WordPress Planet

WP Android: WordPress for Android Now Available for Nook Color/Tablet & Kindle Fire

Dan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:08:32 +0000

Did you know that WordPress for Android runs on both phones and tablets? Sometimes a little extra screen space can help you draft that longer blog post. If you have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, or another Android tablet you’ll find the WordPress app in the Android Market.

Now for the Nook Color/Tablet and Kindle Fire, too!

We’re happy to announce that WordPress for Android is now available for the Nook Color/Tablet and Kindle Fire. The 7″ screen on these tablets make an excellent home for the all-new Dashboard UI that we added in WordPress for Android 2.0.

We paid special attention to the post editor on theses devices, enhancing the layout to make it super simple to edit your post content in either landscape or portrait orientation. You’ll find everything there that you’d want in a WordPress app, including support for editing post content, adding media, viewing your stats, comment notifications, and more.

The app is available today in the Amazon Appstore and Nook Store.

Feedback

How do you like the tablet WordPress app? Let us know in the comments section below, or ping us on Twitter.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog to stay up to date with the latest happenings around WordPress for Android.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 2/9

James — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:00:31 +0000

Aqua is a crisp, clean, and bright theme with small touches of aqua as an accent.

Gridly is a clean, minimal, and responsive theme with a simple options panel.

Joseph: WordPressed

Joseph Scott — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:00:02 +0000

I noticed Sarah working on a crossword puzzle from the local ad circular that comes in the mail. At first glance I thought that section was labeled “WordPress” instead of “Word pressed”.

WPTavern: The History Of WordPress Default Themes

Jeffro — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:00:34 +0000

WPLift has a cool post highlighting the different default themes that WordPress has had since its inception. According to the post, since WordPress was first created, the publishing platform has had a total of five default themes with Twenty Twelve being the sixth, slated to arrive with WordPress 3.4. It was a nice stroll down memory lane and a bit surprising that the amount of default themes was so low. However, it seemed like forever when Kubrick was the default theme for WordPress.

So the question is, how many of you remember using the first WordPress Default theme for your site?

Weblog Tools Collection: Printed WordPress Magazine to be Released Shortly

James — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:04 +0000

WPCandy Quarterly, a WordPress related quarterly print magazine from the folks at WPCandy, is just about to be mailed out to the lucky readers who either pre-ordered or subscribed. To my knowledge, or at least about half an hour of searching, this may very well be the first ever printed WordPress magazine publication.

The first issue will feature articles from 11 well-known contributors, and due to demand from the pre-orders, 2,000 copies are making their way through the printers as you read this. A lot of thought went into the design of this magazine, and you can see a video blazing through the various drafts below.

It’s not too late to reserve your copy, so if you want to be a part of this historical launch, you should place your order soon before they’re shipped.

WPTavern: Senior PHP Developer Position Open – Lift

Jeffro — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:00:09 +0000

Chris of LiftUX reached out to me the other day and wanted me to let everyone know that they are hiring for the position of Senior WordPress/PHP developer. The developer would also be helping to build out themes and plugins for UpThemes.

WPTavern: First Issue Of The WPCandy Quarterly Almost Out The Door

Jeffro — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:17 +0000

Many people within the WordPress community are anxiously awaiting the first issue of the WPCandy Quarterly to show up in their mailbox. According to Ryan, that day is soon approaching as the first batches are currently being printed. However, since there is still some time before we’ll be holding the physical copy, Ryan has explained how he went about developing the first issue. Based on the video Ryan published showcasing the various designs that articles have gone through, it looks like the magazine will have an impressive display around the content of each article, giving it that magazine feel.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 2/7

James — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:00:01 +0000

New plugins

Google AdSense and Google Analytics Remover will prevent AdSense ads and Analytics tracking code from displaying when you are logged in.

Updated plugins

Custom Field Suite allows you to visually manage custom fields.

Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick e-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent.

WPTavern: BuddyPress Codex Revamped

Jeffro — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:00:32 +0000

John James Jacoby of BuddyPress.org has announced that the BuddyPress Codex has received a much needed refresh. Here is the kicker, the BuddyPress Codex is powered by a WordPress installation where all registered users are an editor. Users can share information as in a traditional wiki but everything is housed on individual pages. Interestingly enough, this very idea was proposed a couple of times during the past few years for the WordPress Codex but it never gained much traction.

Head on over to the NEW BuddyPress Codex and check it out. It will be interesting to see how this approach scales.

WPTavern: How Page.ly Was Built

Jeffro — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:45 +0000

First off, congratulations to Joshua Strebel and to his wife as they are now first-time parents. Secondly, Joshua has put together a pretty transparent view as to how he created Page.ly, a WordPress specific hosting service. So far, the guide is five parts long but I advise you to start out with part 1, Identifying the opportunity.

No related posts.

Weblog Tools Collection: BuddyPress Codex Gets a Refresh

James — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:00:48 +0000

If you’re a fan of WordPress, you probably know about the WordPress Codex, the massive community-editable source of WordPress documentation.

Just yesterday, the BuddyPress core team gave a massive update to the BuddyPress Codex, making it easier than ever to learn how to use the #1 social networking platform plugin for WordPress.

Even though the new BuddyPress Codex may function like a traditional Wiki, it’s actually built on top of WordPress and BuddyPress. After all, why not show off some of the cool things you can do with a platform while you learn how to use it?

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 2/5

James — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:30:04 +0000

Blush is a soft, warm, feminine theme in tones of rose and cream.

Boozurk is a clear theme with a lot of features.

The Frances Wright is a clean and elegant theme.

BuddyPress: BuddyPress Codex Refresh

John James Jacoby — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:22:59 +0000

We all know how critically important the WordPress.org Codex is. Countless laborious hours have gone into making it the de-facto resource for all things WordPress.org related. It serves as an online encyclopedia of WordPress functions, actions, best practices, and examples on how extend WordPress far beyond its initial reach.

You may not know it but we’ve had a codex here at BuddyPress.org since the early days. It’s mostly made life really difficult and forced everyone into the forums or to other sites for help.

Today, I’m really happy to report that the core team has spent some time this weekend to finally refresh the BuddyPress Codex.

The BuddyPress Codex is a WordPress installation where everyone is an editor. You are free to contribute your knowledge into it exactly the way a traditional Wiki works, all using WordPress pages and a few custom taxonomies specific to the BuddyPress project.

In addition, we’ve added a few small social integrations to show off who created and edited each page, and we’re keeping track of all those edits through the BuddyPress Activity component so you can show off your contributions back to the community.

We really think you’ll like the changes, and hope you’ll let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Weblog Tools Collection: A Plugin to Make All Themes Responsive, Coming Soon

James — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:00:04 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of responsive themes. Knowing that your WordPress blog will look just as good on a tiny mobile screen as it does on a huge desktop screen is one of the most important factors of design to me, especially in today’s age where mobile device usage is growing so rapidly.

Sadly, there aren’t many responsive themes out there, but Responsive Plugin aims to change that. Once released, Responsive Plugin will make any theme scale perfectly on any screen size. There is no definitive release date, but it is definitely coming out sooner rather than later, and you can find a signup form at the bottom of the site if you want to follow the action.

WPTavern: VoodooPress Celebrates 1 Year Anniversary By Giving Away T-Shirts

Jeffro — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

WordPress community site VoodooPress has recently turned one year old. To celebrate, they are giving away VoodooPress branded T-Shirts. They come at the cost of providing the site some social love by clicking on any of the social media icons on the site. Small price to pay for a chance at a T-Shirt. Congrats to the VoodooPress team and I hope the second year is better than the first!

Just imagine how powerful one would be if they wielded a GPL voodoo doll.

WPTavern: Digging Into WordPress Book Updated To Cover WP 3.3

Jeffro — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:00:50 +0000

The WordPress book, Digging Into WordPress has been updated to cover WordPress 3.2 and 3.3. This marks the 9th edition of the book as noted by Jeff Starr. Those of you who are owners of any previous version of the book will receive this update for free.

WPTavern: Situations In Which MultiSite Should Not Be Used

Jeffro — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:00:04 +0000

Ipstenu once again has a great article that covers some situations in which MultiSite is not the best tool for the job. If you’re thinking that you need to use MultiSite to accomplish a certain task, make sure that task is not on her list.

No related posts.

WPTavern: Press75 Joins The WordPress.com Commercial Theme Family

Jeffro — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:00:36 +0000

Congratulations goes out to Luke McDonald as one of the themes produced by Press75.com has been selected to be part of the WordPress.com commercial theme store. The theme is priced at $50.00 and is called Debut. It’s mobile ready right out of the box along with having post format support. Speaking of post formats, Debut is especially interesting because when users select the Audio post format, it expands into a multi-track playlist. You can see the theme in action via the WordPress.com theme showcase.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 2/3

James — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:57 +0000

New plugins

Quick Notice Bar will help you to display a sticky message in your site’s header.

RePress allows you to circumvent internet censorship by proxying traffic to websites that have been blocked by repressive regimes.

Widget Logic Visual lets you control on which pages widgets appear using conditional tags.

WP Really Simple Health allows you to view memory utilization, server uptime, and CPU load on the new admin toolbar.

Updated plugins

Tallyopia Analytics provides analytics that you can embed into your site using shortcodes or view in your admin dashboard.

Ultimate TinyMCE beefs up your visual editor with a plethora of advanced options.

Alex King: http_build_query() Separator Tip

Alex — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:46:04 +0000

I ran into an interesting “bug” in Twitter Tools last night that I traced back to http_build_query(). I expected that the query strings generated by this function used & as a separator for the key=value pairs, but on one of our test servers, the separator being used was &. This is a php.ini config setting, so my expectation was clearly based on false assumptions. If you want to make sure that you get a & separator, you can pass it in as the 3rd parameter.

You’ll find this is particularly important if you’re making requests for remote data from within WordPress via wp_remote_get() or similar technique. If you are working on something that is run within WordPress, you can look at using add_query_arg() as an alternative to this as well.

WP Windows Phone 7: Version 1.5 Is Here

Isaac Keyet — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:00:16 +0000

We’re very happy to announce that version 1.5 of WordPress for Windows Phone is now available. This update focuses on speed and reliability – here’s what’s changed:

Stats: We’ve moved the stats section to its own page in the app which greatly improved the loading time for the blog panorama. While we were at it we fixed some bugs and improved the styling of the charts. The result is a much smoother experience for keeping up with your site’s stats. Just tap the new stats button in the actions pane to view your stats.
Post scheduling: The ability to schedule posts was a missing piece in the app. Now you can easily set a future publish date for your posts right from the app.
Comments: The comments list has been updated and now features a simple way to select multiple comments for bulk moderation.
Infinite scrolling: Your posts, pages, and comments now keep loading as you scroll down the list. No need to tap an extra button, it’s quick and easy.
Media uploading: The uploading reliability has been greatly improved. Now the app uploads your media in bite-size chunks, and automatically retries if you lose your connection. This has been tested a great deal and works well in most everyday situations.

In addition to the improvements and bug fixes, version 1.5 of WordPress for Windows Phone has also seen some minor UI enhancements and updates, as well as a number of crash fixes. All in all, we’re very happy with this release, which should make it even easier for you to blog from that fancy Windows Phone of yours.

We’re not resting just yet though. What would you like to see added to or improved on in the app? Comment on this post or shout out on Twitter and let us know your thoughts.

Huge thanks to everyone involved in this release: Dan Roundhill, Danilo Ercoli, Robert Collins, Max Cutler.

Matt: LIFE.com

Matt — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:48:32 +0000

LIFE magazine has relaunched, powered by WordPress.com VIP. I’m a huge fan of the magazine’s history and the work of photographers like John Dominis.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 2/1

James — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:39 +0000

Dusk To Dawn is a dark theme that melds old-style organic ornaments with modern design and typography.

Grisaille is a classic and simple two-column design adjusted for mobile browsing.

Stark has 2 columns with a left sidebar, is of fluid width, has both an upper menu and a vertical menu, and is high contrast with vivid red, black and white.

WPTavern: DBS Interactive Releases Theme Reference Guide

Jeffro — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:00:40 +0000

DBS Interactive which is an interactive agency has released their version of a WordPress 3.0+ theme reference guide. The guide is a reworked version of the information you would find in the Codex around template tags. So if the Codex presentation of this data is not your cup of tea, perhaps this reference guide will be easier to follow.

WPTavern: Recovering From A Crashed WordPress Site

Jeffro — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:21 +0000

Themefuse has a generally good checklist on things to do when a WordPress powered website crashes. While the article doesn’t contain any drastically new information, it’s still a good list of things to do to get your site back up and running as soon as possible if a crash were to occur.

Weblog Tools Collection: The WordPress Theme Review Team Needs Your Help

James — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:20 +0000

Are you a WordPress blogger? Do you enjoy having thousands of safe themes to choose from in the official directory? Did you know that a small group of volunteers goes through every single line of code in every submitted theme to make sure that they work properly on a basic installation and are free from malicious code? Chances are, you didn’t know that last bit, but now you do.

The Theme Review Team could use your help, especially if you know your way around a theme or two. At this time, there are typically many more theme submissions than active reviewers, so if you’re looking for a great way to help out the entire WordPress community, join the Theme Review Team today! If you’re a theme developer, but don’t have the free time to volunteer, you can at least help the team out by ensuring that your theme meets the guidelines before submitting it.

WPTavern: Do You Want To See Plugin Specific Dashboard Widgets Disappear?

Jeffro — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:00:26 +0000

Joost de Valk was one of the first to start the trend and now, he’s on pace to reverse it. Joost announced that he has decided to remove the dashboard widget which shows the most recent posts on his site from his SEO plugin.

Joost provided some interesting statistics that show where most of his visitors are coming from. As it turns out, the dashboard news are did provide additional traffic but very little in the way of conversions which is one of the reasons for the removal. Looking at the reactions of those that use the plugin, some applaud Joost for this action while others wanted the ability to choose whether to hide or display the news widget. While not mentioned, I think it’s a little humorous as well that within the Plugin UI Guide published by WPCandy recently, they featured the Dashboard News Widget of Joost De Valks SEO Plugin as what not to do.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

While I want to see the results of the poll question I asked, I’ll pose a few more questions for you to answer. When is it ok to have a dashboard widget such as the one that used to be within the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast? Is the dashboard considered sacred real estate reserved for only the most important information?

Personally, I like the trend of removing dashboard widgets generated by plugins. In this case, I think less is more.

WPTavern: Theme Review Team Could Use Some More Reviewers

Jeffro — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:38 +0000

The Theme Review Team tried something new this past weekend. Members of the review team that could make it, spent all day in IRC to review themes stuck in the Priority 2 queue which lists themes that have been stuck in the review process for more than two weeks. While the goal was to clear the queue, the last time I checked the number of themes was around 81. Some of the themes have been in the review process for over 6 weeks. Browsing through the queue, I even noticed two themes submitted by Automattic. One was called Duotone which has been in the queue for 5 weeks with Bouquet coming in at 6 weeks. Just goes to show that Automattic doesn’t receive preferential treatment when it comes to the review process.

If you would like to see themes get through the review process faster, please consider joining the theme review team. As a theme author, you can also help make the review process go faster by ensuring that your theme meets the following guidelines.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/30

James — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:38 +0000

New plugins

No Soup allows you to block users from a specific IP or range(s) of IPs and redirect them to another site.

WhatElse is a widget that lets you manually add related content to every post or page.

Updated plugins

Joemobi allows you to create native Android and BlackBerry applications from your WordPress site.

Social Login for WordPress lets your users log in and comment via their accounts with popular ID providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Live, and over 15 more.

WPTavern: WordPress Foundation To Foot The Bill For Meetup.com Organizer Dues

Jeffro — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:00:36 +0000

In what I believe to be an excellent use of the WordPress Foundation, Jane Wells has shared news that the foundation plans on footing the bill for Meetup.com Organizer dues that need to be paid by the founder of the meetup group. Considering the amount of these dues range from $12-19/month it’s not exactly cheap.

We’re setting up an official WordPress account on Meetup.com right now, and over the next couple of weeks will be working with existing meetup group organizers, people who want to start a new meetup group, and the helpful folks at Meetup.com to put this program in place. WordPress meetup groups that choose to have their group become part of the WordPress account will no longer pay organizer dues for that group, as the WordPress Foundation will be footing the bill.

This is exciting for several reasons. First, it means local organizers who are giving something back to the project by way of their time won’t also have shell out $12-19/month for the privilege. That alone is a big step. Second, it will open the door to more events and leaders within a community, since leadership and event planning won’t need to be tied to “owning” the meetup group. Third, more active meetup groups means more WordCamps, yay!

This is great news considering how many people use Meetup.com to control all aspects of their local WordPress meetups. Reading through the post, it looks like there are no strings attached but I wonder if by joining the official WordPress Meetup Group if at some point in the future, there will be some sort of Meetup guidelines published that those users will need to follow. If there are any guidelines that will need to be followed, I would hope that they are no where near as stringent as the WordCamp guidelines.

If you’re already a Meetup.com WordPress group organizer or looking to get started, be sure to take the survey so it gives the foundation a good starting point.

WPTavern: Uncensoring The Web With RePress

Jeffro — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:00:23 +0000

A brand new plugin released by GreenHost aims to make censoring the web next to impossible. It’s called RePress and turns any WordPress powered website it’s installed on into a proxy server. The plugin was created in response to piratebay.org being blocked within the Netherlands due to a court ruling.

Header Image As Seen On Their WordPress.org Plugin Page

RePress uses phpproxyimproved as its HTML parser which is another piece of open source code that allows the proxy magic to happen. After installing the plugin, you’ll need to give it a unique URL that will be used when going through the proxy to the blocked website. I received the following message after trying to view one of the default websites that are added to the proxy list:

In order to protect your blog from cross-site scripting attacks, please log out of your WordPress administration backend before accessing any of the proxied site urls.
Please log out of WordPress by clicking on this logout link.

Afterwards you will be directly redirected to the proxied website.
For security reasons. This will also delete all cookies for this domain (your remembered settings will be lost).

So if there is a particular website that you visit often using your site as a proxy, you’ll need to bookmark the URL and visit it only when you’re logged out of WordPress.

If you decide to give RePress a try, please give GreenHost some feedback on it via the following forum thread.

Addicott Web Suggests 6 More Plugins

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 1/28

James — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:00:56 +0000

Putte is a clean and beautiful theme with great features.

Red Modern is an elegant theme with red modern menus and elements.

Peter Westwood: Tracing things back to where they came from

Peter Westwood — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:14:26 +0000

One of the things I find myself doing a lot when developing WordPress is debugging things and so I spend a lot of time thinking of ways I can make this easier for me and easier for everyone else. Overtime this had led to a number of significant improvements to the debug ability of WordPress core including things like WP_DEBUG and the Deprecated Notices as well as the development of great tools like the Debug Bar plugin.

Recently I’ve found that the more context you can get to an issue the easier it is to understand and debug and I also noticed that while we recorded a simple backtrace for queries in core when SAVEQUERIES was defined we didn’t do a good job of presenting the data. Some function calls need more context that just the function name to be most useful – such as when running an action/filter it is useful to know the name and when requiring or including a file is useful to know the file name and some path context. This lead to the idea of refactoring the backtrace capture functionality out of WPDB and into a function that was improved to give proper calling syntax for functions in classes when called statically and was more obviously re-usable by plugins like the Debug Bar.

So today I have introduced wp_debug_backtrace_summary( $ignore_class = null, $skip_frames = 0, $pretty = true ) for #19589. If you provide no arguments you will get back string containing the full trace of the code run up to the place where you call wp_debug_backtrace_summary() – you won’t see the call to it in the trace as it always hides itself.

The best way to see the difference and improvements is to look at how this improves the information in the development version of the Debug Bar (new release coming soon) so after the break I have included some before and after screenshots.

Debug Bar query list before the change showing the previous limited infomation

Development version of the Debug Bar showing the enhanced details

An example of how the Debug Bar currently displays warnings, notices and deprecated function calls.

The development version of the Debug Bar showing how it can use this new function to display much more useful information

One of the things I suspect I will be doing a lot with this new function is dropping calls to error_log( wp_debug_backtrace_summary() ); into code that I am trying to debug and work out how often and from where it is being called. In the past I’ve done this by using print_r( debug_backtrace() ); which prints out a lot of information (some of which is pretty useful) and more recently I’ve been using print_r( debug_backtrace( false ) ); so as to only fetch and print the stack traces.

Using this new function does mean I lose by using the access to line numbers and file names I had from the raw PHP functions but I find that with the file names in the require/include calls and the function name being called I can get to the code just as fast as before.

I hope you all put this new function to good use!

Dev Blog: Year of the Meetup

Jane Wells — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:17:49 +0000

We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action.

meet·up \mēt-əp\ noun
A meeting, especially a regular meeting of people who share a particular interest and have connected with each other through a social-networking Web site: a meetup for new moms in the neighborhood; a meetup to plan the trip; a meetup for WordPress users.¹

So what is a WordPress Meetup? Basically, it’s people in a community getting together — meeting up — who share an interest in WordPress, whether they be bloggers, business users, developers, consultants, or any other category of person able to say, “I use WordPress in some way and I like it, and I want to meet other people who can say the same.” Meetups come in different shapes and sizes, but they all carry the benefit of connecting you with potential collaborators and friends, and helping you learn more about what you can do with WordPress. Here are some of the common types of WordPress meetups:

Hang out and work on your WordPress sites together
Social/happy hour type gatherings
Mini-lectures/presentations
Developer hacking meetups
Show & tell of how group members are using WordPress
Formal instruction on how to use WordPress
Lecture series (possibly with visiting speakers)
Genius bar/help desk

There’s no prescribed format, as each local group can decide for itself what they want to do. Some groups mix it up from month to month, while others have multiple events each month to satisfy the needs of their community.

The tough part? Running a popular group takes time and money. Just as we worked last year to remove the financial burden for WordCamp organizers and provide logistical support so they could focus more on their event content and experience, we want to start extending that kind of support to meetup groups as well. We don’t want it to cost anything for someone to run a WordPress meetup, or to attend one — building local communities should be as free as WordPress itself!

Since there are so many more meetups than there are WordCamps, we’re going to start with the cost that is the same for every group: meetup.com organizer dues. We’re setting up an official WordPress account on Meetup.com right now, and over the next couple of weeks will be working with existing meetup group organizers, people who want to start a new meetup group, and the helpful folks at Meetup.com to put this program in place. WordPress meetup groups that choose to have their group become part of the WordPress account will no longer pay organizer dues for that group, as the WordPress Foundation will be footing the bill.

This is exciting for several reasons. First, it means local organizers who are giving something back to the project by way of their time won’t also have shell out $12-19/month for the privilege. That alone is a big step. Second, it will open the door to more events and leaders within a community, since leadership and event planning won’t need to be tied to “owning” the meetup group. Third, more active meetup groups means more WordCamps, yay!

In addition to the financial aspects, we’ll be working on ways to improve social recognition of meetup activity by incorporating feeds from the official meetup groups into the WordPress.org site, and including meetup group participation in the activity stream on your WordPress.org profile.² I’m also hoping we can do something around providing video equipment to meetup groups (like we already do for WordCamps) to record presentations and tutorials that can be posted to WordPress.tv, helping meetup groups offer WordPress classes in their community, and getting involved with mentoring WordPress clubs at local schools and universities. Oh, and we’ll send out some WordPress buttons and stickers to the groups that join in, because everyone loves buttons and stickers.

We’re also putting together some cool resources for people who want to start a new meetup group. There will be a field guide to getting started and some supplies to help you get your group going, and a forum for organizers to talk to and learn from each other.

Over time, we’ll be talking to organizers and looking at what other expenses we can absorb and what other support we can provide to local groups. For now, we’re starting with the organizer dues. If you currently run a WordPress meetup group (whether you are using Meetup.com or not) or would like to start a WordPress meetup group in your area, please fill out our WordPress Meetup Groups survey. Filling in the survey doesn’t obligate you to join the official group, it just gives us a starting point to a) find out what groups are around/interested, and b) get some information on existing groups and their expenses and needs. Meetup.com will contact the group organizers who’ve said they’d like to join the new program, and will walk them through the logistics of the change and answer questions before helping them to opt-in officially.

So, if you currently run a WordPress meetup group, or you would like to start one, please fill out our WordPress Meetup Groups survey. I can’t wait to see more meetups!

1 – Adapted from “meetup” definition at dictionary.com.
2 – Didn’t know about profiles? Check out http://profiles.wordpress.org/users/yourwordpressdotorgusernamehere (put in the username you use in the WordPress.org forums) to see yours!

Weblog Tools Collection: PressTrends Releases Plugin for WordPress Blogs

James — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:00:32 +0000

PressTrends has released a rather fascinating plugin for WordPress blogs. The plugin will allow you to measure various metrics for your posts, comments, and plugin usage, and compare these to averages across the entire PressTrends community.

The feature list may be just a bit basic now, but there are more features on the way, the design is very clean-cut, and if you’re interested to see how you’re doing versus “the status quo,” this is definitely the way to do it.

If you’re a theme designer, you might also be interested in their core product, which provides metrics for theme usage.

WordPress.tv: Christopher Ross: Make a Living by Giving it Away for Free

wctoronto — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:00:04 +0000

WordPress.tv: Trevor Mills: Building Mobile Apps with WordPress

wctoronto — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:00:08 +0000

WordPress.tv: Ron & Andrea Rennick: WordPress Multisite

wctoronto — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:00:15 +0000

WPTavern: Interview With ManageWP Owner Vladimir Prelovac

Jeffro — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:00:25 +0000

ManageWP is a new service that aims to make managing multiple websites as easy as possible. They’ve recently opened their doors to the public and Vladimir Prelovac was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule to answer a few questions I had. Enjoy!

Is ManageWP a webhosting company or simply a means of managing websites that are hosted elsewhere?

We are not a webhosting company, as ManageWP provides an efficient way to manage any number of websites that are hosted on your own servers, but we do offer something new and unique to the WordPress community: one dashboard for all their websites no matter where they are hosted. This ensures that our users maintain total control over their websites while also ensuring that they can continue to expand, without restriction, far into the future.

ManageWP Dashboard After I Added The WPTavern Website

What was the idea or inspiration behind creating ManageWP?

As with all plugins I have developed, ManageWP was created out of the pure need to solve a problem. The problem here was having to do repetitive tasks — like updating and maintaining your sites (something computers and Internet services are supposed to be good at).

As you surely know, managing numerous WordPress sites can be somewhat time consuming. Add several WordPress sites into the mix, and you quickly become a slave to your CMS. I wanted to simplify the process, so that was when ManageWP became reality.

What are some of the things going on behind the scenes to make ManageWP function like a well oiled machine?

It requires a tremendous amount of effort by all of our team members. That’s the first thing that springs to mind. It’s not easy to create and maintain a service this complex, one which also remains in sync with the WordPress development cycle, all while having it work with thousands of different WordPress setups and with thousands of different server/hosting configurations.

It’s not an easy job. But we also have no intention of stopping anytime soon!

Options To Schedule A Backup For A Particular Site

What are some of the benefits of using ManageWP versus using WordPress Multisite?

The most notable benefit is ManageWP’s ease of us. While being a good idea on paper, WordPress Multisite demands a certain level of technical knowledge to install, manage, and maintain. It also takes time, time which many people find valuable. And while Multisite might be good enough for some people, we always want to offer our users so much more value and time-saving functionality.

And we differentiate ourselves by providing many awesome features:

you can set up and monitor fully automated backups for all of your websites from one location, along with being able to specify exactly where you want those backups stored;
you can use ManageWP to monitor your website’s up-time;
you can use ManageWP to monitor crucial SEO performance metrics;
you can take advantage of incredible third-party services like Google Analytics and DropBox;
you can change passwords for your admin user on all of your WordPress sites from within ManageWP;
and the list goes on and on.

As for the similarities between ManageWP and WordPress Multisite — it ends with the ability to update plugins. ManageWP goes far beyond that. However, if you’re already setup with WordPress Multisite, that’s no problem. ManageWP fully integrates with that too!

What types of security practices have been put into place to protect customers?

We know that the success of our business depends a lot on security; this has been our focus since day one. To ensure that our user’s data is secure, we dropped the built-in XML RPC protocol — it’s inherently insecure to work with as it exposes sensitive data. We replaced it with OpenSSL encryption. Because of this, the transmission of your data remains completely secure.

We also never ask users to enter their admin passwords for any websites they are managing with us. We do not have access to your site’s credentials and other crucial information. Our technology is innovative in that it allows ManageWP to talk directly to your WordPress sites through our ManageWP Worker plugin. So by utilizing WordPress’ built-in plugin architecture, we are able to do amazing things to help you manage all of your sites.

As for protecting your ManageWP account, we utilize multiple layers of protection: restricting the login by IP address and two-factor authentication (wherein a security code is sent to user’s email or phone via SMS). This is far beyond industry standards, and it’s only a handful of the things we do to ensure that our users’ sites are safe.

We take great pride in this.

All Sorts Of Cool Things You Can Do From One Location

Are there any differences between the self-hosted product of ManageWP and the ManageWP website?

The Enterprise (self-hosted) version of ManageWP is essentially the same as our hosted version. But we offer this to companies and organizations that want all of the benefits of ManageWP in the privacy of their own hosting environment. For example, this can be (and usually is) important for data compliance within larger organizations.

Our Enterprise users also enjoy our full attention and dedicated support. We often work with our Enterprise customers to provide them with the special features that they need. We always make the extra effort to ensure that our customers’ needs are served.

How has your experience in developing plugins and working with sites such as Mashable contribute to what you’ve accomplished with ManageWP?

I started making WordPress plugins almost five years ago, so getting to know WordPress inside-out helped me tremendously in understanding the needs of the average WordPress user — if such user exists at all, as there are so many uses for WordPress today. After that, it was then only a matter of coordinating with our team to develop a high-quality solution that works on almost any number of different WordPress setups.

And now that we have launched ManageWP, I can direct my focus my attention on improving it further and adding new and amazing functionality. That makes me very happy. I hope it will continue to make our incredible customers happy as well.

WordPress.tv: Mark Reale & Khori Armstrong: Using WordPress to Build Interactive Games

wctoronto — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:00:52 +0000

WPTavern: Honey Badger Doesn’t Care About Anything

Jeffro — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:00:42 +0000

Apparently, this site has been around for a little while but I’ve just now seen it being shared across WordPress folks on Twitter. It’s the WordPress Honey Badger who has a bad attitude and does things the way it wants to do them which is not always the right way. I’ve been reading some of the recent posts and honey badger is a pretty funny animal. Crude language aside, there is some educational value in the website in that you shouldn’t accomplish tasks the same way Honey Badger does. For example, Honey Badger edits the core files to get things done which is not necessarily the best way to get things accomplished. I personally like Honey Badgers stance on the Capital P filter.

No related posts.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/26

James — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:00:34 +0000

New plugins

Site Background Slider uses fullscreen images (read from a specified folder) to create a slideshow inside your background area.

Updated plugins

FoxyPress is a custom plugin made to integrate FoxyCart e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website.

Slick Social Share Buttons allows you to add Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Digg, Google Buzz, Linkedin, and Stumbledupon social media buttons in a floating or slide out tab.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

WordPress.tv: Ruth Maude: SEO for WordPress

wctoronto — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:26 +0000

WordPress.tv: Brendan Sera-Shriar: PressWork – Designing in a Live Preview Environment

wctoronto — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:00:13 +0000

Gravatar: Growth, Performance, and Pretty URLs

Barry — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:55:51 +0000

It’s been a while since we have posted about the current scale of Gravatar. Since that post in 2008, things have changed quite a bit. We are now serving over 100,000 requests per second. That is over 8.6 billion requests per day – more than the number of people currently alive.

With the help of our partners, Edgecast and Dyn, Gravatar is faster than ever. Distributing content across the world allows the majority of requests to complete in under 100 milliseconds – that is 4 times faster than the blink of an eye! No wonder more people are using Gravatar every day.

In 2007, we replaced the (ugly) image URL /avatar.php?gravatar_id=HASH with the (pretty) URL /avatar/HASH. As firm believers in backwards compatibility, we continue to support both URL formats. In order to ensure the freshest content is served to all users, we now redirect the old URLs to the new ones. We suggest that if you are still using the old avatar.php?gravatar_id=HASH style URLs that you switch to the new style – it will be prettier and faster for your users. If you have any questions about this change, please refer to our documentation.

Since Gravatar support has been added to WordPress, there are millions of WordPress sites using Gravatar every day. But did you know these other sites also use Gravatar?

github

Stack Overflow

Trello

SendGrid

Gnome Extensions

American Idol

Battlefield 3 Battlelog

99 designs

Zendesk

Digital Photography Review

ZDNet

TENNIS.com

Want to learn how to integrate Gravatar with your website? Check out our implemetation documentation.

WordPress.tv: Liesl Barrell: PM101 – Project Management for Small Business

wctoronto — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:00:41 +0000

WPTavern: Jeff Starr On Smarter Slugs In WordPress

Jeffro — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:00:03 +0000

One of the refinements that was part of WordPress 3.3 is that posts that have certain characters within the post title are ignored thus, creating a cleaner permalink. Jeff Starr of Digging Into WordPress explains in better detail on what actually happens when you use those characters within the post title but further into the post, he also brings up the fact that WordPress can automatically detect duplicate post titles within the database and append a dash with a number to the end of the post title. However, as Dave Clements mentions in the comments, this could possibly lead to broken links:

I read something that’s a little concerning in your post. Let’s assume that I create test-post and then create test-post-2. I publish them both and then trash test-post. Are you saying that test-post-2 will automatically become test-post, potentially screwing up any links that have been published with the original permalink of test-post-2? Just wondering what impact this has.

Perhaps Otto could shed some light as to what happens regarding this scenario. Jeff Starr will be looking into it and will be reporting back his findings.

Ask Jeff: Is The Submit A Post Link A Plugin?

WordPress.tv: Mo Jangda: Managing Your Editorial Workflow

wctoronto — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:00:05 +0000

WPTavern: Status Update On WordPress Weekly

Jeffro — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:54 +0000

It’s been a long time since I published any episodes of WordPress Weekly and it’s not without good reason. I am still in the middle of transitioning from one dwelling to another and this is the primary reason why I haven’t been able to produce an episode. During the past few months, I’ve not been able to spend as much time behind the PC as I’d like which also explains why I’ve been publishing more short form content versus long form. I’d like to explain everything I’ve personally been through during 2011 and now going into 2012 but it would take up a novels worth of space. Lets just say that in 2011, we had to purchase a new roof for our home, new vinyl soffits, other home improvements and some of them were forced on us thanks to the appraiser who told us some items needed to be repaired or renewed before he would approve of the home in order for us to transfer the mortgage.

Putting all that personal stuff aside, I’ve been making strides and within the next 2-3 months, I expect to be moved into a new home as well as have my new office put together. Once this happens, I’ll be able to concentrate on producing the show on a weekly basis again. Regarding the show, I’ve decided not to produce it live on a weekly basis. Instead, the majority of episodes will be pre-recorded via Skype which is not only a benefit in terms of audio quality, but makes it much more convenient for both myself and the people I’ll be interviewing. There are plenty of people that I want to talk to throughout the course of the year and I look forward to being able to engage in spirited conversations with the people that are doing great things with WordPress.

Weblog Tools Collection: Celebrate Matt Mullenweg’s Birthday by Donating Water

James — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:03 +0000

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, turned 28 two weeks ago. It’s been a busy year for Matt. Three major WordPress versions were released, he switched back to using a Mac after 8 years on Windows, and he travelled 190,000 miles over 245 days.

Even though two weeks have gone by, it’s not too late to say “happy birthday” to Matt. In fact, he would prefer to receive all of his birthday gifts this year in the form of donations to Charity: Water through his birthday campaign. Matt has set an ambitious goal to reach $28,000 in donations by April, but if that goal is reached, his “birthday presents” will have provided clean water for 280 families in developing countries. Not everyone can head to the nearest faucet for a clean glass of water, so say “happy birthday” to Matt and help someone else enjoy some clean water today!