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5 Tips To Create A Great Site About WordPress

5 Tips To Create A Great Site About WordPress

By Jeffro on September 28, 2010

I’ve been writing about WordPress since 2007 and since then, I’ve seen a number of websites about WordPress come and go. Like many of you, I’m a fan of all these different websites and enjoy reading their points of view. Some of them even have breaking stories from time to time. However, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the RSS feed goes dormant, never to be heard from again. As a writer and reader of a site devoted to WordPress, here are a few tips.

Consistency – Something I’ve lacked recently but I enjoy sites that are consistently publishing something during the week. If it’s only one or two things during the week, it’s easy to forget about that website despite subscribing to their RSS feed. Consistency also retains the audience and gives them an expectation that there is always something new to participate in.

In-Depth Knowledge – There are a ton of people in the WordPress community that know what is going on amongst the various facets of the project, write about it. Link things together, talk about stuff in the past and mix it up with stuff in the current/future. Bring comments, track tickets, discussions together. The WordPress.org project is a spaghetti of stuff going on, do your best to try to give visitors the big picture without all the cruft.

Try Not To Do It Alone – I’ve learned that there is just too much going on for one man to write about. To truly have a great, successful site about WordPress, you’re going to need at least 3-4 knowledgeable writers. A good example of this in action right now is WPCandy.com which is one of the few WordPress centric sites that was buried 6 feet under and has been resurrected with new life. In fact, the new site is better than the old one before it and it seems like the site hasn’t lost a beat.

Curation Is A Good Thing – Something I do here on WPTavern.com is curate news and information. I use my RSS Feedreader as a cockpit with a window to the internet. From here, I can get a good idea as to what the topics and trends are within the world of WordPress. The best part about my feed reader is my subscriptions to the WordPress keyword in Google because it brings in posts from places and people I have never heard of. Occasionally, I’ll find a real gem in that crowd. People are busy and if you can link to useful items with brief descriptions, you’ll be thanked for saving them time.

Longevity – If you’re going to start a site about WordPress, at least stick to it for a year. This has been the biggest culprit of good sites I’ve seen disappear. They all seem to do a good job for the first three months, then things gradually die off and within 6 months of starting the site, it becomes another graveyard on the web. There is plenty of room for sites about WordPress with everything that goes on during a weekly basis. Give yourself the time needed to gain exposure and become a reliable stop for information within the community.

Follow those five tips and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a destination stop for the WordPress train. Do you have any tips or suggestions that you could lend?

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Help Me Cleanup The Ideas Forum

Help Me Cleanup The Ideas Forum

By Jeffro on February 24, 2010

For those of you that have been following me on Twitter, I’ve referenced the ideas forum quite a bit. I’ve been keeping it under wraps because there was less of a chance of running into people responding to the same ideas but since Jane Wells has made the work more public today, (Highly appreciated by the way) it’s time I make the call for help to clean up that place.

What I’ve been doing is browsing the ideas that are filed Under Consideration and working my way from the last page to the front. So far, it’s been pretty funny to read some of the ideas submitted by some notable community members that today, can code up their own solutions to problems. I guess if you’re given three years, you have the opportunity to learn a thing or two. At any rate, here are the directions to help me with the ideas forum.

If you want to help (this is an easy way to contribute for those who aren’t coders), go to http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/view/considering and start looking at threads. Start from the pages at the back of the list, and on each one you can help resolve:

  • Read the thread.
  • If you don’t know if something exists as a plugin or has been implemented, use Google.
  • Add a comment to the thread indicating the status/outcome. If you found an appropriate plugin, link to it.
  • Add the “modlook” tag.
  • Bask in the glow of knowing that this small task is part of a big job, and is much appreciated by the community.

The sooner we get the old ideas cleared out of there, the sooner it can become more useful as a discussion tool (and clear up Trac to focus on accepted features and enhancements).

So if you have any spare time or are just bored, feel free to go through a page or two of ideas and update them. I’ve actually found a few ideas that are three years old that still have merit and are worthy of still being considered for future versions of WordPress. If you don’t know of any way to answer the idea, move along to the next one and save it for someone that does know.

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What Is The Weakest Link Of WordPress?

What Is The Weakest Link Of WordPress?

By Jeffro on December 2, 2009

After putting this question out on Twitter today and receiving a bunch of answers, I decided to take it out of the 140 character limit and provide a comment form. Here are the rules. First, you’re only allowed one answer. If you have multiple answers, figure out which one you think needs the most work or attention. I know some of the developer types have an endless list of weaknesses for WordPress but I only want the one that you feel is the most important. Second, explain what you have done to try and fix the weakest link or suggest what you plan on doing.

The more I engage with the WordPress community and consistently browse WordPress.org, the more I feel that WordPress.org itself is the projects weakest link. I’ve harped on this before and I’ll continue to do so until the situation changes. The site is the bread and butter of WordPress. It’s where all of the information is housed, links to resources are presented, clear and concise directions are given, etc. If it were 2005 all over again, perhaps the information presented on WordPress.org would be relevant but in 2009, it’s frustrating to realize how much information is missing from the site. I realize that the site will eventually get an overhaul to turn more into a community hub which I can’t wait for, but as it stands, I think the entire site needs to be reformatted with fresh, relevant content related to the project instead of static HTML pages from yesteryear. With a dynamic project such as WordPress, I don’t understand the notion of set and forget with regards to the website for the project. I expect things to readily change along with WordPress to give a sense of progress. Instead, the site makes me think I’m stuck in history.

Since I consider this to be the weakest point, I’m considering rewriting the pages myself using the Codex to create a rough draft first, as Demetris has done with the WordPress Features page.

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WordPress Idea Roundup

WordPress Idea Roundup

By Jeffro on September 7, 2009

ideasThe last I heard about the ideas section of WordPress was that Jane Wells was cleaning up the place to prepare it for an upgrade to bbPress 1.0.  Not sure how the progress is going but upon checking my feedreader this morning, I noticed some ideas starting to trickle in. Here is a small sampling.

Enhanced Author Widget – I wish there was a plugin to add am Author widget to the Widget section with options to display the avatar, to display a list of the posts (possibly with thumbnails generated from the articles next them), links to author’s pages on social networking sites, etc.

Offer Usage Stats To Plugin Authors – We can see how many downloads our plugins have, and from comments Matt M. has made we know there are stats on how many blogs a plugin is active on. It would be nice to make that available to the plugin author (maybe on the admin page where the SVN info, etc is). No personal information, just a simple “Installed/Active in ## sites”

I’ve talked with many plugin authors and plenty of them tell me this sort of information would be great to have. If you’re a plugin author and like this idea, I say go on over and voice your feedback, perhaps even include some information you’d like to see in the stats page.

Conditional Tags For ‘if pings’ or if trackbacks. - But now that we have the option to split comments and trackbacks up when displaying in our comments section, there is a small problem: there’s no conditional tag to say “if there’s trackbacks” or “if there’s pings” so we can keep the trackbacks list silent until there’s actually a trackback. The problem is that, with the new formulation, we end up with a non-XHTML-compliant ol or ul with no li in the middle.

While I don’t mind discussion of these ideas here, the discussion would be better placed on the actual ideas page. You can use your WordPress forum user account to login to the ideas forum.

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Addicott Web Suggests 6 More Plugins

Addicott Web Suggests 6 More Plugins

By Jeffro on March 28, 2009

addicottweblogoAddicott web which is a web design company has published a list of six must have plugins for WordPress. Among the list is Easy Contact, Thank Me Later and WP-UnitPNGFix. Do you use any of the plugins they suggested?

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