The extensibility of WordPress is legendary. But buried deep beneath the surface is plugin API that is rarely used and lie mostly undiscovered. Get a primer on how these APIs might be used in plugins and take WordPress to even higher heights by Aaron Brazell, author of the book The WordPress Bible and owner of TechnoSailor.com.
Randy Hoyt demonstrates how to use many of the image-related features and functions in WordPress: * configuring your media settings for your theme * using gallery shortcodes * the mysterious “Post URL” button explained * template files for attachments * adding featured images to your theme * using get_posts to display attachments.
The author of Beginning WordPress 3 shows you WordPress’s best-kept secrets, including: * 10 unpublicized feeds * the members-only content feature no one’s using * 2 simple template tags that give you complete control over styles, from whole categories to individual posts * 2 lines of code that add Flickr-style tagging to your photo galleries You’ll also see some of the best overlooked plugins for WordPress, including a few amazing importers and a complete workflow suite.
This session is by Stephanie Leary and if you want to follow along with her via the slides she used in this presentation, you can view them on SlideShare.
This is a guest blog post written by Joachim Kudish, author of the blog, http://jkudish.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter.
WordCamp Montreal 2010 was held on (August 28th and 29th) in Downtown Montreal (at the UQAM Coeur des Sciences venue). The two-day conference was a success with over 300 attendees. The venue was divided into two rooms, one serving more beginner topics (such as A beginner’s guide to WordPress) and the other more advanced ones (such as Tweaking plugins to be 3.0 Network-Compatible).
Attendees were well treated with T-Shirts, the usual selection of stickers, breakfast and lunch (during both days), a special cupcake appearance and a great after-party. One could tell that the event was a success by the amount of tweets on the #wcmtl hashtag on twitter. The infamous Rennick family drove down all the way from New-Brunswick for the event. Both Ron and Andrea gave amazing talks, all whilst volunteering at the registration desk and providing cupcake security. Andrea’s talk was particularly enjoyed by the crowd who let away lots of laughs.
All of the presentations can be found here (most have slides up on slideshare), and you should check out the awesome photos of the event on flickr. I also hear that videos of the event are scheduled to pop up soon!
WordCamp Montreal was organized by Jeremy Clark, Brendan Sera-Shriar and Shannon Smith and was the 2nd WordCamp for Montreal (first one was in 2009).
During the event, an important decision was made for the Montreal WordPress community. WordPress meetups will be held on a bi-monthly basis, where WordPress users can get together to chat about their favorite piece of software.
I think it’s time that not only do I inform new readers but remind long time visitors that this site is my home and you’re just a guest. The WPTavern.com about page does a decent job of explaining how this site came to be and what its purpose is. WPTavern is still a project but let me explain a few things. For starters, I am not a journalist. I’ve never taken a journalist class and my role is not to be the journalist of WordPress. WPTavern is an enthusiast community about WordPress. It’s comprised of fans of the software, one of them being me. So whatever standards of journalistic quality you’d like to hold me to, get rid of them, they mean nothing.
What I do here is routinely take a look at the WordPress horizon and write about what I see. Things that are interesting to me or that I have a comment/opinion on end up as forum or blog posts. I am not officially endorsed by WordPress.org or Automattic although I do receive monetary support through display advertising by Automattic. Am I a fan boy of WordPress? My answer to that is no and my track record which is available through the WPTavern.com post archive will illustrate this. I am a person that can be swayed from one side to the other. One day, I think something is a great idea and after further discussion, I might think it’s the worst idea ever. That’s just who I am. A fan boy in my opinion is someone who tows the line and only thinks unilaterally in favor of the platform or key figure. That’s not me.
I have to admit, I think I had more fun with this hobby of writing about WordPress and what people were doing with it when I didn’t know anyone personally. For the past 2 years, I’ve worked pretty hard not to burn any bridges and directly go after anyone. In the past two weeks, I’ve been pretty grumpy and those bridges have ignited into flames. It’s hard to stay neutral and not burn those bridges when you look out at the horizon and see a bunch of asshats in the community you love to be a part of. But I can’t publicly call them asshats or describe what their doing to be asshattery because of this notion of taking the high road. While great in practice, it’s good to take a detour every once in a while. These past two weeks have been a detour for me and it feels pretty good to sling some mud where I feel it necessary. The WordPress community is made up of millions of people and only a fraction of those people are assholes, thank god for that. However, I think for now, my mudslinging is over with, at least in the public space.
So you may have heard from someone that I’m the voice of WordPress, a voice of reason, or some other title. The truth is, I didn’t ask for any of those titles and I don’t try to live up to any of them. My interviews, the way I write and the things I do regarding WordPress all stem from my own curiosity.
Over time, my goal and direction for WPTavern has changed. The past two months have been a financial break down. I’ve been working to turn WPTavern into a full-time job, a great source of income for me. It’s not working. There are numerous times in which I’ve looked at the amount of time and work I’ve put into this site, the podcast, etc and wondered if I should continue, at least at trying to make a full-time gig out of it. The choice is becoming increasingly clear in that the answer is no. So I’m currently thinking about revamping my mindset and using WPTavern as my second part-time job that brings in extra money versus having it be my primary source of income. Basically, turn the site and podcast back into a hobby that occasionally pays money. At least this way, the stress of trying to please others first rather than myself will decrease and I don’t need to worry so much about page views or artificial limitations that people have placed on me. I have thought about selling the site or disbanding it but I’m still a distant way from pulling the trigger. After all, the forum is doing very well, the site is still a good resource for many people, and I still enjoy writing about the software.
So while the drinks are still on the house, any liquid that does not make it from the cup to the mouth will be considered alcohol abuse and you’ll be charged a hefty fine.
It’s that time of year again to nominate WordPress for the Packt Open Source Awards for 2010. Nominations were opened up on August 9th and will close on September 17th. The top five projects with the most nominations in each category will move on to the final stage of voting. Voting for the finals begins on September 27th, voting will close on November 5th, and the winners will be announced on November 15th.
In 2009, WordPress took the prize for Overall Winner while Drupal won the category for best open source PHP content management system. One of the categories setup for nominations is Most Promising Open Source Project. While you can nominate any project you wish, consider nominating BuddyPress as it’s made some great strides within the past year and is definitely an up and coming successful project.
Those of you who counted on the WP-Pro mailing list to either post jobs or receive job offers will be disappointed with the news that the mailing list is going away. Announced by Jane Wells on August 18th, the list will be de-activated at the end of this week.
Let’s face it: when someone says they want to hire someone for a WordPress job, making them sign up for a mailing list just to post an ad is a little ridiculous when they could go to a site like http://jobs.wordpress.net and put up a post that can be easily managed/updated in moments as well as being seen by far more people.
The reaction from those who use and have received client work because of the list are not too pleased to see it disappear and would rather have it stick around. However, the discontinuation of the WP-Pro mailing list could be what the doctor ordered for WPCOOP.org. To get an idea as to what WPCoop is all about, check out this interview I had with Jayson T. Cote back in September of 2009. A number of people on the mailing list have expressed interest to help Jayson get WPCoop back in action and if you’re one of those interested in helping out, you can sign up to the list.
While I’ve never used the list myself, over the past two years I’ve seen the number of WordPress specific job boards increase. In fact, WPTavern.com forum now has one although it’s rarely used since only VIP members can post job offers. Outside of Codepoet.com, you can also check out this handy list of job boards that was published to the Tavern forums by Nick.
Ozh of PlanetOzh.com has a great post filled with tidbits of information he has gathered from mining 54 different WordPress releases ranging from 0.7.1 to 3.0.1. Not surprisingly, WordPress continues to have more functions added to it as time moves along. As of 3.0.1, WordPress has 3,240 PHP functions defined. Based on the graph published by Ozh, it looks like 2.7.1 to 2.8 had one of the largest increases of defined functions.
If you haven’t been listening to the WordPress Community Podcast, you ought to tune into the previous episode as well as the upcoming episode slated for Tuesday, August 17th as both feature an interview with Matt Mullenweg. In the interview, Matt talks about the changes that have taken place so far thanks to the various teams working on making the surrounding WordPress experience better, WordPress 3.1, Automattic product line and WordCamps. The interview was pre-recorded so if you show up in the chatroom on Tuesday, don’t expect your questions to be read and answered on the air.
Before they had a WordCamp to call their own. Hard to believe that considering Houston is the birth place for at least half of WordPress that it’s only now that a WordCamp was created in the area. Culturemap.com has a great writeup of the event including a few quotes from Matt himself. If you’re lucky, you might spot the VaultPress spelling error which gives it a Transformers vibe.
Mullenweg floated in and out of sessions, visiting with anyone with a question, concern or an idea. It’s apparent that the ease of use comes directly from Mullenweg’s ability to listen to users whether you are building a complicated system or just want to have a recreational blog. This is one available, famous guy. “WordPress is not just software, but a community,” Mullenweg wrote in the forward of WordPress for Dummies. The day proved that to be true.
If you attended WordCamp Houston, let me know within the comments what you learned.
The extensibility of WordPress is legendary. But buried deep beneath the surface is plugin API that is rarely used and lie mostly undiscovered. Get a primer on how these APIs might be used in plugins and take WordPress to even higher heights by Aaron Brazell, author of the book The WordPress Bible and owner of TechnoSailor.com.
This is a guest blog post written by Joachim Kudish, author of the blog, 
