a guest blog post written by
Jamie, author of the blog,
IdealienStudios.You can also follow him on
Twitter.
Who: Anyone and everyone with an interest in design / development of WordPress
What: WordPress Developer Group of Ottawa (WDGO) Pub Night
When: Tuesday July 7, 2009
Where: Shoeless Joe’s (3049 Carling Ave) in Ottawa, ON
Why: Connecting with the WP Community in Ottawa – and booze :)
Wordcamps are great for networking with a wide cross-section of the WordPress community. However they don’t occur frequently enough in the same geographic region to build a local community around. Towards that end, I am taking small steps towards connecting the WordPress community in my region of Ottawa, Canada.
Starting a regularly scheduled meetup in July probably won’t get much uptake as it is a challenge to get Canadians to give up their precious summer nights as we have a finite amount of warm weather north of the 49th parallel. But we do like to drink! So the first Ottawa WordPress Developer Group event is going to be an informal pub night at Shoeless Joe’s (in front of the AMC Theatre on Carling).
The hope is to better understand who is doing what great things with WordPress in the 613 area code and what they would like to give / get out of WDGO. You can learn more at http://ottawadevelopers.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/pub-night-july-7th-2009/ or follow @WDGO on Twitter to stay up-to-date with future events.
Posted in Meetups | Tagged developers, drinks, ottawa |