Here’s a great article about WordPress meetup communities around the world, including Singapore, Argentina, France, Croatia, India, Serbia, Malta, Norway, South Africa, Canada, Switzerland, Ireland, Estonia, Egypt, Poland, Belgium, and Slovakia.
Category Archives: WordPress
We’re organizing an exciting new conference series focused on blogging, called Press Publish. The speaker list has some really awesome folks on it, and will include notable WordPress bloggers telling their stories as well as Automattic employees teaching tutorials and workshops. Plus, WordPress.com Happiness Engineers will be ready and waiting to help people one-on-one with their blogs.
The first two events are in Portland on March 28 and in Phoenix on April 18, and if you register with this link in the next week or so you get a discount, special for Ma.tt readers.
Personally I can say that it was the Jetpack features that helped provide the defaults that got me hooked on WordPress. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Josh Pollock at Torque writes about Lessons we can learn from Jetpack.
This Man’s Simple System Could Transform American Medicine, about a quest to quantify the effects of medicine and treatment differently, which is really needed.
Update: Looks like it’s built on WordPress, too:
.@photomatt Thanks for the link! I built the site with Dave Newman (powered by WordPress)!
— Graham Walker, MD (@grahamwalker) March 9, 2015
WordPress [actually Automattic] has scored an important victory in court against a man who abused the DMCA to censor an article of a critical journalist. The court agreed that the takedown request was illegitimate and awarded WordPress roughly $25,000 in damages and attorneys fees.
Yes! Good laws become bad when people abuse them. Here’s the source: WordPress Wins $25,000 From DMCA Takedown Abuser (s/WordPress/Automattic/).
There’s the smart publishers, and then there’s the ones going out of business. WIRED is one of the smart ones, and just launched an awesome redesign on WordPress. From their editor-in-chief:
Back in 1994 we launched Hotwired, the first site with original editorial content created for the web. It was a digital home for reporting on the future of science, business, design, and technology. You’ve come to trust us over the past two decades, but our growth online has sometimes come too quickly and with some pain. When I took over as editor in chief in 2012, WIRED had an archive of more than 100,000 stories. That’s good! But they were spread out over more than a dozen different databases, sections, and homepages tenuously connected by virtual duct tape and chewing gum. The cleanup process—onerous and without a shred of glamour—took almost 15 months. But finally, last year, our engineers rolled out a newly unified site architecture built atop a single streamlined WordPress installation. And you didn’t notice a hiccup. Maybe you saw that pages loaded a touch faster. Stories looked more WIRED.
The story of the engineering behind it from Kathleen Vignos is also cool:
The redesign gives us the third incarnation of our Curator application, which started years ago as a separate Groovy on Grails application maintained by a single Java developer. Curator once consumed articles from 35 different blogs for curation on our homepage. When we migrated our 17 active WordPress blogs into one WordPress install, we also rewrote Curator in Cake PHP to match our WordPress PHP backend. After this, anyone on our team could maintain Curator—but the architecture remained the same and lived outside of WordPress. Using this version of Curator, our web producer team manually constructed the homepage throughout each day as various stories were ready to be promoted.
Our new and improved Curator is now a custom WordPress plugin—and it’s artificially intelligent! This allows our homepage and section landing pages to be both automated and curated at the same time. Stories flow through automagically based on editorial criteria, but editors can take control of the flow by locking stories in certain slots in our card system. This means our homepage and section landing pages are constantly changing with new stories all day long.
Curator sounds cool, as does the coming “longform feature article builder.”
It’s been a long road, but the WordPress mobile apps are finally making some major strides. WordPress iOS version 4.8 includes a visual editor so you won’t see code anymore when blogging on the go. (For anyone curious at home, WordPress originally shipped with WYSIWYG in version 2.0, and it was highly controversial at the time.)
On WordPress.com and Bitcoin
There’s been some controversy and discussion about the fact that WordPress.com no longer support Bitcoin in our new checkout flow on signup. (It’s still there in some other flows.)
Since there has been a lot of discussion about it, I wanted to share directly some of the answers I had to Grace’s follow-up questions, since I’m not sure if they’ll be published and if they are it probably won’t be in their entirety.
In regards to your future plans for the currency, is bitcoin support definitely returning or is that just a possibility at this point?
We’re big fans of Bitcoin and hope to support it again in the future, for all of the reasons that we originally supported it in 2012, which you can read about here:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/
Is there anything that will influence the outcome of this decision?
No, it is simply a matter of development resources, which are especially scarce for us right now as we’re trying to keep up with growth.
You mention that bitcoin has low volume compared to other payment methods, has this always been the case? Has its volume share changed over time?
The volume has been dropping since launch, in 2014 it was only used about twice a week, which is vanishingly small compared to other methods of payment we offer. We supported Bitcoin for philosophical reasons, not commercial ones.
What are the key aims of your checkout process changes?
Our goals are twofold: to refactor the code behind it which has parts that are over five years old and has grown very complex, and to make it faster and easier for people to buy our services.
When you first launched bitcoin payments WordPress’ blog post praised it as an inclusive payment method for those who cannot use PayPal. Do you worry that these people will now be excluded from the platform?
Of course, but either that number of people turned out to be smaller than we expected or they found other ways to pay. Since it’s so few people overall I’m happy to extend people’s subscription for a year, as I offered in your comments section.
What does being a ‘big believer’ in bitcoin mean to you?
I believe Bitcoin or some other blockchain-like system will be the basis of the majority of financial transactions in the future, from small remittances to multi-billion dollar corporate acquisitions. I think transaction costs should follow Moore’s law, and I don’t think we’re going to get there with the centralized gateways that currently account for the overwhelming majority of transactions. I also personally hold Bitcoin, I’m an advisor to Stellar.org, and my friends make fun of me for bringing up Bitcoin and the blockchain in unrelated conversations.
The bitcoin option still appears on the ‘WP Admin’ screen but not on ‘My Upgrades’. Is this part of the phase out, or likely to stay this way?
That’s on the old code base, and will be available for a short while if any current Bitcoin subscribers want to renew while the option is still available.
There’s been some interesting threads going around on Jetpack and the future of WordPress, here’s Chris Lema’s take: Is the Future Success of WordPress tied to Jetpack?.
There’s a relatively new site called Fusion.net that is definitely worth checking out, it’s already full of great articles and they’re starting to climb up the Techmeme Leaderboard. They run on WordPress.com VIP.
A federated Wikipedia by Jon Udell talks about the ossification happening in the Wikipedia community, caused in part by its attachment to rules that were created with the best of intentions. All open source communities, including WordPress, have to be vigilant against this. Sometimes we have to throw out what worked before to create what will work tomorrow.
If Apple Made Milk, and Other Super-Cool Imaginary Product Packaging, cool work by the artist Peddy Mergui. (Who uses WordPress.)
Over on the BruteProtect blog they have a look at the Jetpack Bloat Myth, and find that counter-intuitively even though Jetpack has more comprehensive functionality it’s faster than using individual plugins to do the same things. There are economies of scale to Jetpack’s approach, and it doesn’t even include the impact of doing things more advanced and complex like Related Posts. There’s a reason why some web hosts like WP Engine ban most related post plugins but encourage the use of Jetpack.
The performance of the plugin code, though still faster, is still a small difference when compared to the benefit of offloading certain tasks like image resizing, related posts, stats, video transcoding, and more in the future to the WordPress.com cloud (which is now across 11 datacenters worldwide).
Of course if you don’t need the functionality at all it’s always faster to have nothing, but that’s a shrinking minority. There are still more optimizations to be had, and in line with a performance focus in 2015 look for more improvements to come in the future. In the meantime, check out the Jetpack benchmarks.
How Paul Graham Is Wrong
I love Paul Graham’s essays and his latest is no exception: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In. I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m confused with the head-in-the-sand approach most tech companies are taking simultaneously complaining that there are lots of great people they can’t bring into the US, but being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located.
In a region that prides itself on disruption and working from first principles, San Francisco’s scaling problem is pretty humorous if you look at it from the outside: otherwise smart and inventive founders continue to set up offices and try to hire or move people in the most overheated environment since there were carphones in Cadillac Allantes. This is where I feel like Paul Graham misses the most obvious solution to the problem.
If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US, and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like.
Update: There is a vigorous discussion also happening on Hacker News.
State of the Word Q&A
In addition to the State of the Word presentation we talked about last week, there was a half hour or so of questions and answers that followed. You can also check it out on WordPress.tv, which now plays everything HD by default.
State of the Word 2014
Yesterday I delivered the State of the Word address to the WordPress community, and the video is already up on WordPress.tv.
Here are the slides if you’d like to view them on their own:
If you just want the bullet points, here are the big things I discussed and announced:
- There will be 81 WordCamps in 2014.
- This was the 9th and final WordCamp San Francisco in its current form. We’ve maxed out the venue for years, so next year we’ll do a WordCamp US at a location and date to be determined.
- Milestone: 2014 was the first year non-English downloads surpassed English downloads of WordPress.
- 33k took our survey: 7,539 (25%) of survey participants make their living from WordPress. Over 90% of people build more than one site, and spend less than 200 hours building one.
- We’ve done five major and seven minor releases since the last WCSF, and have had 785 contributors across them.
- WordPress market share has risen from 19% in 2013 to 23% now.
- We now have 34k plugins and 2.7k themes, and have enjoyed record activity on both — including plugins passing 1,000,000 commits.
- 16 releases of our mobile apps, Android and iOS.
- Code Reference launched.
- 105 active meetup groups in 21 countries, with over 100 meetup and WordCamp organizers present at the event.
- Internationalization will be a big focus of the coming year, including fully-localized plugin and theme directories on language sites and embedded on dashboard in version 4.1, which is coming out December 10th.
- Better stats coming for plugin and theme authors.
- Version fragmentation is a big challenge for WordPress, only a quarter of users are currently on the latest release.
- This is also a problem for PHP — we’ll be working with hosts to help with version fragmentation, as well as to get as many WordPress sites as possible running PHP 5.5 or better.
- Showed off 2015 theme.
- We will be testing a workflow for accepting pull requests on our official WordPress Github repository before the end of the year.
- For the first time in 11 years we’re switching away from IRC as our primary communication method. We’ll be moving to Slack, which has helped us set up so that every member of WordPress.org can use it. (During the keynote address the number of people on Slack surpassed our IRC channels, and is currently over 800 people.) Sign up at chat.wordpress.org.
- Five for the Future, with Gravity Forms and WPMU Dev committing to donate, and Automattic now at 14 full-time contributors to core and community.
- We need to work hard to harmonize the REST API plugin and the WordPress.com REST API.
- The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing, which means access for everyone regardless of language, geography, gender, wealth, ability, religion, creed, or anything else people might be born with. To do that we need our community to be inclusive and welcoming. There is a sublime beauty in our differences, and they’re as important as the principles that bring us together, like the GPL.
We’re not trying to build the next Snapchat — we’re trying to build the next WordPress.
— Josh Miller from Facebook
Uh, okay! From the Verge’s article Facebook's new Rooms app brings bite-sized forums to your iPhone.
Retina 5k Mac
To me one of the most meaningful shifts in computing the past few years has been how the resolution of displays is getting higher and higher, and interfaces are starting to become resolution independent. I feel like when pixels disappear there’s less of a wall between people and the technology, it starts to blend and meld a bit more. It’s something I’ve been personally passionate about since the first retina iPhone, tirelessly beating the drum at Automattic to make everything we do shine on hi-DPI screens, or leading the WordPress 3.8 release that brought in MP6 project to make WordPress’ aesthetics cleaner and vector-based.
I’m sitting in front of a Retina 5k iMac right now typing this to you. (It was supposed to arrive on Friday but came a few days early.)
It’s the most gorgeous desktop display I’ve ever seen, breathtaking at first and then like all great work becomes invisible and you forget that there was ever a time when displays weren’t this beautiful. (Until you look at some lesser monitor again.)
I’ve been using 4k displays, the Sharp and the ASUS, with Mac Pros for a few months now, and to be honest they come close, but this takes the cake in every possible way, including the design and aesthetics of the computer/display itself which is laptop-thin at the edges. If you’ve been on the fence, and you’re okay with the tradeoffs an iMac has in general, get one. I can’t wait for them to do a 5k Thunderbolt display (but it sounds like it might be at least a year away).
P. S. If you’re looking for a gift for the iMac that has everything, consider a slipper to keep its feet warm.