Shortly after the release of WordPress 3.3, BuddyPress 1.5.2 was released and is simply a compatibility release intended to fix some cosmetic issues with the new WP 3.3 toolbar. If you experience any issues with WordPress 3.3 and BuddyPress 1.5.2, you should participate in the following support thread on the official BuddyPress forum. ∞
Lorelle VanFossen To Teach 4 Credit WordPress College Course
Huge congratulations goes out to Lorelle VanFossen for being selected to teach at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Lorelle will be teaching an Introduction To WordPress course that will reward students with four college credits. While WordPress in the classroom has become more common across the world, very few are actually awarding students college credits. Here is the information regarding the course:
Beginning January 10 through March 20 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, this 10 week class (20 hours) is from 6-8PM. Registration is through Clark College. Contact the Clark College Computer Technology Office (CTEC), Reesa McAllister at 360-992-2106 for details. You will need the following when you call: Item Number 4538 and Course ID CTEC 280.
I’ve been lucky enough to meet Lorelle in person a few times within my lifespan and the one consistent quality that she has is her enthusiastic ability to teach. She loves teaching people about WordPress and I think she loves seeing that glow in peoples eyes when they Get It. Again, congrats Lorelle. Be sure to tell us about your experience with teaching WordPress at the college level.
Merry Christmas: WordPress 3.3. Released
The time has finally arrived. WordPress 3.3. was released early this morning to the masses. Codenamed ‘Sonny’ which at a glance looks like sorry, 3.3 has a couple of great user oriented features with a ton of polish. While my WordPress upgrade experience went smoothly, I was immediately impressed with the welcome screen which in my opinion, is better at explaining new features in WordPress than most of the official release posts on the WordPress.org blog, minus the ones with published videos. Kudos goes out to all involved for the welcome screen as well as every other improvement that made it into WordPress 3.3. Let me know in the comments what you think of the new user experience polish that made it into this version.
Case Study On How WordPress Won The Crown
Interesting case study using a number of cool data points that shows how WordPress has won the crown amongst Joomla and Drupal for being the most widely used CMS in the world. One things for sure, it certainly paid off for WordPress to be focused on making the democratization of content publishing as easy as possible first, then making WordPress incredibly extensible later. There is an entire laundry list of reasons of why WordPress is at the top of the mountain right now, the success of the platform can not be traced back to one thing. The comments in the article contain a couple of those reasons while the others are spread amongst the various comment and forum threads on the web.
The past 7-8 years is very interesting to look back upon to figure out how WordPress ended up in it’s current spot of being the best in breed within the content management space. But, what I find even more interesting is if whether or not the things that made WordPress successful in the past will continue to stick around so that the platform is equally or more successful in the future. Focus, ease of use, extensibility, etc. Be right back, I’m going to go ask my magic 8 ball. ∞
3.3 Is Getting Closer
Looks quite possible that we’ll be using WordPress 3.3 before Christmas. 3.3 Beta 1 was released on October 11th so plugin and theme authors have had more than enough time to test their code against the latest version of WordPress. However, when a Release Candidate is offered, it’s generally the best time for testing as there is a very small chance that any major code changes will occur to the core. ∞
Things You Should Know About WordPress 3.3
Aaron Brazell of Technosailor.com has come through once again with his traditional 10 things you should know post, this time covering WordPress 3.3. The article covers mostly the user experience side of WordPress 3.3 but Aaron also points developers in the direction of the ever changing Codex article for 3.3 that they should take note of. With four different beta releases and a pretty long development cycle, plugin and theme authors have no excuses for any incompatibilities that may arise due to lack of testing.
I’d say that the drag and drop media uploader will probably end up being the most talked about aspect of WordPress 3.3. After using a test version of WordPress for a little while, I’ve become quite fond of the new media uploader. ∞
WPCandy Set To Publish First WP Centric Print Magazine
Ryan Imel of WPCandy.com has announced the launch of a quarterly magazine focused entirely on WordPress called the WordPress Quarterly. The magazine will be physical in nature meaning you can hold it in your hands as well as have a digital counterpart that won’t be available until the print edition ships. During the course of the year, the magazine will have four issues shipped, one in January, April, July, and October. If you want to own a small piece of WordPress history, you can pre-order the first issue for $12.00 while subscribing for the entire year will be $36.00. That doesn’t include shipping which many people outside of the U.S. have already complained about. However, Ryan has since tweaked the shipping prices to make them more affordable. The first issue already has a slew of contributing WordPress all stars which you can see here, covering the gamut from an article on TimThumb to bbPress and the GooglePlex.
What perplexes me is the idea of going through with a physical WordPress centric magazine at all. Back in March of 2010, Justin Tadlock started an interesting discussion on the Tavern forum regarding the idea of creating some sort of community oriented WordPress magazine. It would have been a website dedicated to the topics of WordPress, bbPress, BuddyPress and anything else that needed to be focused upon. Although the site wouldn’t really be used as a typical blog but more or less be used to publish non time sensitive content such as reviews, interviews, tips and tricks. At the end of the day, the idea never gained traction to see the light of day but it looks as though the excitement that was expressed regarding the idea back in 2010 is still prevalent as I’ve seen a number of people subscribe to the WP Quarterly Magazine.
Fast forward to the end of 2011 and the question I have is, what has changed since then to turn the idea into a reality with not so much of a website but a physical magazine? While Justin wanted a group of contributors to simply give back when submitting an article to the magazine, WPCandy is charging for this content. I wonder if the authors will be allowed in on profit sharing or if they are paid on a per article basis? Considering the alternative of being able to publish those great articles on ones own site, I’d be hard pressed to think people will just give away that type of content without a price attached.
At any rate, I’ll be watching from a distance to see if this magazine can gain traction and stick around for awhile or if the initial surge of subscriptions and excitement will die down. At the very least, owning the first issue will be like owning a small piece of history.
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WordPress.com Reaches 60 Million Blogs Milestone

WordPress.com has crossed over yet another milestone in that they now host over 60 million blogs. After the GigaOm article has been updated, it now appears that half of the 60 million blogs are hosted on WordPress.com while the other half is on the self-hosted version of WordPress. This is a big number but unless those 60 million blogs are broken down into active sites, spammers, sploggers, dead sites, etc. then it will remain nothing but a big number. Touting big numbers is cool but showing how that number is figured out is even better.
Asides from the big number, I also wanted to point out the article that GigaOm published regarding this milestone. It has to be one of the most confusing articles I’ve ever read that mixes up WordPress.com and the open source project known as WordPress. For example, this sentence threw me for a loop:
Meanwhile, WordPress doesn’t plan to abandon its core allegiance to open source standards as it continues to expand as a for-profit company.
The sentence starts off with WordPress, then mentions open source standards and concludes with for-profit company. Even if you added the .com to WordPress that still wouldn’t make sense. Outside of all the confusion, the article itself is not bad considering it has a number of quotes from Matt when he participated in an on-stage interview with Mathew Ingram at the GigaOM RoadMap conference.
The big take away is that WordPress.com will be receiving a heavy dosage of social and mobile development.
SnowshoeMag.com Switches To WordPress
Snowshoe Magazine has recently switched over their website from a Coldfusion installation into WordPress with the help of Serafini Studios. During the switch, Gabriel created custom code that exported 1,131 articles in 48 different categories as well as 1,184 events from ColdFusion into WordPress. According to the sites source-code, a custom theme is being used called Snowshoemag2011 with a myriad of familiar plugins such as Contact Form 7, Google Analytics by Yoast, All In One Event Calender and Featured Posts Scroll.
All in all, the site looks pretty good. The thing that gets me though is that I never knew snowshoeing was actually a sport.
