Joost De Valk who hosts the PressThis podcast recently conducted an interview with Mark Jaquith to discuss the future of WordPress. Mark is one of the core committers to the project so he would obviously know a thing or two with regards to the future direction of the software. During the interview, we get to find out what’s on tap for WordPress 2.9, some discussion around post types, taxonomies, using WordPress as a CMS, roles and capability simplification, and much more. If you’re interested in the future development of WordPress, definitely download this episode and give it a listen.
You can listen to Joost De Valk live on WebmasterRadio.FM on Tuesdays at 5PM EST. Three hours before the life recording of WordPress Weekly.
One of the biggest WordCamp events of the year is poised to take New York by storm between November 14th and 15th. The event is being organized by Automattics own Jane Wells. Not long ago, a poll was conducted on the WordCamp New York website asking the audience what type of tracks they would like to see. Surprisingly to me, developer won most of the votes with the large scale CMS topic coming in second. That ought to be a change of scenery for most WordCamp goers as most sessions center around the business/blogger/social media types. Considering all of the WordCamp events I’ve ever attended, the one complaint I’ve heard consistently is the lack of WordPress specific content. WordCamp New York aims to quench that thirst.
Based on talks I’ve had with a few different people, quite a few folks from Automattic will be in attendance at this particular event. There is also the chance that many high profile community members will also be in attendance. Currently, I have plans on attending this event, I just need to buy the tickets. There is a chance that I’ll be once again hanging out with the WebDevStudios crew as they are familiar with the area. There is also a possibility that Michael Torbert, developer of the All In One SEO Plugin will be in attendance but he hasn’t confirmed anything to me just yet.
By the way, WordCamp New York is still looking for volunteers, sponsors, and anyone willing to lend a hand. For more information check out the official WordCamp New York Website.
I believe tickets for the event will go on sale some time in September. Once registration opens up, I’ll pass the news along. Will I be seeing you in November?
I learned about this through WP Engineer where the CMS Awards for 2009 are now open for nominations. The total prize purse is $24,000 with each winner of their respective category taking a share of that money. The categories are as follows:
Best Overall Open Source CMS
Most Promising Open Source CMS
Best PHP Open Source CMS
Best Other Open Source CMS
Open Source MVPs
During the nomination stage, they are giving away three 8GB iPod Nanos to three individuals at the nominations stage, and three 8GB iPod Touch’s to three individuals at the voting stage, all selected at random. The entire contest of sorts is being put on by Packt Publishing which is home to quite a few WordPress centric books. The last time WordPress appeared in the winners circle was back in 2007 where WordPress took the crown for Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. Drupal however seems to be near the top in each year while taking the crown in 2008.
I’ve nominated WordPress in the categories I see fit. Visit the nomination page here.
During my chat with Jane Wells on episode 68 of WordPress Weekly, we spoke about a number of different topics, but one I wanted to put a little more focus on today was the developer chat. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to encourage people to join the developer chats as a means of participating in the development of WordPress. I myself participate in the chats I can make it to. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure all I’ve done is get in the way.
As I’ve learned, the developer chats are meant to talk about the core development of WordPress. These 60 minute meetings each week are the one time where all of the core developers of the software get together to discuss the development of WordPress. This is also where development tasks are assigned to anyone who volunteers. This meeting is not a place to voice feature requests or bug reports. At all other times, the channel is used to bring up bugs or specific issues related to the core of WordPress, not for troubles with the plugin or theme repositories or any other general aspect of WordPress.
I’m like that kid who wants to get his hands and ears into everything but unfortunately, that kid usually becomes a nuisance or someone that gets in the way. That’s not what I want to be in the WordPress community especially as it’s related to development of the software. So with that, I am pledging to take a step back and view from a distance. I’m not a developer so I shouldn’t be getting involved in development oriented tasks or discussions.
Earlier this morning, I pre ordered my copy (non-affiliate link) of the WordPress bible being written by Aaron Brazell also known as Technosailor. If anyone has been following Aaron on Twitter (@technosailor) you’ll know that he has been busy writing his hands off to finish the rest of the chapters in time for his deadline. Right now if you order the book, you get to save $17.00 or 34% of the regular price of $49.99. So in the end, you’ll pay $32.99 like I did. I have no idea when this special pre order price ends but I’ve already snapped up my copy. What about you?
In this episode, David and I get you caught up on the news of the week which includes a few stories from the WordPress.com side of the world. We give you the 411 on the latest version of WordPress to be released, WordPress getting it’s own URL shortener, and much more. We were also joined by special guest Jane Wells who provided us some great information regarding the happenings with WordPress.
Ad Copy:
This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by, WebDevStudios.com WebDevStudios is a WebDevStudios.com is a New Jersey based software development company specializing in website development, social network applications, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions and more. Check out webdevstudios.com for more information
What is the name of the company that does the server hosting for WordPress.com?
WordPress Trivia Answer:
LayeredTech
This Weeks Trivia Question
What is the name of the new part fulltime employee Automattic recently hired?
Announcements:
On Thursday August 27th at 2PM Eastern Daylight Time, we’ll be interviewing Adii of WooThemes. The special date and time is due to Adiis geographic location.
If you haven’t heard the news, WordPress 2.8.4 has been released to fix another security/annoying issue that was discovered the other night. According to the announcement, this is what happens:
a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.
I was very surprised to see an email show up in my inbox letting me know what my new password was to log into WPTavern.com. Once I discovered what the problem was, I fixed it by uploading the patched WP-Login.php file as suggested by Matt Sivel and a few others in the WordPress Developers IRC channel. That fixed the issue. There has been a bit of a debate on whether this is really a security vulnerability or not but one things for sure, it is highly annoying. Glad to see it fixed in short order. You’ll never hear me complaining about too many WordPress upgrades when it comes to stuff like this.
Anyone else hit with the password reset annoyance?
One of the new features already implemented in the bleeding version of WordPress aimed at WP 2.9 is the Trash Status. This new status serves two purposes. One functional and the other UI related. First I’ll start with the UI. In the backend of WordPress, the Trash status link will show up in the edit posts page, edit pages, edit comments, and edit attachments. Here is what it’s looking like so far.
In the screenshot above, that link just shows you how many items are in the trash. The next screenshot shows Trash as a quick edit link.
Currently in WordPress, the Trash link is called Delete. When you click on the delete link, a dialog box pops up asking you if you’re sure you want to delete the item. While it’s nice to have a reminder before something ends up deleted, I’ve discovered that I enjoy just hitting the trash link with no reminder box popping up. There is no need for that box since the item is moved to the trash which you can easily recover.
Here is what the actual Trash bin looks like for the comments.
One thing I’ve noticed is that it appears as though each area has it’s own trash bin. That means there are three different trash cans. One for comments, one for pages, and one for posts. I’m not sure if that is the correct way to go about it as I’d like one trash can to rule them all with a drop down box to select different items. Since this is part of the developmental version of WordPress, chances are things will change with it’s implementation before it hits the public. I know at one of the next dev meetings I attend, I’ll be talking about this trash status and adding my input.
Right now, I have no idea on how to configure how the trash bins work in as far as configuring a number of days for items to stay in the trash or for auto emptying. I’m not even sure UI will be added to the backend to configure the behaviour of the feature or if it will need to be configured through the WP-Config file like Post Revisions. I’ve added the topic to the meeting agenda for this week so I’ll update you when I find out what is going on.
I really need to start doing more of these if I’m ever going to improve. This screencast features a review of the Advanced Exporter plugin for WordPress and WPMU by Ron Rennick. This plugin adds the type of functionality I’ve been expecting out of the WordPress exporter ever since I learned about the process. With it, you can easily export a single category of a blog to import into another. That is something many people have wanted an easy way to do for a long time. You can also use the restrictions to create multiple WXR files in case you can’t import a single large file. Also worthy of note as that this plugin was entered into the WeblogToolsCollection plugin competition for 2009. I know this thing is going to be a big hit whether Ron wins or not, I’ll make sure it does. Thanks for creating it Ron.
I recommend watching this video in FullScreen mode in order to make out the text and such. One of these days, I’ll figure out the magic presets for Viddler publishing.
Were you surprised to see WordPress 2.8.3 released? I was, but I didn’t think it would be because of the same security related issue that 2.8.1 was supposed to address. I thought 2.8.3 was released as a bug fix version as a few annoying bugs have popped up that were giving people issues. It was inevitable that a 2.8.3 would be released before 2.9. I’m glad however to report that 2.8.3 does contain some bug fixes as well as completely fixing the security exploit. The bug I had in mind deals with editing comments and the URL field being blank even though there was a value represented in it, which has been fixed. The upgrade was easy peasy for me and I suggest you upgrade as well. But please, backup your data first before you even think about touching that upgrade button.
Joost De Valk who hosts the PressThis podcast recently conducted an interview with Mark Jaquith to discuss the future of WordPress. Mark is one of the core committers to the project so he would obviously know a thing or two with regards to the future direction of the software. During the interview, we get to find out what’s on tap for WordPress 2.9, some discussion around post types, taxonomies, using WordPress as a CMS, roles and capability simplification, and much more. If you’re interested in the future development of WordPress, definitely download this episode and give it a listen. 
In this episode, David and I get you caught up on the news of the week which includes a few stories from the WordPress.com side of the world. We give you the 411 on the latest version of WordPress to be released, WordPress getting it’s own URL shortener, and much more. We were also joined by special guest Jane Wells who provided us some great information regarding the happenings with WordPress. 
