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.
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.
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.
Great tutorial on the WordPress email system that walks users through setting up a plugin, creating an email template, preparing WordPress to use that email template, and modifying existing system emails. If that tutorial has you thinking that it’s too much work, you can take a look at the WP Better Emails plugin. ∞
Migrating from Drupal to WordPress is one of the more difficult migration paths. There are scripts available to migrate from Drupal 6 to WordPress but the way in which those scripts were created only allow for the migration of a specific version of Drupal to a specific version of WordPress. Most of the time, these scripts are written and shared by people that couldn’t find an easy path to move from one to the other and generally give up on maintaining the script after completing their move. Instead of relying on outdated scripts, you may want to check out MigrateToWP.com. These folks specialize in moving sites from Drupal into WordPress. While that is their specialty, they’ll also move plain HTML, Joomla, Blogger and other CMS sites as well.
Judging by their pricing page, they seem rather reasonable for what you get, especially when you compare those prices to getting a developer to provide you with a custom migration script. What’s not offered through the Professional plan can be accomplished with plugins after the move is complete. If no predetermined planned suits your needs, you can get in touch with them and they will provide you a free estimate.
If you’ve used this service before feel free to share your experience.
Andrew Nacin who is one of the core developers of WordPress gave a presentation at the most recent meetup in New York City covering WordPress 3.3. The video is 35 minutes in length with Andrew going in-depth on many of the features that 3.3 will have such as the admin bar, drag and drop media uploading, post names for permalinks and more. The video is best viewed at full screen. Thanks to Steve Bruner for the hat tip.
This weeks edition of the show features a one hour presentation with the founders of Drupal and WordPress together on one stage to talk about Open Source. This presentation took place on October 6th through the 7th, 2011 at an event called Schipulcon which is a web marketing conference. Unfortunately due to audio problems, I had to cut out the first 5 minutes of the presentation so your ears don’t fall off. Special thanks goes out to Katie and the Schipulcon group for providing me this audio file as well as the permission to play it through the WordPress Weekly stream. The next live show is scheduled for Friday, October 28th at 9PM Eastern.
Here is the recorded video featuring the presentation of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress with Dries Buytaert of Drupal discussing open source. Kudos goes out to the Schipulcon group for getting these two together for an awesome presentation. The audio is terrible until you hit the 4 minute mark. If you want to see a transcript for some of the questions you can read them on the Schipul Blog. Definitely watch from 32 minutes onward as that is when the audience starts asking some pretty good questions.
For those that don’t know, I produce a live podcast every Friday evening at 9P.M. Eastern time on Talkshoe.com called WordPress Weekly. On tonight’s episode, I’d like to hear from you regarding your experience thus far with WordPress 3.3. beta 1 if you’ve had a chance to use it. I’m especially interested to know your thoughts on the new fly out menus and the drag and drop media uploader. If you can’t call in to the show tonight, at least show up in the chat room to be part of the conversation as the show is recorded live.
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. 
This weeks edition of the show features a one hour presentation with the founders of Drupal and WordPress together on one stage to talk about Open Source. This presentation took place on October 6th through the 7th, 2011 at an event called Schipulcon which is a web marketing conference. Unfortunately due to audio problems, I had to cut out the first 5 minutes of the presentation so your ears don’t fall off. Special thanks goes out to Katie and the 