Adfloat displays ads in a fixed position on the left side of your website.
Cookie Warning asks users’ consent for using cookies or redirects them out of your site.
Tweets As Posts imports all tweets tagged with specified hashtags from your twitter account into WordPress as posts.
WordPress HTTPS (SSL) is intended to be an all-in-one solution to using SSL on WordPress sites.
Talking Points Memo interviewed New York Times media columnist David Carr and I loved this quote:
You don’t have to be able to code yourself, but you have to know what coding is. You should be able to work in Final Cut Pro. WordPress should be second-nature. I think, in generational terms, being able to produce and consume content at the same time.
Check out the rest of the interview on the state of media and journalism.
WordPress 3.4 RC 1 has been released. Well over 500 tickets have been closed, so there’s plenty to look out for as you take out your testing sticks and knock it about.
As before, this is not yet meant for live sites, though the adventurous amongst you may feel free to tempt fate, especially if you are a plugin or theme developer. If you find any bugs, please report them, and contact the support forums if you need any help.
Also, I’d like to wish an extra special Happy Birthday to WordPress, which was released yesterday nine years ago!
Carrington Core1 loads template files through a function rather than including them directly within the global scope. This means that global variables need to be explicitly brought into scope rather than just being there and available to you.
I’ve considered this a feature, because it means that you’re much less likely to stomp on an important WordPress global variable from within a template, and having the explicit declaration of which variables you want available makes things a bit easier to follow.
However, it also has drawbacks. For anyone already familiar with WordPress theming, there is a “this is broken” reaction when trying to access $post doesn’t work until they declare global $post;. I’m on the fence about which approach is better (enforcing better development best practices or making the platform more accessible to new devs), but I’ve been exploring some options (in case we decide a more accessible platform is better).
View the code on Gist.
You’ll see the three approaches I’m considering in the comments at the start of the function. Each has pros and cons.
Option #1: Selectively bring in globals. This was my initial solution. It makes a reasonable set of global variables available. However, if someone needs to hit a global we didn’t choose to include, I think that becomes more confusing. If the global $post was already in scope (without having to declare global $post;), why would they need to declare global $_wp_using_ext_object_cache; to get that variable?
Option #2: Bring all globals into scope. I think this is an interesting idea, but likely not a good solution. Developers would assume that these variables are global and run into surprises when they find out they aren’t.
Option #3: Bring in all globals. I’m leaning towards this, but it just feels wrong to me – likely due to an overall aversion to globals. It basically makes all templates loaded by Carrington Core work like standard WordPress templates. There is potential for confusion here since all of the globals are present and a developer can interact with them just like their template file is being loaded into the global scope; with a pretty big exception that variables created in the templates are not created in the global scope.
There is also a concern about this change causing problems with existing Carrington powered sites. Previously variables set in template files wouldn’t pollute the global scope or stomp on global variables. With options #1 and #3, this would be a possibility.
So I’m soliciting feedback. Fellow WordPress developers, what say you? Anyone have a “silver bullet” solution? Perhaps no action is the best action?
The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.4 is now available.
An RC comes after the beta period and before final release. We think we’re done, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible we’ve missed something. So if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.4 yet, now is the time! Please though, not on your live site unless you’re adventurous.
With more than 500 tickets closed, there are quite a few changes. Plugin and theme authors, please test your plugins and themes now, so that if there is a compatibility issue, we can figure it out before the final release.
If you are testing the release candidate and think you’ve found a bug, please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If any known issues crop up, you’ll be able to find them here.
To test WordPress 3.4, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).
If you’d like to know which levers to pull in your testing, visit the About page (
→ About in the toolbar) and check out the list of features! You’ll definitely want to try the live theme previews.
Bonus: Happy birthday WordPress — nine years old today.
Cafe Noir is a rich and vibrant theme in brown, gold, amber, beige, and cream.
Magomra is a lightweight yet powerful theme with a feature rich and user friendly options page.
Stylish Church provides an attractive and effective web presence.
Today is the ninth birthday of WordPress (the anniversary of the first release).
WordPress still continues to astonish me in its phenomenal growth. Comparing to this time last year, WordPress now powers more than 74 million sites, accounting for more than 16% of the internet.
At my “Scaling, Servers, and Deploys — Oh My!” talk (slides) at WordCamp San Francisco 2011, I talked a bit about my ideal WordPress repo setup. In the spirit of sharing, I’ve now made that skeleton setup into a GitHub repo.
What you get is a WordPress repo starter kit. WordPress is in a subdirectory (/wp/), content is in a custom directory (/content/), and uploads are mapped to /shared/content/uploads/, which is a Git-ignored location. Re-symlink as appropriate, or alter your deploy script to do the symlinking on the fly.
You get a nice clean wp-config.php with a few of my tips and tricks already implemented (like local-config.php support for local development). .htaccess is ready to go with WordPress rewrite rules for anyone running on Apache.
I don’t really expect people to use it exactly the way I have it set up (though feel free!). What’s more likely is that people will fork it, and then make it their own. For instance, you may want to add mu-plugins drop-ins that you frequently use. Have fun!
by Mark Jaquith at May 26, 2012 03:16 PM under local development
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It’s that time again. Version 3.0 of WordPress for iOS is out and adds some exciting new features. Most of the changes have been under the hood so we can now start giving you great updates fast. Let’s jump into it.
Download version 3.0 of WordPress for iOS today.
The following contributors have worked on this release of WordPress for iOS: koke, irbrad, aerych, daniloercoli, mrroundhill, rhc3, boctor, isaackeyet - are you next?
Here’s what the rough road map looks like, find more and discussions on the dev blog.
Version 3.1
This release is tentatively scheduled for the end of June.
Version 3.x
These are some of the features/changes we’re considering for the upcoming versions of WordPress for iOS.
You should get involved right now. We’re looking for feedback on the planned features and help testing the releases with a new and active Beta Team. If you’re a developer you can get involved directly to help get these great features out quicker – learn more about how to get involved by visiting the Development section.
What are your thoughts on WordPress for iOS and the future? Tweet us @WordPressiOS or leave a comment below.
The video from last night’s PandoMonthly interview isn’t up yet, but there have been five blog posts that came out of it on their site if you want some of the highlights: Facebook, You’ve Got a Friend: Matt Mullenweg Thinks You Own the Future of Advertising; Distributed Workforces are All About Results; Matt Mullenweg and the Cult of WordPress; I’m Worried That Silicon Valley Might Be Destroying the World; WordPress and Tumblr are Complementary, WordPress Founder Says.
Flickr Blog This to Draft Post will make a draft post to your blog instead of publishing via Flickr’s “Blog This” function.
Ice Visual Revisions adds revision tracking to the visual editor.
Minify automagically concatenates JS and CSS files that are output in wp_head() and wp_footer().
CloudFlare ensures your WordPress blog is running optimally on the CloudFlare platform.
Jetpack supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.
Developing a WordPress plugin is hard work, and by the time you’re done, the little details can sometimes be overlooked, like the appearance of the plugin’s icon in the Dashboard. I have used plenty of plugins in my time, and quite a few had pixelated icons or icons that just didn’t seem to look right overall. By the way, have you noticed that the default Dashboard icons are not colored until you hover or click on them? Yeah, now try to ignore the few plugins you have installed with constantly colored icons.
To help new developers with their plugin icons, Matthias Kretschmann has created a handy template for WordPress admin icons with tons of tips. Now, no more excuses, get some good looking icons into your next plugin update.
I’ve already professed my love for Paper1, and one of my primary usages is for wireframing UX models. I used it for a few of the improvments we added in Social 2.5, and thought it might be fun to share a couple of them here.
One of the biggest changes we made was an overhaul of the Broadcasting screen. Here is the “before” version:
This worked OK, but you can see a few problems:
So we worked on some different approaches. These are pretty close to what we shipped in version 2.5:
And here is the version that shipped:
We also made some significant UI changes to the way accounts are managed on the admin side. Here is the “before” version.
Again, functional but can be improved. In particular I wanted to consolidate this into a single list rather than having one place to add/remove accounts and a separate place to indicate the default accounts. Also, you can see the problem (again) of pages not being shown by default.
This concept allowed the two lists to be combined into one:
And what we shipped was pretty darn close to that:
In addition to making the admin screens more compact, this design also makes it easier to support more services in the future (Google+, etc.).
So there you have it, a little “behind the scenes” fun. I definitely recommend incorporating sketching and wireframing into your design process, it’s been a huge help for us as we brainstorm, discuss ideas, etc.
Had an interesting chat with Anil Dash today at the GigaOM/PaidContent conference in NYC, here are some tweets from the talk:
@rosso @photomatt As soon as the next bubble bursts (and I’m quite sure that it will), blogging is going to be bigger than ever.
— Oliver Reichenstein (@iA) May 23, 2012
Q&A: @photomatt on tools used by his employees. “We just use blogs for everything. P2 is like our internal @Twitter.” #pc2012
— Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) May 23, 2012
If you’re curious about P2 check out p2theme.com where you can sign up pretty easily.
Like Jay-Z obsessing over young rappers, @photomatt keeps an eye on every new content management system that comes out. #photo2012
— Ron Hogan (@RonHogan) May 23, 2012
I learned this from the Complex interview with Young Guru. (Which they present in slideshow format, for some reason.)
A few very kind words from Jay Rosen:
Takeaway 2 from #pC2012: Easily the most impressive–articulate, confident, calm, funny, locked-on–media executive on stage was @photomatt.
— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) May 23, 2012
And finally we talked about how WordPress is actually on its third or fourth pivot, as in the most important contributor to growth of the platform changes over time, which turned into this article which has been making the rounds:
New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way dlvr.it/1cGgSl
— paidContent (@paidContent) May 23, 2012
WordPress was first for pure blogging, then became embraced as a CMS (though some people still deny this), is seeing growth and innovation in being used as an application platform (I think we’re about a third of the way through that), and just now starting to embrace social and mobile — the fourth phase of our evolution.
As with each of our previous transitions there are large, established, and seemingly unshakable competitors entrenched in the same space. This is good because we can learn from those that came before, as we always have, and good competitors drive you to be better. As before, people will probably not notice what we’re doing at first, or deny it’s happening as folks who still say WordPress “isn’t a CMS.”
Function reforms form, perpetually. As John Borthwick put beautifully today, “A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it.” How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.
There are hints of this already happening in our iPhone and Android apps, but even though I’m thinking about this all the time I don’t have all the answers yet — that’s what makes it fun. WordPress is going to turn nine years old this Sunday and I’m as excited to wake up in the morning and work on it as I was the day we started. I think when we turn 10 in 2013 the ways people experience and publish with WordPress will be shorter, simpler, faster.
Soar features a dove in flight on a very simple, elegant dark charcoal grey background.
SpringFestival is a retro style celebration of Chinese history.
Been in New York since Sunday — I really love it here. I’m speaking twice this week, first in an interview with Anil Dash at the PaidContent conference, which has about 15 tickets left. Second, will chat with Sarah Lacy in the inaugural New York PandoMonthly event. If you’re in New York and a WordPress fan, please swing by.
This is a bugfix release of the full page caching plugin WP Super Cache for WordPress.
Not much has changed in the week or so since I asked for testers but in case you missed that post here are the changes since 1.0:
As ever, the support forum is the best place to go for help as I monitor it all the time. Before you post there use Google to search for any error strings and use the debug system in the plugin as it will probably tell you what’s going on.
Related Posts
by Donncha O Caoimh at May 23, 2012 10:35 AM under wp-super-cache
Leap Motion looks pretty amazing, and their site is powered by WordPress so you know they’re savvy.
I’m very pleased to share version 2.5 of Social with you. Brought to you by our good friends at MailChimp (see their blog post), Social is a WordPress plugin that connects your WordPress site to Twitter and Facebook in really interesting ways.
Here are the high level bullet points:
Pretty good feature list, right? Social also has a couple of great collateral features. When used in conjunction with the “users must be logged in to comment” feature of WordPress, you can choose to require your commentors to attach a more meaningful (and verified) identity with their comments. Removing anonymous noise from the mix always raises the level of debate.
Social also allows your site to be the place for your content. You can bring in conversations from both Facebook and Twitter back to your site, while still participating in the conversations on those social networks. Engage with people where they want to engage, but do so while providing a richer cross-network experience on your own site.
That’s Social in a nutshell. Which brings us to the “what’s new in this version” list. I did most of the coding on this release so I’m hardly unbiased, but I’m pretty darn pleased with the way this version has shaped up. I’ve been using development builds on this site for a bit now, and I really like the way the new features have removed that last little bit of friction from some of my more common interactions.
Before we launch into what’s new, I’d like to take a moment to point out that Social is built entirely in the open on GitHub. Developers, please send us awesome pull requests.
I think some of the best changes in this version are in the improvements to interactions with Facebook. By default, when a post is broadcast it is sent as a link rather than a status post; regardless of if it has a featured image or not. The obvious exception here is for posts that have a status post format – those are still sent as status posts. To try to make this interaction clear, we show a nice preview of how the post will look on Facebook on the broadcast screen.
When comments are broadcast to Facebook, we try to do the Right Thing with it. There are two options:
We also take the step of auto-selecting the “Post to Facebook” checkbox under the following conditions:
Social does this all for you – just hit reply, type your message and send. This feature is important to keep the conversation running easily on both Facebook and your WordPress site.
Twitter integration got some nice improvements in this version as well. You were previously able to import tweets as comment directly by URL, but now you can do this from the front-end as well. Use the menu we add in the admin bar under the Comments item to bring in tweets directly (and look for social comments). This is really useful for bringing in replies to replies or other tweets that are part of the conversation, but not something that Social will pick up by default. Note that you have to be on a single post (permalink) view for this to be available.
One of the use cases that I think makes Social really interesting is the way it allows your WordPress site to interact with real-time happenings on Twitter. Did someone tweet something that prompted you to write a blog post? You can send your broadcast tweet as a reply to that user.
Tip: Make sure to include their @username in the tweet so that they see it as you expect.
We also improved the Twitter comment detection to auto-select the account that a tweet was directed to when replying to an imported comment. Huh? Basically, if @someoneelse sends a tweet to @yourusername and Social brings that in as a comment, Social will also select your @yourusername and check the “post to Twitter” box when you hit the Reply link for that comment. It also inserts @someoneelse into the comment box so that you can start writing your reply.
The last significant change we made is to widen the net a little and catch specific types of Twitter replies, then import them as comments. The scenario is basically this:
Previously we would have missed automatically importing the replies in step 4 above. Now we catch them.
We walk a fine line with the amount of content we try to find and import. In particular we want to make sure we don’t set up rules that allow Social to use up all of your API requests checking for comments on your broadcasts. However, we do want to bring in as many relevant reactions as we can. We were able to make this change without requiring an additional API hit. We are able to look for additional data in the API requests we were already making.
You can now send customized broadcasts to each account in a single action – each account has its own form that you can edit. By default, the first broadcast message for each service (Facebook, Twitter) is editable while any others are in “copycat” mode. They will all be updated along with the edits to the first message unless you click the Edit link for the ones you want to customize. We think this is a good compromise between convenience and control, and hope you like how it works.
The account management forms have been streamlined and cleaned up, on both the main Social settings screen and the user profile screen. For example, Facebook pages are always displayed so they can be selected, etc. We also consolidated the selection of “default” accounts into the main accounts list. We hope this makes these pages easier to understand and use.
Some of you have post broadcasts that get a ton of Likes and Retweets. These are cool to see in the (condensed view in the) comments list, but not as meaningful in the comments RSS/Atom feeds that WordPress generates. We’ve added some code to suppress these types of “meta” comments in the feeds.
When you have lots of comments, they come with a lot of in-page image requests. This can cause your site to load more slowly than you’d like, so we implemented support for the Lazy Load plugin. Install and enable this plugin, and the avatars for your Social comments only load when scrolled into view.
Social now functions as a platform for other social WordPress plugins. You can choose to disable any features that you don’t want on your site and just use the connections to social networks. Expect a new release of Twitter Tools, built on Social, very soon.
Of course we also fixed all of the bugs we were able to reproduce. This includes making Facebook comment importing more consistent, along with a number of other fixes and improvements.
A quick word about Google+ integration (by far the most requested feature – tracked here). It’s something we want to do and plan to do, but until Google+ has a write API we can’t attain feature parity with our Facebook and Twitter integrations. My guess? We’ll see a Google+ API featured next month at Google I/O.
Want to build cool WordPress integrations like this? We’re hiring.
Wade Roush writes about the Bay Lights Project, a remarkable endeavor to put 25,000 individually addressable LEDs on the cables of the Bay Bridge. I think it would be cool if they opened up the algorithms to reviewed contributions, especially if they ran at a set time like between 2-4 AM — far from “public-playground interpretations” I think the creativity of the Bay Area (and beyond) would delight everyone involved. But in the meantime the non-profit needs to raise a fair amount in a short period of time to have a chance: you can donate to the Bay Lights here.
The official WordPress.org Plugin Directory has received a rather significant redesign. With over 19,000 plugins listed, the team took some time to revisit this highly popular destination for the millions of folks using WordPress.
Right off the bat, you should notice a new ability to to mark your preferred plugins as Favorites. Each plugin page now has a new Support tab populated with the plugins’s support thread, and a super-handy chart showing you the resolved vs. open thread count so you can see at a glance how well supported a plugin is. Finally, there is much more focus on the authors this time around and some improved styling over all.
What do you think of the newly redesigned plugin directory?
Config Constants allows you to modify WP_DEBUG and other wp-config.php constants directly in the WordPress admin rather than manually editing them.
Password Protected is a very simple way to quickly password protect your WordPress site with a single password.
Redirection allows you to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.
StatComm provides realtime statistics on your blog, collecting information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS and more.
Code Poet has just relaunched, and it is now so much more than the directory of WordPress professionals that it was before. If you build anything with WordPress, Code Poet is now on the fast track to be your one stop shop for resources and information.
Today, Code Poet features free eBooks from WordPress professionals, interviews with WordPress professionals, useful resources from the WordPress community, and a handy quiz to test your WordPress knowledge. As you can imagine, Code Poet is gearing up to be a massive resource build by WordPress professionals for WordPress professionals and aspiring power users.
If you’re still looking to hire someone, the Code Poet Directory still exists, and aspiring Code Poets can still apply to be part of the prestigious directory.
Head over to the new Code Poet, grab a free eBook for the road, and take the quiz right away. How did you do on the quiz, and what do you think of the newly relaunched Code Poet?
Been hanging out with a few WordPress.org hackers — Scott, Nacin, and Otto — the last few days in a BBQ-fueled haze of hacking to make plugin directory better. There are over 19,000 plugins listed and they’re really the heart and soul of WordPress for many people, so they deserve a little tender loving care. Here’s a quick before and after snapshot you can zoom in on to see a visual overview of some of the changes:
Our first focus was around improving the discussion and support around plugins.
You’ll now notice that threads about a plugin are pulled directly into a “support” tab on the plugin page — each plugin has its own forum. We’ve made authors much more prominent and with bigger Gravatars and better placement, so you can get a sense of who made the plugin you’re using. And finally to show how active and well-supported a plugin is, you can see ”16 of 75 support threads in the last two weeks have been resolved.” Finally, if you’re logged in you get access to the new “favorites” feature that lets you mark the plugins you use the most so you can share them on your profile page and find them quickly later. We soft-launched favorites a few days ago and there have already been 2,000 saved!
If you’re a plugin author, we’ve started with a short threshold (2 weeks) for the resolved stats so it’s easy to catch up and stay on top of it. (It’ll eventually go to two months.) You also now have the ability to set stickies on your plugin forum to put FAQs or important information at the top, and of course any person you put as a committer on the plugin will have moderation access. People on the forum tag will see your custom header and links to the other resources attached to your plugin.
We’ve tightened up the styling a bit on the forums and plugin pages, though still some cleanups to do there. Some older improvements you might have missed, but are still useful for users and developers alike:
All of this will continue to evolve as we get feedback and see usage, but we’re happy to have been able to make some key improvements in just a few days while hanging out in Memphis. (This is why WordCamps usually have BBQ — it imparts magical coding powers.)
Art Blogazine is a simple and minimalist theme with HTML5 markup.
Outline is a beautiful, simple, elegant, monochrome theme for blogs or websites with a simple floral motif in the header.
Phire is a modern and easily customizable dark theme.
WPstart is a simple parent theme allowing you to create any type of website you want.
For the third year now I’m over in Memphis for the World Championship of BBQ, joined by Otto, Nacin, Scott, and Rose. Last year due to flooding the festival was moved to a fairgrounds inland, but there’s nothing quite like being right on the Mississippi with the sweet aroma of pork all around you. (An aroma that, incidentally, follows you home in your clothes. 
) The team we sponsor, the Moody Ques, put together an impressive booth this year, which you can see coming up in the below timelapse:
The video doesn’t do justice to the delicious food being cooked inside, though, which you have to experience in person.
Mark Jaquith writes How I built “Have Baby. Need Stuff!” — a nice overview of the latest and greatest in modern WP development.
We’re just about ready to put a bow on version 2.5 of Social. If you’d like to test the second beta release, grab it from GitHub.
Social is a plugin that allows you to maintain a centralized conversation on your site, while also participating in conversations on Facebook and Twitter.
Monster Widget provides a quick and easy method of adding all core widgets to a sidebar for testing purposes.
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place.
Yepty is yet another pay per click advertising plugin.
This is an aggregation of blogs talking about WordPress from around the world. If you think your blog should be part of this send an email to Matt.
For official WP news, check out the WordPress Dev Blog.
May 29, 2012 02:15 PM
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