The WordPress ecosystem is rife with copycats and we’re severely lacking a couple of unique ideas. Due to the popularity of WordPress and the obvious success that designers / developers and businesses have experienced in recent years, many more are flocking to the platform to make a quick buck. Which would’ve been absolutely fantastic for all those involved, except that these newcomers are not bringing much newness to the table.
Pushing For Innovation
-Pushing For Innovation
MSU Extended University Offers Advanced WordPress Course
Looks like WordPress is getting a little closer to becoming a college course as Montana State Universities, Extended University will be offering a course on Advanced WordPress on May 9th. This course doesn’t say anything about college credits but how cool will that be to see the day when there is actually a college course devoted to WordPress that you could earn credits with? Perhaps as part of a journalism class? ∞
What’s Your Breaking Point?
As WordPress becomes a mature piece of publishing software, more things are being added to the kitchen sink. Some features are great while others, not so much. As WordPress adds more features, how many of you have found yourself using plugins or convoluted ways to disable or remove the functionality that was added to WordPress? I’m not opposed to WordPress adding more features and functionality but I am interested in knowing what your breaking point is with regards to how many plugins will you use to go against the grain of WordPress before you decide that a different publishing platform would ultimately be the better choice?
WordPress And Its Cloudy Future
Join in the conversation and tell us where you think WordPress as a platform should go. ∞
100 Things To Know About WordPress
100 Things You Need to Know About WordPress. JTPratt and Anthony Montalbano combine to provide 100 things all users need to know about WordPress. The list is broken down into 10 parts ranging from web hosting to WordPress resources. A good read for anyone relatively new to using the software. ∞
WooThemes To Go Back To Their Roots
In a interesting business move by WooThemes, the commercial theme company has announced that they will be re-focusing their efforts to be a WordPress centric theme company, again. Another example as to how time flies, it wasn’t too long ago when WooThemes began releasing themes for Expression Engine, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. This was a move to diversify their business and expand into different markets but after a year into the experiment, it turns out that there is more to it than cranking out themes.
- We have no knowledge of these platforms, which meant we had to partner with collaborative developers to help us expand onto these other CMS’s. We luckily found brilliant partners passionate and committed to their niche CMS strengths. Collaborations have their own little intricacies and our experience with these platforms & development processes was just never the same, as it was with WP.
- We realized that we had no knowledge of these communities, which meant that it was hard for ourselves to get a firm foothold there. Our roots are firmly in the WP community and as a result we always tried to replicate our WP ideas in these other communities, but we eventually realized that we had to tailor our approaches accordingly. The decision to focus our attention on WP instead is simply due to team capacity, budgets & priorities.
- In our hearts, and without trying to step on anyone’s feet, we could never get as excited about a new Drupal or EE theme in the same way we do before every WP release. Passion is always important.
It’s great to see that WooThemes is taking measures to ensure that their non WordPress platform customers will be taken care of by the end of April. So is it a risky move by WooThemes to reorganize into a one platform theme company again? Of course, but it’s not like WordPress is going any where and it doesn’t seem to be crumbling down anytime soon. How long WordPress continues to be king of the hill remains to be seen but I’d venture to guess it will be at least a couple more years. Hopefully longer.
Hello To Those Reading From The Dashboard
First, let me start off by saying hello to everyone who has arrived to this post via the dashboard of their WordPress installation. Secondly, I’d like to personally thank Matt Mullenweg for not only adding WPTavern to the Planet WordPress Feed but for adding WPCandy as well. It’s funny because I remember in 2009 when WPTavern was just getting started, I wrote an article explaining why this site would never make it into the dashboard. Needless to say, my attitude and the times have changed.
We Finally Made It In!
For those of you brand new to WPTavern.com, my name is Jeff Chandler and this is a site focused on all things WordPress. On top of that, we also cover BuddyPress, bbPress, any project under the Automattic umbrella. You can get a sense as to what this site is about via my About page but to make a long story short, this site exists as a place to find out what’s going on throughout the WordPress ecosystem. On this site, you’ll see interviews, links, quotes, and all sorts of content related to WordPress as well as Automattc. It’s a fan based website with no affiliation to WordPress or Automattic.
There are three things I encourage you to do. The first is to register an account with the WPTavern forum which is used for support and general conversations about all things WordPress all the time. The second is to check out the WordPress Weekly podcast which is something I’m trying to get back into producing on a regular basis.
Last but not least, the third thing I’d like you to do is introduce yourself to me.
WordPress.org Should Scare You
Interesting conversation within the Drupal forum discussing community and the Drupal.org website ∞
Fixing PressThis On A HostGator Account
It all started with a couple of tweets by Bradley Potter when he mentioned a HostGator specific bug to Andrew Nacin. Since WPTavern.com is also hosted on HostGator, I decided to try and replicate the bug. Following his instructions I was able to replicate the error pointing towards the possibility of something on HostGator not configured just right.
While testing another plugin by Trevor Fitzgerald that ties into his website PressTags.com, I noticed that the Reblog feature didn’t work. It provided the same error as the Comment Trash link bug that Brad had mentioned. The reblog feature uses the built in PressThis bookmarklet in WordPress to republish an article. After going back and forth with Trevor as I thought his plugin was the one causing the error, I decided to install a fresh copy of WordPress within a subfolder to see if I could recreate the PressThis bookmarklet error. Sure enough, even on a fresh install, I would receive a 404 error each time I tried to use it. However, the raw URL for the bookmarklet worked just fine. Thinking that it was an HTACCESS problem, I got with Peter Westwood on Skype to perform some more troubleshooting but we discovered that even with an empty HTACCESS file, the error still occurred.
Trevor and I finally came to the conclusion that there was something wonky with HostGator and the way it treats URLs that had the following in it: _wp_original_http_referer. Both the move comment to trash link and the PressThis bookmarklet utilized this text and from what I can tell, adds the URL to my site twice within the link. Trevor then discovered a thread on the HostGator support forum from 2008 that mentions an Apache upgrade that broke someones site. More specifically, the PressThis bookmarklet.
It looked as though mod_security had something to do with the breakage and in order for it to work again, the URL had to be whitelisted by HostGator. After I created a support ticket with HostGator explaining the situation and linking to the thread, they were able to tell me that some of the things I had been doing were definitely triggering some mod_security rules. They whitelisted those items which ended up fixing my problem not only with the PressThis Bookmarklet but with the Move Comment To Trash link as well.
So if you’re running on HostGator and the same thing is happening to you, create a support ticket and request that you be whitelisted for those mod_security rules. One of the questions I had received after publishing the answer to this support question is whether the whitelist for mod_security opens up the site to any security vulnerabilities. I have no idea. But if you do, please share those within the comments.
WordPress iPhone App 2.7 Released
Version 2.7 of the WordPress for iPhone app has been released to the App Store. In this version, there have been over 100 bug fixes which should help alleviate crashes and increase stability. The development blog states 2.7 is more of a performance and stability update rather than a feature upgrade.
The main focus of this release is to improve the app’s performance and reliability. The app has been moved to Core Data, which is a much improved way of managing information locally on the device. Also, the methods used to communicate over XML-RPC have been updated to better handle communication issues and increase reliability of the app. In total there have been 117 changes in this release.
Besides the bug fixes, the UI for the Post editor has been revamped to make it easier to write and edit posts. The question I have and I know many others are wondering the same thing is when will Post Format support be added?