Sean Daily who does the TEC Podcasts for the Lexnet Consulting Group recently published an audio interview he conducted with Matt Mullenweg. The 15 minute interview talks about what’s new in WordPress 2.8, the merger between WordPress.org and WordPress MU, the future of Matt and WordPress and a few other tidbits. The one thing I take away from this interview is the following quote from Matt.
If I had a billion dollars, I would want to do exactly what I’m doing today
Pretty cool.
This is a guest blog post written by JD Hartley, author of the blog, JDH23.com. You can also follow him on Twitter.With WordPress 2.8 out, many people are loving the new drag and drop widget page, plus the faster-loading-by-compression backend (have you noticed yet?).
But there are some features we shouldn’t let go unnoticed for too long. There are also some great new features for administrators involving the users section.
Heading: A new notification
The one that first caught my eye when I logged in on a brand new blog I was setting up today was a message telling me that I was using a WordPress auto-generated password.
Pretty cool, right? Although the auto generated ones seem pretty secure, they are REALLY easy to forget… hopefully you remember to change yours with this reminder. But if by some strange skill you can remember it and the message annoys you, you can turn it off too.
Heading: New User features
I usually delete my admin account so I can have a different username (plus it is good for security). So I went over to create my new account. And there I discovered three new features added in WordPress 2.8:
1) Password Strength Meter
The first one that caught my eye was the password strength meter. I have seen it when I edit my profile, but now it is there when I create and edit a user as an administrator. I really like this one because I often create blogs that are sealed off of new registration, and people create their account in person by using my laptop.
2) Send Password to User
The next one was the “Send password” feature. This will send an email to the user with their new password, much like it does when WordPress auto assigns one to them on a normal registration. Now the person knows you have registered them a new account and they have all of their information to log in with.
3) Premium Subscriber
WordPress 2.8 also introduces a new user role (such as Administrator, Author, Subscriber, etc), called a Premium Subscriber. There is no reference in the Codex or trac yet, but hopefully someone will shed some light on this eventually. I logged in as one of these Premium Subscribers and it appears to be exactly like a Subscriber permission-wise. My guess is that this role was put here for plugins that want to distinguish between normal people and special people. Sounds cool to me.
*NOTE* I have verified by checking the 2.8 install on WPTavern.com and I do not see a premium subscriber role. Sounds like JD is using a plugin or something that adds that role.
Heading: Time Zone updates
After exploring some more, I went to change my time zone so it was in Central Time. As long as I can remember, there has been a little note in that section where they have promised us that they would make that feature better someday. Well, it looks like that day has come.
In WordPress 2.8, there is a new feature called “Choose a city near you”. They added a rather lengthy list of cities from around the world (including Longyearbyen, which is in Svalbard, quite north of Europe and Asia). You can also just choose a GMT +- time if you would not like to scroll through the huge list of cities.
Most people will only use these new features a few times on their blog, but I thought it would be nice to just show them and make sure they aren’t lost in the new features of WordPress. Hope you like them.
Out of curiosity: Which feature are you going to use most? Which is most important to you? Any ideas of where they should improve this area of the backend more?
Last week, I published a post which discussed the fact that there are so many sites centered around WordPress that perhaps we were reaching a point where there are TOO many sites. Darren Hoyt who we know from creating the Mimbo Pro theme has launched a new site called WPTopics.com which tries to present WordPress information from only established sites. I was lucky enough to talk to Darren for an hour the other day to find out a little more about this particular website.
In a nutshell, can you explain what WPTopics is all about?
My best wording for it is in the footer but I guess it’s supposed to generate discussion, record how much value people place on WP blogs and the personalities behind them. But I really don’t want it to be a popularity contest. For example, I’m teaching a friend web design from the ground up (he’s paying me). So of course I’m trying to get him into WordPress and this tool is exactly the kind of thing he needs instead of sifting through thousands of fly-by-night WP blogs by people who abandon them after 6 months. I want to only to link to people ingrained in the community, who are dedicated to the software and influence it.
Upon visiting WPTopics.com the first thing I think of is AllTop which does have a category for WordPress. How does WPTopics differentiate itself from AllTop?
As far as I can tell, the AllTop page was not compiled by anyone ingrained in the WP community. It’s a fair sampling of info but it’s a little unfocused and there are no categories, voting, nor will it probably ever change, whereas if someone’s blogging drops off or they move away from WP, I’ll be removing them from WPTopics.
You mentioned earlier that you don’t want this to turn onto a popularity contest. But, if people vote for certain sites or feeds, will those rise to the top of the page? How will you protect against those sites telling their communities to vote for them?
I cant’ really think of a reason someone would vote if they legitimately didn’t like a site. Like Nathan and Justin got their readers to vote for them and they did. It’s a great reflection of the enthusiasm people have for certain people’s work like Ian Stewart, etc. But, if someone pisses someone off, they could also go and give them a 1-star, and mess up their whole rating average. No real way to protect against it, it keeps everyone on their toes.
What does it take to be added to WPTopics.com?
Basically if you’re consistently publishing articles that talk back to the WP community at large, and, in fact, change the way Automattic does things, that’s the sign of a trusted developer. I know people like Lloyd & Matt “check in” on certain sites like Ian’s and Justin’s, and sometimes comment so stuff like that is a pretty good measuring stick. Basically when the creme rises to the top it’s obvious and if I have any doubt, I send a group email to Justin, Ian, Nathan and you and ask if you think they’re a good candidate. By no means is it a truly scientific system.
Ok tell us a little bit about what is going on behind the scenes. Are you using specific plugins to pull in the feeds? Are you using a caching plugin? Did you do the design yourself?
Yeah, it’s using a custom WP framework I’ll probably release soon codenamed, Gravy. Each feed is actually a post and I’m using the More Fields plugin to specify .ico files along with the feed and URL address. Then Ben (binarymoon) helped implement some javascript that only queries posts if you’re on a particular tab, plus the voting plugin and supercache. When I say ‘framework’ i should really say ‘baseline theme’.
What sort of things do you have in store for WPTopics.com?
Some kind of twitter integration that isn’t chaotic and hopefully a “featured article” of stuff that’s especially good. Other than that, I want to sit back and watch how/if/when people use it, and then make decisions based on that.
In the WordPress Developers channel on IRC today, Ryan Boren announced that the target date for the release of WordPress 2.8 is June 10th. There are a couple other things that were announced as well:
As an aside, I noticed this thread in the hackers mailing list archive which contained not only a link to the 10,000th ticket to be opened and closed in Trac, but also contained a neat tidbit of trivia.
2.8 is the one with the most tickets opened (815, which if memory serves me well is the first time a milestone passes the 800 line), and more importantly with the most tickets closed (758 and counting).
Usually milestones end their lifetime with a couple dozens (if not a couple hundreds, most often) of unresolved tickets, which are then swept under the rug of the next minor or major version.
But this time, thanks to extensions to the release date (and I’m thinking also the tireless participation of external developers, among which one of the most notable is Denis de Bernardy, who devoted himself full-time to tickets-resolving ever since the 24-hour-marathon (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9758#comment:10), we’ve seen a steady decrease in number of open tickets, even thought this major release has seen more open tickets than any other previous release: we’re at 758 closed tickets already, and the closest to that is v2.5 with 750 closed tickets, then v2.7 with 668 closed tickets.
If you continue reading into that archived post, you’ll see that based on Xavier’s opinion, going six months without a major release proved beneficial to getting the ticket situation under control. Hopefully with 2.9 and beyond, the core devs and contributors can keep pace with the progress they have made with 2.8. I’d also like to extend Xavier’s thanks to the core developers, external developers, reviewers, testers, and people who participate in in-depth discussions to figure out the best way to solve a particular problem.
Ryan Imel who runs the WordPress blog ThemePlayground.com got in touch with me the other night and we had a very interesting discussion about a topic I’ve thought about since the days before I launched WPTavern.com and that is the possibility that there are too many people writing about WordPress in too many places. What initially sparked the conversation is a forum thread that Ryan created on his forum asking his audience if they would be interested in a printed WordPress publication.
There is a surplus of less-than-quality blogging about WordPress going on. Hopefully I’m not contributing too much to that pile. So this idea really began as a single realization: we (WordPress bloggers) are all fragmenting ourselves and diluting the potency of our blogs, I think, in the process.
There are just too many people writing about WordPress in too many places.
Of course I would never think of asking any WordPress bloggers to join me at the Playground and leave their blog behind, as I wouldn’t leave my own blog for anyone else. So instead my thoughts drifted toward a larger, more concentrated effort, that those interested in writing about WordPress and open source software could contribute to and get excited about.
For this concentrated effort: why not a printed publication?
When I came up with the idea to start WPTavern.com, I wondered how well it would do considering the large amount of blogs about WordPress already in existence. In fact, I didn’t think I had any chance at making a splash in this niche area of writing. So far, thanks to a loyal fanbase and an awesome community of people surrounding the Tavern, the site has done well to rise slightly above the noise. (Thanks a ton :)
I had quite a few ideas actually. The first was to create an email newsletter called Pressed For Words which would be a monthly newsletter with the focus on WordPress news, plugin and theme releases and an article or two with featured tips and tricks. I passed this idea up because of Lorelle’s awesome WordPress Wednesday posts on the BlogHerald which accomplished the same thing I was going to do but for a price.
The second idea was to gather up a list of WordPress bloggers that I knew created great content and pool them together to create a content network on Lijit. This way, they could maintain their own blogs and not have to do anything different while their content was aggregated to the Network Page which would have advertising on it. The revenue would then be split up between members of the content network. However, I wasn’t in the position to manage such a project at the time so I passed on that idea.
The third idea was to create a WordPress specific blog network and send out invitations to specific WordPress bloggers to be part of the network and then combining our traffic for bigger advertising dollars. However, when you look at most of the WordPress centric sites out there that write about the software, most have their own individual advertising system meaning they don’t need to join a blog network for ad dollars. So that idea was canned.
In our conversation, we mentioned that there are bloggers such as Kyle Eslick with WPHacks.com which is a great site for premium theme news and code snippets, WPCandy is also a great site covering the realm of WordPress, WPEngineer with code snippets and the same with WP Recipe. All of these guys seem to be doing great on their own but the thought of bringing all of that talent under one roof is mouth watering. However, there are quite a few issues regarding bringing the talent under one roof, most of which I covered in my previous ideas.
My thoughts are, if someone could start up a monster WordPress site where you could dedicate people to their own specialty and cover the project from head to toe, such as themes, plugins, news, code snippets, general news, community happenings, etc, you would have one awesome WordPress site. But to get people to collaborate on a site like this, especially when money is involved would be a tough thing to do in my opinion, especially when they are pulling in money just fine on their own. So then the next question is, what if the site was a non profit? Well, although I’m sure most of us wouldn’t mind sharing great information and insight from the realm of WordPress, I think most of us are trying to make a living or at least a side income from creating this type of content. So a non profit wouldn’t fly.
With the ability to subscribe to blogs and read their content via RSS, I’m not sure if WordPress information fragmentation is really a problem. I do know one thing though, the WordPress Codex would be a much better place if it contained half of what the WordPress Rockstars put out on a regular basis. But putting awesome content on the Codex doesn’t provide the same benefits and rewards than publishing it on a blog. You might get a warm fuzzy feeling inside when you publish to the Codex but on a blog, you get comments, search engine traffic, and the ability to monetize your sharing of information. I remember in an interview with Matt when I mentioned this topic and he said something to the effect of their needing to be some sort of way to plug the gap between the great informational posts in the community and the Codex. I know of a possible way this could be done but I won’t dive into that just yet.
In the end, do you think that there are just too many people writing about WordPress in too many places? Or does it not make a difference to you thanks to RSS? The more the merrier? Or please stop?
Well, what can I say other than plenty of other people throughout the community picked up on the same message I did from WordCamp San Francisco regarding the merging of WordPress.org and WordPress MU. In fact, there is even a slide that goes with the presentation that says: WPMU and WordPress.org … merging. After that slide was presented, take a look at what anyone paying attention saw on Twitter.
#wordcampsf WordPress MU and wordpress.org are merging. For those of you who are into MU, these must be interesting news.
WPMU and WordPress.org are merging! The codebases are being combined. (per @photomatt) #WordCamp
This was on top of all the websites that reported on the same thing announcing that perhaps by the time WordPress 3.0 would ship (speculation regarding version number) that the codebases between WordPress MU and WordPress would be merged.
Today, we learn from Lorelle on the BlogHerald.com that we possibly tuned into the wrong message. According to Lorelle:
While I’m waiting confirmation, my understanding from Matt’s announcement is that the long time home of all things WordPress, known by many as the WordPress dot org site, will become a WordPressMU site, with nothing impacting the downloadable versions of WordPress.
So, I dived into the WordPress Developers IRC channel to see if anyone had any inside knowledge on the announcement. Most of the people who responded didn’t quite have the answers I was looking for, that is until Donncha chimed in. I ended up having a little conversation with him to see if I could get the details regarding the announcement and this is what he had to say:
donncha – Sure, MU will be merged into WP. That’s basically the whole story
jeffr0 – Majority of people believe a merging of the two projects. WordPress and WordPress MU into one project with a rumored completion of WordPress 3.0. Now posts like Lorelle’s on the blogherald are creeping up suggesting no, WordPress.org will be powered by WordPress MU or something like that. No one knows anything
donncha – It’s just MU -> WP. Everything else is speculation.
jeffr0 – So WPMU becomes WP and that’s that?
donncha – basically, yes.
So how it will happen or when is still up in the air but at least it looks like most of us who jumped the gun and believed that the announcement meant the merging of both projects into one was correct. However, it will be interesting to see what Lorelle comes up with after she receives her confirmation to see if her post changes to match Donncha’s answers.
The second North East Ohio Meetup which took place on Thursday, May 28th was a success. We had a total of six attendees with three of those being new faces. Thanks to Jeff Lees efforts on Facebook, we at least got the word out about this particular event. Now that we have two of them under our belts, we can use the momentum to get more people to show up.
During this event, I gave a guided tour of the cool new toys that would be included in WordPress 2.8. I covered the new widget interface as well as the ability to install themes from the administration side of WordPress. For my first presentation, it wasn’t bad. I streamed the meetup which included my presentation on Ustream but thanks to a browser crash, I lost half of the show. Thankfully, I got the other half of the event on Ustream which you can view here. Warning it’s about 2 hours long heh.
Here are two photos of the event featuring our attendees!
The next meetup has already been scheduled. You can find information regarding the next event and also specify whether you’ll be able to join us or not by visiting the following link.
Thursday May 28th, will mark the second Northeast Ohio WordPress Meetup. The meetup is held at the OfficeSpaceCoworking building in Akron, Ohio from 7:00pm – 10:00pm. This time around, I’ll be giving folks a tour of WordPress 2.8 to showcase whats new. If you’re in the Akron, Canton, Youngstown or Cleveland areas and are a fan of WordPress, make the trip down and join us.
Looking for a way to showcase your tweets on your WordPress powered site? This post by Technobuzz.net should do the trick as they list 52 different WordPress plugins aimed at accomplishing this feat. As for WPTavern.com, I’ve stuck with using the HTML embed code from Twitter.com and shoved it into a text widget. This is good enough for me!
Dave Coveney of Spectacu.la announced on the Tavern forums that they have released their WordPress 2.7 user guide. The user guide covers everything from getting started with WordPress to using the Visual editor to managing users. The downloadable guide is 56 pages in length and is in PDF format so make sure you have a PDF reader installed before you try to open the file. However, Spectacu.la club members are able to download the PDF and the final Word document which would come in handy if you’d like to print this out.
The only complaint I have with the guide is that the images contained within have a low resolution to properly make out various parts of the WordPress 2.7 backend. You’ll be able to read them but not without squinting and rubbing your eyes. Other than that, this is a Spectacu.la guide that should be stored in your resources bin!