WordPress Planet

Lloyd: Commercial WordPress Themes’s PHP Code is GPL 2 Too

Lloyd — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:28:16 +0000

I’m hoping that my boss Matt Mullenweg sharing the legal opinion on “Themes are GPL, too” will put the issue to rest for the majority of the community (emphasis mime):

“PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
…
Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or JavaScript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.”

The legal opinion was provided by Software Freedom Law Center. Council James Vasile provided the findings and blogs at hackervisions.org . James also has posted about this on his own blog in the article “CMS Themes and the GPL“. As I commented there, my fear is:

“people read what they want to get out of it, and case law is the only thing that moves them.”

The legal finding and unchanged policy are consistent with the intentions of the WordPress developer community and what has been promoted for the four years I’ve been involved.

Talking about licensing really is the suck. Matt’s article became necessary lately as some commercial theme developers have been very aggressive to WordPress community members, who have shared theme code as allowed by WordPress’s viral GPL v2 license.

It frustrates me when I read commercial theme developers complaining about people “stealing” their themes after the thousands of hours they have worked. They make no mention of the hundreds of thousands of hours others have worked on WordPress (counting on the GPL protecting their freedoms ).

The incredibly exciting news is seeing the various commercially developed and supported themes embrace the GPL in the last 9 months. Theme collections like ThemeShaper (Thematic FrameWork), StudioPress (previously Revolution 2), and WooThemes are all 100% GPL — those are just the ones I’m familar with, be sure to check out the theme offerings of the other commercially supported GPL themes.

Weblog Tools Collection: Best Method To Post Content To WordPress

Keith Dsouza — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:01:50 +0000

We conducted a small poll recently, where we asked WordPress users the method they use to post content to their blogs. The poll is now closed and here are the results of the poll.

And the winner and best way to post content to your blog is the WordPress Dashboard Write Panel, coming in a distant 2nd is desktop applications like Windows Live Writer.

So why do people prefer using the write panel? There could be several reasons for this, the most important one I can think of is that, when writing posts using the write panel users have access to the features plugins provide them with.

Another reason I think is not many users may be aware of the availability of desktop applications for blogging. Also many people may really feel comfortable blogging using the write panel too.

On the other hand desktop applications like WLW do provide users with a familiar interface and the flexibility to blog from their desktops.

What are your views on this poll results? Do let me know.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Best Method To Post Content To WordPress

Weblog Tools Collection: bbPress 1.0 Bechet Released

Mark Ghosh — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:07:02 +0000

bbPress 1.0 final, finally released: For those of us that are also fans and users of bbPress, bbPress version 1.0 is finally released. Many improvements over the 0.9 versions include cookie integration with WordPress, various fixes, JQuery integration, a complete XML-RPC API, new admin interface, new icons, improved spam management and much more. Backup files and database and disable all plugins prior to upgrade but our test upgrade went amazingly well and everything continued to work post upgrade.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

bbPress 1.0 Bechet Released

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/03

Perurry — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:06:05 +0000

New Plugins

External Files

External Files provides a shortcode [external] that wraps around a file path or url. The contents of the file/url are imported and outputted in an xhtml-friendly way. What’s more, the plugin auto-guesses the syntax of the file (by looking at the extension of the path or the content-type of the url).

RSS Shortcode

Allows you to embed an RSS feed in your blog post by using WordPress shortcodes.

BuddyPress Contents

BuddyPress content aggregation and organization.

Real-Time Find and Replace

Set up find and replace rules that are executed AFTER a page is generated by WordPress, but BEFORE it is sent to a user’s browser.

Supr by StumbleUpon

Su.pr is the only URL shortener that gets you more traffic and save time posting to Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.

Updated Plugins

Shorten2Ping

Sends status updates to Ping.fm or Twitter everytime you publish a post. Using Bit.ly or Tr.im for the permalinks (accounts on these services required). So this way you can send status to many sites at once if you have a Ping.fm account.

Meebo Me

meebo me lets you chat with your site visitors using your Meebo account. Visitors on your blog can hit a simple button and chat with you when you are logged into meebo. This is an easy and free way to interact with your visitors.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support. Plugin can be integrated with comments for making a review website.

WordPress Console

An interactive console for WordPress developers

Flickr + Highslide

This plugin displays flickr photos using highslide.

Easy AdSense

Easy AdSense manages all aspects of Google AdSense for your blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Plugin Releases for 07/03

bbPress: bbPress 1.0 final, finally released

Sam Bauers — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:40:23 +0000

That’s right, bbPress 1.0 finally hits the tubes!

After many months in alpha, ~~beta~~ and release candidate status, bbPress 1.0 final is now available for download.

Thanks to the many testers who contributed so much important feedback during the pre-release period, going way back to 1.0 alpha 1.

This release offers many usability improvements, based on making bbPress more approachable for adopters who are accustomed to WordPress. To that end bbPress 1.0 now has a similar administration interface to WordPress and uses similar descriptions and names where appropriate. bbPress also behaves more like WordPress when it comes to things like automatically generating your .htaccess file when setting up permalinks.

Here are a few of the improvements over the 0.9 series:

“Voices” count on topics reports the number of individuals participating in a conversation
Native support for cookie integration (single sign-on) with Wordpress 2.7 and 2.8
Optional support for memcached object caching
Time-zone and Daylight Savings time support
A complete XML-RPC publishing API
Pingback support – each topic can receive pingbacks, just like a blog post
All javascript has been moved to jQuery
Optionally allow login via email address as well as username
New meta API allows arbitrary meta data to be stored for posts, topics, forums, options, tags or even meta (that’s right, meta-meta – first legitimate use wins a prize)!
Display names used primarily for user identification display, which allows special characters to be used
Themes can now have a “functions.php” file, which is automatically loaded
Accessibility improvements on forms and in the default theme, including WAI-ARIA roles
Major overhaul of the admin interface
Optional Akismet statistics page
Cute new icons from Ben Dunkle (pictured above)
Improved use of posts admin to manage spam
Prettier Kakumei (default) theme
Hello Louie! Plugin

If you are upgrading from any earlier release to 1.0 then you absolutely should backup all you files and database before doing so. You also may need to make minor adjustments to your templates. Before upgrading, disable all plugins.

Dedication

bbPress 1.0 is named “Bechet” (pronounced beh-shay) after the pioneering jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet.

Akismet: New Akismet revision available for testing

Alex — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:46:18 +0000

Those who like to live on the bleeding edge might like to download and test the latest revision of the Akismet WordPress plugin from Subversion:

http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk

If you don’t know what Subversion is or how to use it, I’d suggest waiting for the next official Akismet release, which won’t be far away.

The new revision includes a new diagnostic feature on the Akismet Configuration tab that’s intended to address a problem with some web hosts.

We’ve known for a while that some web hosts and servers have firewall rules that block outgoing connections — including connections to the akismet.com API servers, which are necessary for the Akismet plugin to work. Usually the host administrators will add some firewall rules to permit the Akismet plugin to connect to akismet.com. But recently we’ve discovered that some hosts have created incomplete firewall rules, with the result that some Akismet connections succeed, but some fail. This caused Akismet to seem like it was working, when in fact only some spam was checked, and only some reports ever made it back to Akismet.com.

The problem is caused by the host’s firewall rules – it’s not something that Akismet can fix. We can detect the problem, however, which is exactly what the new revision does.

The new feature adds a Server Connectivity section to the Akismet Configuration tab. The new section will check for any problems connecting to any Akismet servers, including the partial firewall problem, and recommend a course of action if there is an issue.

There’s more code in the new revision than we would typically add in an Akismet update, so testing and feedback are welcome.

Some technical details for those who are interested:

Akismet uses round-robin DNS and load balancers to distribute the work of checking comments for spam across multiple servers. A DNS lookup of rest.akismet.com (the domain used for Akismet API calls) returns not one but several IP addresses, corresponding to the multiple servers. When your blog uses Akismet to check a comment, it will (more or less) randomly choose an Akismet server IP to use. Each time it checks a new comment, it might use a different Akismet server IP.

If a web host blocks all connections to all Akismet server IPs, the Akismet plugin can easily detect the problem and report an error. The plugin has always included a connectivity check as part of its configuration process, that will warn the user if Akismet servers are unreachable.

If a web host allows connections to some Akismet server IPs, but blocks connections to the others, the connectivity check might succeed (if it happens to connect to one of the allowed IPs), while some subsequent connections will fail (when they try to connect to one of the blocked IPs). Result: the plugin appears to be working fine, but in fact only some API calls are working. Users often won’t notice anything wrong, because some spam is caught.

The new revision expands the connectivity check to include all known Akismet servers. It displays a status message or warning to the user if some servers are unreachable. It also stores a list of server IPs and their status, with a 24 hour expiry. That list of IPs is used when checking and reporting spam, to ensure that only servers that are known to be reachable are used. The list will be refreshed after 24 hours so as to adapt to any changes in availability – such as when a web host changes their firewall and blocks or unblocks an Akismet server. (Which is something that a few hosts have been known to do without warning, unfortunately).

WordPress.tv: Micah Baldwin: Measuring Online Influence – WordCamp Denver 2009

Michael Pick — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:02:59 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: How Do You Post Content To Your Blog?

Keith Dsouza — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:50:27 +0000

WordPress provides users with various ways to post content to their blogs, the best part is that it does not limit users to write their views.

However we all use different methods to post content to our blog and it would be interesting to know which is the most used way to post content to a WordPress blog.

Here is a short poll, please choose the method you use frequently to post content to your blog, you can select more than one options, also don’t forget to tell us why you use a certain method to post content to your blog.

This poll requires JavaScript, please visit the website to vote

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

How Do You Post Content To Your Blog?

WordPress.tv: Matt Mullenweg – Improving Performance in Mature Web Apps

Michael Pick — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:32:23 +0000

BuddyPress: Installing BuddyPress Locally on a Mac

Andy Peatling — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:00:49 +0000

I’ve recently noticed some posts on the BuddyPress forums where people are having problems getting WordPress MU and BuddyPress running locally on their machine.

I spent some time today to put together a twenty minute video that will show you how to set up and run WordPress MU and BuddyPress locally on a Mac. There is a tool you can use that will make this very easy called MAMP. For those of you running Windows, there is a similar tool called WAMP that will basically do the same thing.

I also make use of Textmate in this screen cast to edit the hosts file, if you don’t use it you can simply open the Finder, use the “Go” menu, and then the “Go to folder” option. Enter /etc/ as the folder and then scroll to the “hosts” file and use the editor of your choice. If you are familiar with the terminal you can also use your command line editor of choice.

I highly recommend you turn on the HD option for this video and make it full screen, that way you’ll easily be able to read and follow along.

BuddyPress: “Cooking With BuddyPress” Video Presentation

Andy Peatling — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:58:59 +0000

This year at WordCamp San Francisco I gave a presentation on BuddyPress entitled “Cooking WIth BuddyPress”. The idea was to answer three questions:

What is BuddyPress?
Why should I use BuddyPress?
How do I skin and extend BuddyPress?

The presentation was aimed at both non-technical and technical people and should provide you with a better understanding of what the project is, and it’s potential.

Matt: Live Web

Matt — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:08:04 +0000

Live Web, Real Time . . . Call It What You Will, It’s Gonna Take A While To Get It. Excellent article by Mary Hodder.

Matt: Velocity and the Bottom Line

Matt — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:40:57 +0000

Velocity and the Bottom Line. How performance touches everything on the web, and includes a quote from me about the importance if of speed to the user experience. You can check out my whole presentation, the Moral Philosophy of Performance, on Blip.

Dougal Campbell: WordPress theme licensing

Dougal — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:00:27 +0000

There is finally an official answer to the question of whether or not WordPress themes must “inherit” the GPL license that WordPress itself uses. Matt asked the Software Freedom Law Center to examine the WordPress source and how themes fit in. The final, official answer to whether themes must be GPL? Yes and no.

As many people have theorized before (myself included), the PHP files in a theme fall under GPL because they are reliant on the main WP codebase in order to function. The CSS, images, and javascript, however, are separate works which can stand on their own in other contexts, and therefore can be licensed however their creator wishes.

The Theme Repository at WordPress.org will only host themes that are fully compliant with the GPL. But they do now now have a directory of other sites which provide “commercially supported GPL themes“. I expect that the combination of the license clarification and the commercial directory listings will stir a lot of new buzz in the WordPress theming communities.

I imagine we’ll start seeing a lot of “free, basic” themes, with “premium” child themes that add fancier styling and javascript features [note: no "child theme" page in the Codex? Really?]. Another business model that commercial theme developers might consider trying is the “hostage-ware” model. This is where you only release the product after you receive $X in “donations” (see Kickstarter for an example of a service built on this idea, in a meta sort of way). However, I’m positive that we’ll also continue to see plenty of wonderful themes which are fully free (in both the “beer” and “speech” senses).

WordPress.tv: Jane Wells: Open Source Community – WordCamp Denver 2009

Michael Pick — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:42:16 +0000

WordPress.tv: Jon Fox on Commenting: WordCamp Denver 2009

Michael Pick — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:39:26 +0000

WordPress.tv: Ben Huh: I Can Has WordPress – WordCamp Denver 2009

Michael Pick — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:05:56 +0000

Dev Blog: Themes are GPL, too

Matt — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:50:35 +0000

If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to themes like we’ve always assumed. To help clarify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preeminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

Matt,

You asked the Software Freedom Law Center to clarify the status of themes as derivative works of WordPress, a content management software package written in PHP and licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

We examined release candidate 1 of WordPress 2.8, which you provided to us at http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8-RC1.tar.gz. The “classic” and “default” themes included in that release candidate comprise various PHP and CSS files along with an optional directory of images. The PHP files contain a mix of HTML markup and PHP calls to
WordPress functions. There is some programmatic logic in the PHP code, including loops and conditionals.

When WordPress is started, it executes various routines that prepare information for use by themes. In normal use, control is then transferred via PHP’s include() function to HTML and PHP templates found in theme package files. The PHP code in those template files relies on the earlier-prepared information to fill the templates for serving to the client.

On the basis of that version of WordPress, and considering those themes as if they had been added to WordPress by a third party, it is our opinion that the themes presented, and any that are substantially similar, contain elements that are derivative works of the WordPress software as well as elements that are potentially separate works. Specifically, the CSS files and material contained in the images directory of the “default” theme are works separate from the WordPress code. On the other hand, the PHP and HTML code that is intermingled with and operated on by PHP the code derives from the WordPress code.

In the WordPress themes, CSS files and images exist purely as data to be served by a web server. WordPress itself ignores these files[1]. The CSS and image files are simply read by the server as data and delivered verbatim to the user, avoiding the WordPress instance altogether. The CSS and images could easily be used with a range of HTML documents and read and displayed by a variety of software having no relation to WordPress. As such, these files are separate works from the WordPress code itself.

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

HTML elements are intermingled with PHP in the two themes presented. These snippets of HTML interspersed with PHP throughout the theme PHP files together form a work whose form is highly dependent on the PHP and thus derivative of it.

In conclusion, the WordPress themes supplied contain elements that are derivative of WordPress’s copyrighted code. These themes, being collections of distinct works (images, CSS files, PHP files), need not be GPL-licensed as a whole. Rather, the PHP files are subject to the requirements of the GPL while the images and CSS are not. Third-party developers of such themes may apply restrictive copyrights to these elements if they wish.

Finally, we note that it might be possible to design a valid WordPress theme that avoids the factors that subject it to WordPress’s copyright, but such a theme would have to forgo almost all the WordPress functionality that makes the software useful.

Sincerely,
James Vasile
Software Freedom Law Center

[1] There is one exception. WordPress does reads CSS and image files to create previews of templates for the template selection portion of the administrative interface. Even in that case, though, nothing in those files calls any WordPress functions, is treated as a command by PHP, or alters any other WordPress data structure. These files are read as data and used to create an image and display a miniaturized version of a webpage to the user.

Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.

Weblog Tools Collection: Official WordPress Commercial Theme Directory is live

Mark Ghosh — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:03:42 +0000

The Official WordPress Commercial Theme Directory is now open. It is linked off the WordPress Extend and is part of the parent theme directory set of links. It is not as much a directory as it is a listing of sites that offer commercial GPL themes. It lists the philosophies, a few words about the business models and the need for the encouragement, a list of screenshots and links to the various theme sites and then a list of criterion for inclusion into this site.

I like the succinct explanation of the purpose and the listing criterion seem simple and straightforward to follow. Send your information to themes at wordpress dot org to get included in the list. From the site, if you want to be included:

Distribute 100% GPL themes, including artwork and CSS.
Have professional support options, and optionally customization.
Your site should be complete, well-designed, up to date, and professional looking.
Include a haiku about yourself to be included.

I am not sure how long this list is going to get, but I am curious to see how this page evolves. I am also glad to see a larger number of GPL based Premium theme vendors on there than I was initially surmising. Cool!

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Official WordPress Commercial Theme Directory is live

Dougal Campbell: WordPress Themes Tutorial

Dougal — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:30:50 +0000

If you aren’t already following along, I highly recommend checking out the How To Create A WordPress Theme tutorial series by Ian Stewart (ThemeShaper.com). This 12-part series (8 complete at the time of this writing) aims to take you from nothing to a fully functional, semantically rich, flexible WordPress theme in digestible chunks. Along the way, Ian describes the changes being made, and why you are making them. In this way, you can gain a basic understanding of the roles of the various theme template files, and the code contained within them.

The lesson is broken down thusly:

Introduction
Theme Development Tools
Creating a Theme HTML Structure
Template and Directory Structure
The Header Template
The Index Template
The Single Post, Post Attachment, & 404 Templates
The Comments Template
The Search Template & The Page Template
The Archive, Author, Category & Tags Template
The Sidebar Template
Reset-Rebuild Theme CSS & Define Your Layouts

If you’ve ever thought about creating your own theme, but felt like the task was too big to tackle, this series of articles is for you. It’s a great bit of instruction that will introduce you to the core pieces of WordPress theming without overwhelming you or trying to cram too much into a single article.

Props, Ian!

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 07/01

Perurry — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:29:25 +0000

Magloss

Magloss is a magazine style WordPress theme packed with fully customized features. This 3 columns WordPress theme has integrated JonDesign’s SmoothGallery 2.0 for the rotating featured content. This theme also comes with an automatic thumbnail cropping feature for your front page posts. Besides the rotating featured content, this theme also enables you to use the category block feature to display recent posts for each category chosen. All these features are controllable inside the admin panel (Magloss Theme Option). Magloss is also comes ready with Twitter, Feedburner, 125×125 advertisement banners, adsense and featured videos. All you have to do is insert the appropriate html code within the theme option.

GreenTweet

Three column, widget ready theme with a big twitter icon, 125×125 ad support and page management for links in the top navigation.

Vina

Two column layout, widget ready, with features to auto-grab and resize images on the fly and compatible with WordPress 2.8

Omicron

Three column, gravatar ready, SEO friendly theme with custom 404 template. (page not in English)

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get listed here

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Theme Releases for 07/01

WP iPhone: Version 1.3 is Live

Raanan Bar-Cohen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:27:19 +0000

Version 1.3 is now live. This version addresses a few OS 3.0 compatibility issues that popped up. You can grab it now from the iTunes store.

Please note: Due to a strange glitch when submitting the app, the About page of the “1.3″ version will say version “1.21.1″. If you see that, you are running the correct version. We are working with Apple to understand why it would not accept “1.3″ as a valid version, yet displays that version in the iTunes store just fine.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 06/30

Perurry — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:02:58 +0000

New Plugins

AVH Themed By Browser

The AVH Themed By Browser plugin gives you the ability to set a correlation between browser and theme. The theme of your blog can change dynamically based on the browser the visitor is using.

Follow My Links

Follow My Links is a very simple plugin that prevents WordPress from automaticaly adding a “rel=nofollow” attribute to links in the post authors URL and comments.

YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter

This plugin is the bridge between YOURLS, Twitter and your blog: when you publish a post or a page, it will use your own YOURLS install, either hosted on the same webserver, or another server, to create a short URL for your post and send it to your Twitter account.

Sliding Panel

It is a panel that can be opened and closed with a click of a mouse that will allow you to house additional content on your site without it getting in the way.

Injection attack protector

Protects a list of web pages and files that are likely to be targeted by injection attack by restoring files from local backup whenever they are modified.

Single Post Template

Single Post Template gives you the ability to create and use “Post Templates” in much the same way you create and use “Page Templates” in WordPress.

GeoSmart

GeoSmart is a plugin for WordPress which allows you to determine where in the world the people who comment on your posts are located based on their IP addresses.

Updated Plugins

SEO Ultimate

This SEO plugin can rewrite title tags, noindex archives, edit meta data, and insert “link rel canonical” tags. Version 0.4 adds a 404 logger.

GD Press Tools

GD Press Tools is a collection of various administration, seo, maintenance and security related tools. This tools can be integrated into the various WordPress admin panels, can perform maintenance operations, change some aspects of WordPress, see detailed server settings and information.

Related Websites

Related Websites is a cloud based traffic exchange. Readers interested in additional reading are presented related posts from other blogs. Your posts are presented on other blogs when related. Balancing the exchange is traffic based.

Twitter Hash Tag Widget

A widget for displaying the most recent twitter status updates for a particular hash tag.

Transpose Email

Transpose Email plugin allows you to use JavaScript to create an encoded link. Clicking that link will trigger the user’s email client to open and create an email.

Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox is an online media viewing application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Plugin Releases for 06/30

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Configuration Tricks

Mark Ghosh — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:13:25 +0000

WordPress Configuration Tricks : If you have ever installed WordPress and wanted to know what else you could do with your wp-config.php file, this is the blog post to read. As Ozh points out in the comments, a couple of tricks were left out but nothing that could not be remedied with a simple Google search (e.g. WP_HTTP) as long as you know what you are looking for.

Tips from that page that got me thinking (things that make you go hmmmmm?) include moving your wp-content directory, increasing your memory limit, changing the autosave interval, turning on debugging and finally the ability to specify a log file for errors. All of this through the wondrous wp-config.php file. The list is quite exhaustive.

While you are there, make sure you subscribe to the blog. Chris and Jeff are putting out some good stuff!

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Configuration Tricks

Weblog Tools Collection: Benchmarking the WordPress Admin Panel

Mark Ghosh — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:48:27 +0000

Dev4Press has done some interesting work on benchmarking various aspects of WordPress and then testing out some popular questions on page loads etc. The methodologies are well documented and the benchmarking setup is standardized. They are testing three version of WordPress including 2.6.5, 2.7.1 and 2.8 (I wish they would have waited for 2.8.1 to be released). This first set of tests were performed on the WordPress admin interface and other benchmarks will follow. While the quantities are not as important, I think the trends are interesting. Though not independently confirmed, the growing girth of the admin interface is obvious. In contrast, my test WordPress 2.8.1 blog has shown marked improvements in load times and memory usage as compared to WordPress 2.8. It will be interesting to see how the load and memory usage trends of the WordPress admin interface change with future versions as the WordPress team turns their attention towards optimizing the admin panel under the hood. (as Matt has said in many of his State of the Word addresses) via @weblogtooltips

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Benchmarking the WordPress Admin Panel

Matt: Real-time Systems Knowledge

Matt — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:24:11 +0000

Scoble: Real-time systems hurting long-term knowledge?

WordPress.tv: Upgrade WordPress 2.7 to 2.8 in CPanel

Michael Pick — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:17:02 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 06/28

Perurry — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:28:53 +0000

Hanging

In Greens and Browns this theme has a healthy balance of color with the main content area a very clear two column layout with a light background.

Vina

Vina is unique layout and auto grabbed image, multi widget, threaded comment and many more

Freshmade Software

A software company styled theme in light colors of white, orange and brown. Supporting widgets and nested comments.

FancyPress

2 columns, fixed width, widget ready theme

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Theme Releases for 06/28

Weblog Tools Collection: Live Stream and Chat from WordCamp Dallas

Mark Ghosh — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:28:34 +0000

Live Streaming video from WordCamp Dallas thanks to Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.tv. Thanks to WPTavern for the link.

I was at WordCamp Dallas last year but could not make it to this one. I am jealous!

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Live Stream and Chat from WordCamp Dallas

WordPress.tv: Timothy Ferriss: Blogging Without Killing Yourself – WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Michael Pick — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:45:08 +0000

WP iPhone: OS 3.0 Version Still “In Review”

Raanan Bar-Cohen — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:30 +0000

From the “no news” category of news, we have no update unfortunately since last week when the new OS 3.0 compatible version was uploaded. It’s currently listed as “In Review” on the iTunes Connect screen.

Our outstanding is that Apple is fairly backed up with the avalanche of updates and hopefully will be caught up soon.

In the meantime you may want to fire-up your iPhone simulator and check out some of the new UI treatments that are showing up in SVN trunk which will be part of the next release.

As always, we’ll post here as soon as it’s live.

Dev Blog: WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 2

Ryan Boren — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:06:31 +0000

2.8.1 Beta 2 is ready for testing. Download it, check out the changes since beta 1, and review all tickets fixed in 2.8.1. We especially suggest, recommend, and beg that plugin developers test their plugins against beta 2 and let us know of any issues. Notable fixes in beta 2:

Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload

Thanks again for testing WordPress.

Lloyd: A 20-minute Snooze in the Office

Lloyd — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:28:04 +0000

Taking a Matt Nap

In “The Way I Work, annotated” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares additional insights and linkifies his Inc. Magazine’s “The Way I Work” column (July issue). Both versions are excellent reads, but the post at ma.tt benefits from Matt answering a lot of additional questions in the comments.

Here is an excerpt from the article that inspired me to share this photo (emphasis mine):

“I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours — folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.”

BuddyPress: BuddyPress 1.0.2

Andy Peatling — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:13:12 +0000

BuddyPress 1.0.2 is out now.

As with previous upgrades, the best way to get the latest is through the plugin browser in your WordPress installation (de-activate BuddyPress before auto-upgrading).

If you are using a language file with your installation you will need to re-download this after your upgrade. From version 1.1 onwards, we’ll bundle as many language files as possible to make the upgrade process smoother for non-english installations.

If you would like to upgrade manually you can download the latest then simply overwrite your existing plugin files (and themes if you are using the defaults). Please make sure you backup everything first.

This is not a critical upgrade, so it is not essential that you install this update. It does however fix a number of bugs that will improve your BuddyPress experience. For a full list of fixes, please see the updated release history.

Update: Please make sure you de-activate any 3rd party BuddyPress plugins before deactivating BuddyPress and running the auto-update.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases on 06/24

Perurry — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:47:40 +0000

News Plugins

External Files

WordPress Console

It provides an in-browser interactive console for the WordPress environment.

SEO Blogger

Whether you blog about business, politics or the hot topic of the moment, SEO Blogger allows you to find the most sought-after keywords for your subject without ever leaving your blog editing screen.

SearchTerms Tagging 2

The function of this plugin is to displays some of the last unique keywords (default is 30, adjustable from plugin admin page) that visitors used to find the blog post from search engine. Each keyword will be changed into a link to that page. The goal is to get more traffic to the blog post by adding related search terms below the blog post.

Clickcha

Clickcha is a unique CAPTCHA system that more secure than traditional text based CAPTCHAs yet easier to use. Clickcha will replace the Wordpress post comment button with an image based CAPTCHA that requires a single click to solve and post the comment.

WP Theme Showcase

WP Theme Showcase ext and i18n (Showcase ext for short) displays uploaded themes with information extracted from the style.css of each theme as well as links to readme files. Showcase ext supports internationalization, CSS-styling, and is highly configurable with user-defined screenshots etc.

Amazon Niche Store

Allows you to automatically display Amazon products on your blog. You just add a simple tag to a post or page, along with your Amazon Tracking ID, and the relevant keywords for the products to be displayed.

Updated Plugins

WP-Simpleviewer

WP-Simpleviewer enables you to easily add SimpleViewer Flash galleries to your posts and pages. The admin interface helps you to create the thumbs for a new gallery and change its settings, it is now compatible with WP 2.8.

GD Star Rating

WP SimpleMail

WP SimpleMail allows you to access your email directly from wordpress.

Possibly Related Recent Posts

Automatically displays possibly related posts at the end of each post using a filter on the_content. List generated on the fly by recency and the categories the current post is in. Does NOT use tags.

ImageShack Offloader

Saves you bandwidth by offloading your images to ImageShack.

Store Locator

Store locator plugin for WordPress web developers & web site owners who need to show any set of important locations on a website. Locations are easily searchable. Uses Google Maps.

GD Simple Widgets

This plugin contains several widgets with simple functionality. Some of them are based on standard WordPress widgets but with extended options and rendering. You can also disable default WordPress widgets if you choose to use Simple Widgets versions.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Plugin Releases on 06/24

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress 2.8 Crosses 1 Million Downloads

Keith Dsouza — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:03:17 +0000

WordPress 2.8 just crossed the 1 million download mark today, you can see the live counter for WordPress downloads on the download counter page.

This is definitely great news since this milestone was reached in 12 days, have you upgraded to WordPress 2.8 yet?

Here is a screenshot when WordPress 2.8 hit the 1 million download mark, thanks to @scoutdude.

Thanks @photomatt via twitter. Follow us @weblogtooltips.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress 2.8 Crosses 1 Million Downloads

Lloyd: WordPress.com’s Job System – Cron for PHP in Distributed Environment

Lloyd — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:21:23 +0000

Colleague Demitrious Kelly (meech, Apokalyptik) earlier this month open sourced the (Unix process) jobs system he (primarily) has been developing for WordPress.com. Not that I really understand it, but “jobs” is described as

A fast, distributed, horizontally scalable system built upon linux, php5.2, and mysql 5.1 wherein work can be stored in a database, and processed outside the flow of script execution. Examples of common things that are part of script execution but not necessary to the rendering of the response to the user might be spam scanning, statistical analysis, email notification sending, processing input data, etc. Also included is an equally distributed cron mechanism to remove single servers as a point of failure for scheduled jobs.

There are a lot of terms I like in there like fast, distributed, horizontally scalable, scheduled. It could probably benefit from robust and fault tolerant. Any others?

Anyway, this crontab-like system for PHP scripts is an essential part of our WordPress.com infrastructure, and I’m really excited to see it open sourced!

Check out code.trac.wordpress.org for other pieces of our puzzle that don’t have pretty project pages.

Lloyd: New Project to Find Movable Type Community’s Melody

Lloyd — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:56:57 +0000

Interesting development today in the blog publishing space with the announcement of Melody and the Open Melody Software Group.

Melody is a new WordPress competitor — bring it!

Based on Movable Type Open Source (MTOS), Byrne Reese writes “[the project's] focus initially is consciously not about features, but rather upon laying the groundwork through a well-documented set of processes by which future features and contributions can be made.” to live up to it’s tag line “Community Powered Publishing”.

The tag line seems to directly take aim at Movable Type for not being community powered, though in interview Byrne suggests that may be part of the overhead of Movable Type being an enterprise product.

From my position looking over the fence, I’m sympathetic to how the Movable Type community has suffered since “in 2008 [when] the hyper dedicated Movable Type product manager, Byrne Reese, was laid off from Six Apart”. Sure, the MT community isn’t just that one person, but he sure was a catalyst and one of the only open channels to the inners of Six Apart. Since then there doesn’t seem to have been anyone there for the developer community, or for me, as a member of another project, to collaborate with. Even Byrne’s own recent email to the MTOS-dev list asking “Who is the lead engineer of MTOS?” went unanswered. Here is that email:

“I hate to ask such a seemingly odd question, but I have recently had questions I wanted to address to the lead engineer of MTOS — offlist, but am honestly not sure who that might be right now. Who is the best person to address questions about governance and process to? Is there one?”

Mark Carey writes today on mt-hacks.com:

“Over two years ago, Six Apart, the creator of Movable Type open sourced the code for the core Movable Type application. While its was an exciting and bold move, the announcement and product naming choices were confusing to many — the differences between Movable Type Open Source and the Movable Type Commercial product and closed source add-ons sold by Six Apart weren’t easy to grasp, and some even disputed the newly open source nature of core application.”

Although Six Apart promised that they would continue “fighting for openness” when they announced “Open Source Movable Type ” at the end of 2007, Melody is now the hope for a Movable Type-based openly developed product. The Open Melody FAQs includes:

“The community created Melody out a shared passion for Movable Type and a shared desire to see it flourish as a platform. We felt that the best and quickest way to achieve that goal was to create a product in which the community was inherently entrusted with a greater degree of control over its direction, communication channels and roadmap, and rewarded with more transparency and a greater sense of belonging.”

Serdar Yegulalp writes “To see a new way for the same framework to be improved, and to allow for feedback and suggestions that stem from my own use, is deeply heartening”

I’m very interested to see how the source code flows. The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge.

Wih founding members and leadership including the likes of Byrne, Tim Appnel, Jay Allen , and Jesse Gardner, Open Melody is off to an incredible start. ((By incorporating as a US non-profit there commitment is beyond doubt — if only in surviving the painful process that the WordPress Foundation has recently come out the other end of.)) The web site looks great, and they’ve chosen open and friendly development tools.

What is good for blogging and open source is good for WordPress, and Melody seems very good for both:

I’m eager to put my frustrations trying to collaborate with the often opaque Six Apart behind me, and collaborate through the Open Melody conduit.
I can’t wait to see a leaner, more modular open source MT based product emerges that is also more feature rich — further confirmation of WordPress’s own approaches, and more good open source products are great for open source.

If you love blogging or open source, then Melody needs our love, participate! (hence this post)

Weblog Tools Collection: What is going on with WordPress Plugin Competition 2009?

Mark Ghosh — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:42:54 +0000

Short answer? It is jumpin! Have you checked out the Plugin Competition Blog recently? There are six new plugins announced for the competition and all of them look fantastic. The comments have been very positive and visitors have been actively rating the entries as they come in. Here is what we have so far:

Tweetable: Another Twitter integration plugin for WordPress (we really need to consolidate these, but there is feature differentiation)
Live Blogging Plugin: Setup a live blog within minutes, needs Meteor
ImageShack Offloader: Move your image hosting to ImageShack
Max Image Size Control: Finer granular control of image sizes in WordPress
WP Devel: Add a whole bunch of debug options to your WordPress blog
WP Update Message: Tweak and refine the update messages in your WordPress admin panel

In addition to these plugins, I know of at least 10 others that are being developed for the competition and I am hoping for many more. A couple of links and stats of interest:

There is now a page for the Rules and Regulations for the WordPress Plugin Competition 2009
Sponsors and well wishers have donated almost $3000 as prize money for the competition. They include: WPMU/WPMUDEV, BuySellAds, White Shadow, WPWebHost and Ozh
Use the WLTC Community Plugin Groups page to post ideas for new plugins and offer to create new ones
Send us tips and ideas through Twitter @weblogtooltips
The Plugin Compeition Blog is checked by hundreds of visitors every day for new entries and to download the old ones

So if you are a plugin author and would like to get your name out or would like to win the prize purse for the best plugin, be sure to throw your hat into the competition and show us what you are made of. If you are a corporate sponsor and would like to help us reward the plugin development community, please drop us a line.

You don’t need to be shy. Come on in, the water is just fine.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

What is going on with WordPress Plugin Competition 2009?

WordPress.tv: Andy Peatling – Cooking With BuddyPress: WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Michael Pick — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:50:39 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection: FTC to go after blogger freebies and non disclosure

Mark Ghosh — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:51:36 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments, the Associated Press reported Sunday. “New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers–as well as the companies that compensate them–for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest,” the article explained. via Report: FTC to go after blogger freebies | Politics and Law - CNET News.

While I am not a big fan of government scrutiny and general “big brother” mentality, I do believe that this will add to the believability and authenticity of the blogging medium. We at Weblog Tools Collection try very hard to keep commercial interests completely out of the content that we generate and only rely on what we consider to be ethical ads to make ends meet. We also follow a strict full disclosure policy.

Bloggers who have regularly received freebies in the past and/or write reviews of products that they then received in lieu of the review (I was approached by a bean bag chair maker a couple of times, occasional reviewers need not care) might want to stay on top of this issue and practice full disclosure if you have not already done so. However in playing devil’s advocate, it would be very difficult to correctly identify the human behind the blogging persona without a criminal complaint and even then it might be in a legal grey area at the least (think DMCA). I am afraid that this level of scrutiny combined with general FUD might also dissuade some casual bloggers from posting reviews and reduce the general alacrity with which weekend bloggers post reviews. My thought is that the companies that offer the freebies (Lexus Automobiles?) and encourage non-disclosure should have to deal with the regulations and not the general blogging public (which is hard to enforce anyways). Techmeme has a bunch of good examples and discussion pieces.

All the transparency and legal issues aside, I think that this might be a good development if well defined and uniformly enforced. Writing reviews is a fun way to get into blogging and I would hate for things to get so formal that the casual reviewers get their hands slapped.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

FTC to go after blogger freebies and non disclosure

Ryan Boren: 2.8 Plugin Compatibility

Ryan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:54:23 +0000

Some plugins are causing grief for those upgrading to 2.8.

HyperDB needs to be updated to the latest version, otherwise tags won’t save.
DB Cache also prevents tags from being saved. I haven’t seen an update for it yet.
Plugins that load old versions of jQuery for all admin pages will break all kinds of stuff. Plugins should use the version of jQuery that ships with WP. If a plugin must use a particular version of jQuery, that version should be queued only for the plugin’s own pages.
Themes that call get_categories() from functions.php before the init action fires will fail. 2.8.1 will workaround this, but ideally these themes should update so that they can handle custom taxonomies properly.

Dougal Campbell: Drupal shop gives props to WordPress

Dougal — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:30:36 +0000

My wife sent me a link by Volacci, a Drupal SEO development shop, giving some nice kudos to WordPress 2.8.

Last week the much anticipated new version of WordPress (version 2.8) was released for download. Many webmasters, bloggers and CMS fans alike have come to expect great things out of the seasoned system, so the expectations were high. According to the earliest reports, WordPress 2.8 not only lives up to the hype, it presents some stiff competition for Volacci’s favorite platform, Drupal.

It’s always nice to see compliments coming from someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in making them. That’s a good indication that you’re doing something right, so congrats to the development team and to the WordPress community. And to give Drupal its due, there are certain types of site setups that are easier to manage in that CMS. And with the Drupal 7 UX effort going on now, it looks like the next release is going to be much easier to administer than it has been in the past.

I have a feeling, though, that future releases of WordPress will be adding more general CMS functionality. And we’ll find more folks in the Drupal camp looking at WordPress as a possible alternative for projects. Really, though, this kind of “competition” only helps to improve both systems. I think users of both WordPress and Drupal can look forward to many improvements in the future.

Peter Westwood: Making it easy to be a WordPress Tester

Peter Westwood — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:36:02 +0000

The other day Ryan shared a simple way of switching a WordPress install to the nightly builds so as to get involved with testing.

The only problem with this method is that you have to redo every time a WordPress release is made because it involves hacking a core file and the update mechanism will only offer you a nightly build if you already appear to be running one.

This got me thinking about whether or not you could create a plugin which would allow a blog to always track a particular type of nightly build stream so as to avoid the need to ever hack core files again. This morning I am please to announce the first release of my WordPress Beta Tester plugin which is inspired by Ryans example but achieves it in a plugin and will keep your blog on one of the two nightly tracks. The choice you have is:

Point release nightlies – This contains the work that is occuring on a branch in preperation for a x.x.x point release. This should also be fairly stable but will be available before the branch is ready for beta.
Bleeding edge nightlies – This is the bleeding edge development code which may be unstable at times. Only use this if you really know what you are doing.

Once you enable the plugin it will by default switch your blog to the “Point release” stream and if you want to switch to the “Bleeding edge” stream then you will need to go to the Tools … Beta Testing page and configure the plugin there:

The administration panel for the plugin

Please note: Once you have switched your blog to one of these beta versions of software it will not always be possible to downgrade as the database structure maybe updated during the development of a major release.

Weblog Tools Collection: Plugin Updates Email Notifier Plugin

Keith Dsouza — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:10:00 +0000

Many of us seldom visit the admin dashboard in WordPress, even if we do we may not really pay attention to the updates available to the plugins we use, one of our twitter followers for @weblogtooltips Avaz tweeted this.

Taking cue from that I quickly wrote a plugin that will do what Avaz suggested, it will send out updates via email to administrators whenever there are new plugin updates available to install.

You can setup the updates to go out daily, weekly or monthly and also choose to receive intimations for deactivated plugins.

The plugin requires you to setup the options before it actually works, you will see a message in the admin header to setup the option if you haven’t done that at-least once.

For for information and downloading visit the Plugin Updates Email Notifier homepage.

We keep a hawk eye on our twitter account, so don’t forget to send us your tips, questions and more to @weblogtooltips on twitter.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Plugin Updates Email Notifier Plugin

Weblog Tools Collection: You might be a WordPress Geek . . .

Mark Ghosh — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:15:31 +0000

When the first thing you do at a new blog is scroll down to see who did the theme, you might be a WordPress Geek. via @SherryDedman
When you mention Dexter Gordon, you have to qualify that he is a saxophonist and not the WordPress release, you might be a WordPress Geek. via Matt
More than one of your Twitter saved searches includes the word “wordpress”, you might be a WordPress Geek.
You read Weblog Tools Collection daily and have withdrawal when we do not have a release post, you might be a WordPress Geek.
You visit a well known publisher and can instantly recognize the permalinks as created by WordPress. Heck, if you know what a permalink is, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If all your vacations are to WordCamps, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If the word “dashboard” reminds you of the WordPress admin panel, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you have multiple Google Alerts setup with the word “WordPress” in it, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If your toddler has a “W” t shirt, you might be a WordPress Geek.
if your browser homepage is set to the WordPress Planet, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you bitch when Matt writes about the Kindle and not about WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you have tried to convert your day job’s website to WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you know of Kubrick but do not know who he was, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you spend more time on WordPress Extend looking for plugins and themes than writing posts, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you have ever met Matt and had a picture taken with him, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you know what Akismet is, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you met most of your friends because of WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you make your living from WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If your significant other complains that WordPress gets more attention, you might be a WordPress Geek.
If you have ever suggested WordPress to others, you might be a WordPress Geek.

I could go on forever. Are you a WordPress Geek?

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

You might be a WordPress Geek . . .

Weblog Tools Collection: Interviews: Matt Mullenweg – WordPress Co-Founder

Keith Dsouza — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:20:48 +0000

Many of us use WordPress on a day to day basis and many of us love using it, but don’t you want to know the people who have made WordPress what it is today, the people behind the software and the people who are helping the WordPress community grow.

Image Credit

To get you up and close with the WordPress rock stars, we are starting a community interview series where we will quiz people who have helped WordPress evolve and grow, and we could think of no one better than Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress to start this off with. Here is the interview we did with Matt.

WLTC: First of All thanks for taking the time to do this interview, I
really appreciate it more than I can tell you, here is the first question. What does WordPress mean to you as a co-founder and when you think of it as a individual user?

Matt: It’s always been about expressing yourself online. For me, that’s a blog with lots of photography elements. For other folks it might just be a website that doesn’t look like a blog at all. But before b2 and later WordPress I never really felt comfortable with an online presence, there was just too much friction in the tools and they made it too frustrating to do what I wanted. WordPress exists to remove that friction.

WLTC: Happy 6th Anniversary WordPress. It has been 6 long years now, can
you tell us some of your experiences from day 1 to day 2190?

Matt: One day I’ll always remember is the first time someone translated WordPress into another language, I believe it was a project in Japan. To put this in perspective, WordPress had no translation framework at the time so this meant someone went through every single file and line of code and edited it.

This blew me away at the time, and I believe it also had a big effect on Ryan, who went on to lead the long and tedious work of making WordPress gettext-compatible so translators had a robust and efficient way to translate WordPress.

Today there are as many WordPress users outside of the U.S. as inside, and international is the fastest growing part of our community.

WLTC: How has WordPress evolved in community building, what steps does
it take towards it?

Matt: Everything we’ve always done has been trial and error. I think our problem then and now has been it’s too hard for folks to volunteer around WordPress. People break through the trouble and pitch in, but it could be a lot easier of a process and I’d love to recognized everyone who contributes a lot more, which is one of the ideas behind redoing how profiles work on WordPress.org.

WLTC: The GPL issue has been lagging around for sometime now, can you
provide some views on why GPL is the best way to go forward with?

Matt: WordPress wouldn’t exist if B2 wasn’t GPL — it’s the core of our existence. Plugins and themes use hooks, filters, functions, and core data structures in a way which makes them linked and they can’t take away freedoms from users granted by the GPL, which means they must be under the GPL or a compatible license. End of story.

WLTC: A couple of years ago WordPress was seen as a excellent blogging
platform, these days people see it more as a CMS in addition to a
blogging platform. What are your thoughts, and what steps is WordPress
taking towards it?

Matt: More and more people are discovering that the only limits with WordPress are your imagination. You don’t need bloated, seldom-updated, expensive, or never-backward-compatible "content management software" to create beautiful and powerful sites. I think people are starting to realize this because of BuddyPress and the WordPress Showcase.

WLTC: As a personal question, do you follow developments in other
softwares such as Blogger, Joomla and Drupal?

Matt: Absolutely, in fact earlier today at CMS Brazil I watched a presentation on Drupal 7.

WLTC: What are the core values from WordPress you might want or like
other companies to incorporate?

Matt: That’s a tough one — there’s a lot of opinions and philosophies embedded in how WordPress works that I’ve internalized so it’s hard to look at them from afar. Maybe one of the days I’ll get a page on WordPress.org about it.

WLTC: Bugs in WordPress, how do you handle those? Any advice to people
who want to share their bugs and problems or contribute towards solving
them?

Matt: We squish bugs with extreme prejudice. If you’re not sure if something is a bug or not the support forums are probably your best bet. If you’re tech savvy and know how to file a bug report, then I’d recommend to drop it on Trac. In the Drupal presentation I saw earlier they called it a "do-ocracy" where people who do things get things done, and recommended if there was something that you couldn’t code yourself to commission someone to do it on your behalf, which will probably be pretty cheap (a few hundred dollars). I thought that was an interesting idea.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to someone starting out as a newbie
in WordPress?

Matt: Check out a book on WordPress, spend a little time clicking around the Codex and on WordPress.tv, and of course subscribe to the WordPress Planet and WLTC.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to experienced WordPress users?

Matt: Check out the taxonomy system, and Dexter Gordon. (The saxophonist, not the WordPress release.)

Update: To learn more about what Matt and team are doing and planning to do with WordPress don’t forget to check the State of the Art Video From WordCamp SF.

Once again thanks Matt for taking out the time for us and answering the questions, it was absolutely nice to have you with us, we hope the readers of WLTC love it too.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Interviews: Matt Mullenweg – WordPress Co-Founder

WordPress.tv: Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word: WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Michael Pick — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:25:49 +0000

Dev Blog: WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 1

Ryan Boren — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:05:14 +0000

We’ve started work on the first maintenance release to 2.8. 2.8.1 will fix a handful of bugs that turned up in 2.8. Today we’re releasing the first beta of 2.8.1. Download it, and check out the bugs fixed so far. Here are some of the notable issues that are fixed in beta 1.

Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.

If you would like to automatically upgrade from 2.8 to 2.8.1 Beta 1, follow these instructions. Thanks for testing WordPress.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 06/20

Perurry — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:07:29 +0000

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Theme Releases for 06/20