By Jeffro on June 4, 2010
Earlier today, I mentioned that Otto would be the man in charge working with the WordPress.org redesign project. Part of WordPress.org and perhaps the most active section of the website is the support forums. Everyone seems to have their own round of complaints regarding the forum but this time around, we now have an official outlet to voice our concerns of what we would like to see improved. Something which I’ve been harping on for a long time regarding the forum is the lack of email notifications for threads I have created or responded to. This will be addressed once the new version of bbPress is released and the support forums are upgraded.
With the support forum mainly being the first stop on the support train and so many people using WordPress these days, how to improve the forum experience for everyone now and into the future is a complex problem. Whatever can be automated should be automated because I think the human element to the forums is the most detrimental factor to them. Humans forget to mark posts as resolved, do not properly categorize their posts and publish them in the correct area, are needed on a full time basis to make sure things don’t get out of hand, etc.
There are a ton of great ideas already presented in the thread that I hope see the light of day such as some type of reputation system and more moderator tools to help keep the forum clean.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged feedback, forum, support, wordpress
By Jeffro on June 4, 2010
The WordPress.org redesign is about to get underway and the person who is in the hot seat to complete the work is Otto. For the past few weeks, we’ve been giving Otto some ideas as to what we would like to see done with the website. If you have not done so already, I highly encourage you to add your own feedback to the thread as it’s ongoing. Personally, I think the biggest weakness of the current website is the lack of organization of the data that it presents to the public. There is a lot of good information strewn about multiple pages but it takes too many clicks to get to. Also, some information needs be brought out from the depths of the site and made more public facing. From what I understand, Otto has reorganized his professional life for this opportunity so lets provide him the necessary support and hope all goes well. Placing the WordPress software aside, the WordPress.org website is one of the cornerstones of the project that I feel needs to be an awesome public face for the project.
Posted in News | Tagged otto, redesign, wordpress |
By Jeffro on June 1, 2010
Justin Tadlock has an excellent post online talking about the new menus feature in WordPress 3.0. The post title says it all. Goodbye, headaches. Hello, Menus!. As I have reviewed numerous commercial WordPress themes along with a few free ones, I’ve noticed that just about each one tackles the menu system differently. The best system I’ve used to date was in iThemes Builder which provided the textual names of my categories and then provided check boxes to either show them, or hide them within the menu. There are too many themes that insist on the user knowing which ID numbers for categories they would like to show or hide. Thankfully, the menu system in WordPress 3.0 will help change all of this and provide a standard for all theme developers to go by.
In Justin’s post, he walks users and developers through the new menus feature and explains how to add it to a theme that does not yet support it.
Posted in News | Tagged justin tadlock, menus, wordpress |
By Jeffro on May 28, 2010
One of the more inspiring posts to read within the past two weeks. Glenn Ansley whom I met at WordCamp Raleigh and is the man behind Full Throttle development told his story on how contributing to the core of WordPress has stepped up his game overall as a developer.
Its funny how you think you know ‘who’ a community is because you’re following a couple mailing lists or a couple of opinionated talkers on Twitter. Getting plugged into the development process has opened me up to a whole new world of very intelligent individuals that I continue to learn from by listening in on their conversations. My coding has become more efficient due to the little tidbits of information I skim off of their public discussions every day.
His story is well worth the read, especially for aspiring developers looking to contribute back in the form of a patch. But the biggest lesson overall is that because Glenn made the effort to familiarize himself with the entire process of how the inner circle of WordPress development works, he has turned himself into a more efficient developer overall.
Posted in News | Tagged core, development, wordpress
By Jeffro on May 27, 2010
Today, WordPress turns 7 years old. I’ve been using WordPress since 2007 which is only a few years ago. I always enjoy hearing the stories from those who were on board with WordPress since the day it was created by a fork of b2. I suppose those folks can be called the ancestors of WordPress. At any rate. WordPress is continuing to grow into a healthy project. The third party community is buzzing with new themes and plugins, WordCamps are popping up all over the world, as Matt Mullenweg said at WordCamp San Francisco this year, the state of the word is Strong. May 27th, 2003, the first version of WordPress was released on the development blog. This is when the development blog still allowed comments.
If you’re interested in seeing what WordPress looked like in the early days, check out this post written by Ozh which explores the first five years of the WordPress user interface.
Does Not Get Much Simpler Than This
Happy birthday bro!
Posted in News | Tagged birthday, software, wordpress |
By Jeffro on May 20, 2010
General RC Readiness
RC readiness could be better. However, a big punt is needed but 3.0 is now under 100 tickets. The blockers are under control. Menus are looking good now that the IE issues are fixed. The rest of the menu tickets are trivial and if needed, can be punted. JohnONolan will be submitting a few UI patches for other stuff and Jane will be going through a final walk through this weekend to see if there is any UX that was missed. The list of remaining tickets for WordPress 3.0 can be found here. The patches that are in Has Patch/Needs Testing, needs testing. If anyone could help out on that, it would be appreciated.
It looks like the importers that are bundled with WordPress will be ripped out and turned into a core plugin with the exception of the WordPress one. The WordPress importer plugin can be found here.
Shrinking of WordPress. In order to have WordPress 3.0 avoid tripping memory limits on shared hosts, certain items are being lifted from the core. The importers are one of those items. TinyMCE.js is also on the slate to be removed. Removing stuff form WordPress is just a stop gap measure to the original problem so that WordPress 3.0 will not be delayed any further.
RC1 looks set to be released by the end of next week or sooner.
Meeting Time
Taken off list to figure out timezones etc.
Update On WordPress Tests
Peter Westwood stated that as far as wordpress-tests is concerned – they exist, I use them, I’m trying to keep them up-to-date and I will have them running automatically when it is worth doing – too many failures at the moment which need reviewing. If people want to play with them they are in svn here: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-tests/
How To Participate:
If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, you can by visiting the WordPress development updates blog. If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.
chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged devchat, developer, meeting, releases, wordpress |
By Jeffro on May 20, 2010
I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this before, a WordPress theme that has a 3-Dimensional post view. Nathan Barry over at LegendThemes has a screencast available showing off the theme in action with rotating post views and the different ways of viewing a post. Unfortunately, this theme is heavily dependent on the type of browser you’re using due to the use of CSS3. According to Nathan, only the most recent versions of Safari fully supports it.
Note: the 3D and animation only work in recent versions of Safari. Though the site does degrade gracefully in other, less capable browsers. Update: Only Safari in Snow Leopard can fully run this demo. Unfortunately preserve-3d doesn’t appear to be supported in Safari Windows or in Chrome on any platform.
Since I don’t use Safari on my desktop, I was not able to check out the 3-D goodness. Would be cool for FireFox to support the various 3D Transforms in CSS3. In fact, it would be awesome if all of the major browsers supported it so we could see themes innovate the ways in which content could be viewed and interacted with.
Posted in Themes | Tagged 3d, css, legend, theme, wordpress |
By Jeffro on May 5, 2010
WordCamp San Francisco has come and gone but there are a few things in the keynote by Matt Mullenweg that I wanted to focus on.
When Matt thinks of WordPress, he doesn’t think of it as a software project, he thinks about it as a creative artwork project. Matt would like the mobile applications and WordPress itself to be a lot more fun to use. More humanized.
Think about that for a second. He doesn’t think of WordPress as a software project yet, that’s what it is. But after hearing him say that and then explain why various easter eggs are within the software, it explains why Hello Dolly exists, the culture of Automattic as a company and why certain things are the way they are, despite protests from users and developers. The easter eggs and funny comments found within the software could easily be removed but if they were, WordPress would lose its human nature. These are small tidbits but it makes the software more human and not so dull. Plus, I think for many up and coming developers, it’s FUN to find these injected pieces of humor.
They are going to take a major release cycle out. Used to be three major releases a year. Now it will be two per year. The reasons for this are historical. This year, they are going to try a 3-4 month cycle and focus just on plugins, WordPress.org, and the API.
For as long as I’ve been using WordPress, the team has done a good job releasing three major versions a year although that streak ended in 2009 when the only major releases occurred on June 10th, (2.8) and December 18th, (2.9). I think going down to two major versions a year is an excellent idea. Not only is it easier for all of us to keep up, but it allows for time to do things not exactly code related such as working on other projects, the WordPress.org website, etc. There are quite a few small problems that exist across the various islands that make up the WordPress.org project and it’s nice to see that time will now be set aside to address all of those.
Roughly 74% of WordPress sites are being used as blogs and content management systems. This is up from about 40% last year. It’s the fastest growing use case of the software. About 80% of people are making money from WordPress. 22% WordPress is their day job. 18% from custom development and hosting, 12%.
I’d like to know how Matt or anyone else knows this? Was there a poll conducted somewhere or can this be determined via WordPress sending data back to the mother ship?
These are just a few of the things I felt needed some more attention.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged keynote, matt, san francisco, wordcamp, wordpress |
By Jeffro on May 4, 2010
I was fortunate enough to be one of the guests on episode 13 of the WordCast Conversations podcast. In this specific episode, I joined Brad Williams of WebDevStudios.com and Miriam Schwab of WPGarage.com to talk about WordPress 3.0. We each gave our opinions on the features that we were most excited about. Towards the second half of the show, we had an interesting discussion revolving around the conflict between users and developers as it relates to theme option pages. I’m a fan of the GUI and stay far away from anything command line. I think we can all agree that the line between users and developers is gray at best and is never in the same spot. I hope you download the show and give it a listen. Let me know what you’re most excited about when it comes to WordPress 3.0.
You can listen to the show on the WordCast website or download the MP3 file here.
Posted in News | Tagged 3.0, bitwire, podcast, wordpress
By Jeffro on May 2, 2010
Fresh out of WordCamp San Francisco, Mashable has published an interview they conducted with Matt Mullenweg. Within this interview, Matt talks about the demise of Ning and how BuddyPress is a nice alternative, the WordPress foundation, and how the PressThis bookmarklet will eventually compete with the one Tumblr has. Matt recognizes that there is still some friction between using PressThis and publishing content. Tumblr has mastered this technique and is one of the trademark features of the publishing service. Ever since I’ve stopped using Tumblr, I’ve hoped for the PressThis bookmarklet to mimic the way Tumblr does it. It’s still not there yet. Any idea on how the publishing process from PressThis could be smoother?
Also feel free to play the game of guessing the company that Automattic will acquire next.
Posted in News | Tagged BuddyPress, mashable, matt mullenweg, wordpress |
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