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Interview With James Lane Of ExperimentWith.com

Interview With James Lane Of ExperimentWith.com

By Jeffro on May 13, 2013

ExperimentWith.com is an idea that’s still at the seedling stage but has the possibilities of being built into a testing platform for various projects. I thought it sounded like a cool idea so I got in touch with James Lane, one of the founders behind the site to ask him what it’s all about.

Q: First off, can you explain what ExperimentWith is?

ExperimentWith.com was started as a testing site for our clients sites while we develop them. It had a nice ring to it and it allowed us to host testing on a separate but not local server. It also allowed for testing in an MU environment. But as we ran into more and more issues with plugins that were never tested on an MU environment so we allowed some authors to test and helped debug a few plugins so we can use them for client projects. After a few projects, we discussed it would be nice to open up our MU based site to who ever wants to use it for testing, debugging or whatever for projects for the community. That was two months ago.

Q: What is going on behind the scenes of ExperimentWith.com and what software or hardware are you using to offer this service?

Behind the scenes its a WordPress MU site running on one of our business class hosting accounts with access to ruby and sass for testing WordPress plugins and themes. Its hosted off our MidPhase account although we have moved most of our site to BlueHost, RackSpace, or ZippyKid. We purchased five years of hosting from MidPhase and said what the hell, lets make it useful and if it becomes popular then we can keep it running.

Q: Is ExperimentWith exclusively tailored for WordPress testing?

We are tailored for WordPress testing but our server has elements running on it to allow for other WordPress integrations like Ruby, SASS, node.js, ect. We like experimenting with other projects out there to see how they can improve, on client specific projects.

Q: It looks like the site is not yet open to the public, do you have a firm date in mind as to when that will happen?

As for going public, we decided to initially start it up as an email us for about your project and if we like it and it won’t cause the end of the world or WordPress as we know it we will give you access. We never thought that more than a few people may take interest in it or would need the resources. So not to dance around your question but Experiment With is a very dynamic project and we are open to help develop it to whatever the community needs.

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Things To Look For In WordPress 3.3 Beta 1

Things To Look For In WordPress 3.3 Beta 1

By Jeffro on October 11, 2011

WordPress 3.3 Beta 1 has finally been released for the curious at heart to get a glimpse as to what’s coming in the final version. There are quite a few visual changes that you should look out for and provide feedback on. Here are a couple things worth noting.

New Feature Pop-ups – After WordPress 3.3 is installed, you’ll see popups that display information pointing users to new features. When testing, see if the popups close upon clicking the close button. Also see if the popups reappear multiple times. There has been an issue with popups and IE7/8 with them not going away but Alex Mills is betting that those have been fixed as of ticket #18693

Feature Popups

Admin Bar Revamp – The Admin bar now sports a darker color. The biggest changes to the admin bar reside within the rearrangement of menu items. Instead of the username and gravatar aligned to the left side of the bar, it’s now all the way on the right hand side. The search box has been moved to the right of the Add New menu link. Updates has been added as a top menu item. However, your website name now shows up on the far left side of the admin bar and this is where you’ll find all sorts of administrative tasks when you hover your mouse cursor over the link. The dashboard link as well as Appearance has been added to this menu item along with an assortment of other options. The drop down menus also look a lot like their Administration panel counterparts compared to the 3.2 version. Last but not least, on the left side of the admin bar, there is a small WordPress icon. This icon acts like the HELP button in typical software. From here, you can get information about the specific version of WordPress, Freedoms, Credits, links to WordPress.org, the support forums, documentation and giving feedback.

Flyout Menus – All of the top level links within the left menu now have Flyouts where as previously, Flyouts only occurred when the menu was collapsed.

Flyout Menus

Drag And Drop Uploading – I think users will be surprised the most by the new upload media screen. Thanks to something called plUpload which has been added to WordPress 3.3, we can now drag multiple files into the editor. This has also allowed the dependence on Flash within the uploader to disappear as support for HTML 5, Flash, and Silverlight are supported with plUpload. I’ve given it a try with 5 images and it worked great. Users who upload photo sets to WordPress are going to love this enhancement.

Multiple file Uploader In WordPress 3.3

Uploading Multiple Files Or Images At Once Is Now Easier In WP 3.3

One Media Button – In WordPress 3.2.1, there are 4 icons within the post editor that allow you to add some type of media to a post. Images, Audio, Video, and strangely enough, an icon named Media. In WordPress 3.3, all of those icons have been replaced by one icon labeled Media. From here, you simply drag whatever media files you have into the uploader. No more picking and choosing since the uploader is smart enough to distinguish between different media types. You can add your typical meta data after the media has been uploaded.

WordPress 3.3. Media Icon

One Instead Of Four

WordPress 3.3. will have more to offer than what I have listed here but if you plan on beta testing the new version, you now have a couple things to play around with. If you come across something you think is broken or not working as you think it should, the best thing you can do is report it within the Alpha/Beta section of the WordPress.org Support forums while being as descriptive as possible.

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Status Update On WordPress 3.3

By Jeffro on October 6, 2011

According to the revised project schedule, WordPress 3.3 beta 1 is expected to be released sometime on Friday, October 7th. Ryan Boren has published a list of things on the to-do list in order to get WordPress 3.3 to beta status.    ∞

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Jane Wells Publishes Results Of WP 3.3 Pre-Beta User Feedback

By Jeffro on October 6, 2011

If you’re curious into how some of the decisions are made regarding the UI/UX area of WordPress, definitely check out this post by Jane Wells on the WordPress Developers Prologue site where she explains the results of her tests using WordPress 3.3 pre-beta. Also worthy of note is the discussion within the comments regarding the Feature Pointers and the concern of whether or not plugin and theme authors will abuse them.    ∞

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Progress Report On A/B Testing Plugin

Progress Report On A/B Testing Plugin

By Jeffro on July 6, 2010

Mitcho who is the author of the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is currently working on a new project called ShrimpTest, sponsored by Automattic. ShrimpTest is a simple, A/B testing plugin that enables users to create various experiments on their site. For example, with ShrimpTest, you can create an experiment to track conversions based on the text used. In the video demo, Mitcho runs an experiment between a large version of a PayPal donation button versus a smaller one to see which provides a better conversion rate. Out of about 3,000 people, the results were almost split with a slightly higher percentage converting through the larger image. I encourage you to watch the following video to get a better idea as to what ShrimpTest is all about.

You can read all of Mitcho’s status updates regarding the plugin via the development blog. Also, if you’re interested in testing out ShrimpTest, Mitcho has recently packaged up version 0.1 that is available for download here. Please reports bugs or other issues within the ShrimpTest trac area.

This plugin is really cool and I suspect that it will be heavily used for UI testing within WordPress. I can also see marketers drooling at the mouth for something like this.

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WordPress Live User Testing

WordPress Live User Testing

By Jeffro on February 11, 2010

Back in episode 82 of WordPress Weekly, a round-table discussion took place centered around the topic of the WordPress Beta testing conundrum. In that conversation, we discussed why critical bugs were found only after the so called stable release was offered to the public. The answer to the problem is more beta testers, but getting those testers is hard. Stephen Cronin of Scratch99.com takes a hard look at the problem and his proposed solution I think has merit and is worthy of more discussion.

Live user testing with staged releases. Companies such as Google use this method to roll out features over time to a select group of users for live testing. This gives them a chance to iron out any kinks in more environments and use cases rather than going through a strict beta testing team. Perhaps the same method could be used on WordPress where 100,000 or so installs receive an upgrade notice that explains that a new feature has been added and then asks if the user wants to participate in the trial of that feature. If any problems are discovered, to report them. Now I don’t think it’s a good idea to put people on Trunk versions of WordPress but the way Stephen explains it, the version of WordPress would be kept the same, only when the feature has been coded into WordPress and is ready for testing would the trial upgrades go out to the public.

There are definitely some logistical issues involved with this entire process but I’d like to see the idea discussed in an upcoming developers chat to see if it has legs. What are your thoughts on this method?

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WordPress 2.8.1 Beta By End Of The Week

WordPress 2.8.1 Beta By End Of The Week

By Jeffro on June 17, 2009

So the WordPress development chat in the dev channel on IRC just took place and here is a brief rundown of the information presented within.

  • WordPress 2.8.1 Beta aimed to be release by the end of this week
  • WordPress 2.9 Target date is October 31st
  • Some fixes to high impact bugs are in.
  • Investigate lengthening RC periods depending on RC download numbers
  • Promote upgrading to RCs more
  • Note that we need help testing with the bazillion plugins in existence

The one thing I took out of the chat is the underlying problem that there are simply too few testers. There needs to be more testing on a scale that matches the kind of environments people use WordPress in when a stable version is released. The same core group of people testing each version are beginning to miss things that other people may have found otherwise. Also, more RC testing on established sites that have plugins would be great as it would provide early detection of plugins which might break due to the new version.

I believe the chat for next week will be focused on WordPress 2.9.

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Your Chance To Make WordPress Better

Your Chance To Make WordPress Better

By Jeffro on May 7, 2009

Jane Wells who was hired on to the Automattic team because of her usability specialty has published a post on the WordPress development blog initiating phase three, Usability Testing, in her ongoing series, how to contribute to WordPress. In this post, Jane outlines what it takes to conduct a usability survey, what those results mean, and how those results can ultimately improve WordPress.

If you’re interested in contributing to WordPress by way of partaking in these usability tests, stay tuned to the WordPress development blog. However, if you have experience in conducting usability tests, consider being a testing moderator. If so, contact Jane Wells and let her know your experience level.

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24 Hour Has-Patch Marathon Underway

24 Hour Has-Patch Marathon Underway

By Jeffro on April 16, 2009

wordpresslogoJane Wells has announced on the WordPress.org development blog that the 24 hour has-patch marathon is now underway. The reason it’s called has-patch is because in trac, when someone submits a patch, the tags ‘has-patch‘ is added to the keyword field making it easier to sort through those tickets which actually have a patch.

During the next 24 hours, the core developers will be evaluating patches that have been tested and committing those that are up to par.

Grab yourself a copy of the nightly build to make sure you’re using the right version, then head over to Trac and start looking at the has-patch* tickets. Pick a ticket, download the diff, test it out on the browsers/platforms you have available, and write a comment about the results in the ticket’s comment thread. Move on to the next ticket. Do as many as you can over the next 24 hours.

Next Monday, Jane will publish the results of the marathon and in her message to the testers mailing list, she upped the incentive on contributing to this event:

When I put up the results of the marathon on the dev blog on Monday, I’ll also link to the top 5 testers from the 24-hour marathon period (measured by number of patches tested/commented in trac treads).

Hopefully, all goes well and if I can find the time, I’ll see if I can do a bit of testing on a patch or two. Last but not least, WordPress 2.8 is now feature frozen.

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