I’m being honored by the Temple Fox School IT Awards so I’ll be in Philadelphia next week. I extended my trip so we can do a WordPress meetup on Thursday night, April 10. The current plan, thanks to Alex Hillman, is meeting at National Mechanics at 6PM.
Category Archives: WordPress
New BuddyPress Site
The new BuddyPress site is up and includes the key ingredients of an open source project: mailing list, bug tracker, and SVN. No official release of anything yet, but if you’re interested in following the development you should join the mailing list. The site itself is, of course, powered by WordPress.
WordCamp Dallas and WordPress 2.5
The talk this morning at WordCamp Dallas was quite enjoyable. The audience here is very sharp and on-point, there was a ton of participation and great questions. They also had delicious Rudy’s BBQ for lunch, which I nibbled at as much as I could. Also (roughly) concurrent with the talk we released WordPress 2.5. Funnily because I kept the edit screen for the announcement open from stage the concurrent editing protection prevented anyone else fom publishing the post! Andy told me after I was done and I pushed the button, but it’s good to know the feature works. 🙂
MyBabyOurBaby.com on MU
MyBabyOurBaby.com is a baby scrapbooking site built on WordPress MU. They were written up in Mashable a few weeks ago, surprised it hasn’t gotten more coverage. It’s a good example of what MU is capable of, joining Edublogs, AllthingsD, and Chickspeak. Any other awesome MU-powered sites you’ve seen recently?
SxSW Day One
My pictures from day one of SxSW.
WP at eBay
eBay has a new WordPress blog. Hat tip: Jonathan Dingman.
At SxSW
I’m at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas now. This is my fifth year at the conference, and I’m excited as ever to see what this year holds. I’m on two panels this year. If you’re a WordPress user and you spot me at the conference please introduce yourself! I’ll try to keep some WP stickers on me, so ask for one if you don’t have one on your laptop yet.
Metblogs
The new Metblogs looks fantastic. According to Jason all the cities are running on WordPress MU. Metblogs was one of the largest Movable Type installations I knew about, I’m honored to see them move to WP. Cities are the next big thing, I hear.
Backing BuddyPress
Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network. Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress. And it was good.
Today I’m happy to announce that Andy has joined Automattic full-time and we’ll be taking the BuddyPress project under our wing. We will grow it and support it the same way we support WordPress, MU, bbPress, Akismet, and more.
It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.
See also: DiSo, GigaOM, Techcrunch, Mashable, Techvibes.
More Social
Scriblio for Libraries
Scriblio MATC Project Final Report. Scriblio is a system for helping libraries and is built on top of WordPress. The article describes some of the troubles with the close association with WordPress:
Shortly after the Mellon Foundation announced the award to the Scriblio project, the WordPress core developers reversed their longstanding position on tags and announced that the next release would include tag support. This is significant because metadata such as author or subject is functionally equivalent to tags in Scriblio, and much of the Scriblio code was devoted to managing those tags.
It also describes some of the benefits:
[T]he relationship between the open source WordPress community and commercial participants, including Automattic, the commercial entity that operates WordPress.com, has proven itself to deliver real benefits to all. […]
And the Scriblio project has enjoyed opportunities to contribute to the WordPress community as well. […] One recent example is Ticket #5649, where a change proposed by Scriblio was committed to the baseline code within an hour of its submission.
Overall, a good read on building a project on top of WordPress, helping an under-served community, and giving back by strengthening the underlying platform.
Twitter Theme
Prologue is a new WordPress theme that’s probably best described as a group Twitter, ideally for 3-15 people to let each other know what they’re up to. It has comments, permalinks, RSS feeds, Gravatars, XML-RPC, everything you’d expect. The front page shows the latest update from each person.
For Dummies Update
The Never Ending Story. “WordPress For Dummies remains the #1 book on blogging at Amazon.com — it’s been #1 almost since the week it was released in November, and has remained there ever since.”
Utah WordPress Meetup
I’m going to be in Utah next week and I extended my trip to do a WordPress Meetup, please come by if you’re in the area.
British Airways
British Airways has a new blog, OpenSkies, using WordPress. Neville Hobson blogs about it here.
Crunchies Win
The Crunchies were tonight, and we were fortunate enough to win in two categories, WordPress for Most Likely to Succeed and Toni Schneider for a well-deserved Best Startup CEO. My heart was racing a thousand beats a minute going up to the stage, which never happens anymore, but I think because there were so many people I knew, and so many startups that I liked there, that it was different. Congratulations to the entire WordPress community for this win. Just wait until they see 2.5. 🙂 Update: If you want to see the shortest company introduction ever and me dork out on stage, check out this video and seek to 33:40.
WordPress Solaris Zone
The WordPress 2-Step is a two-step process for setting up and installing everything you need to run WordPress inside of a Solaris zone.
WordPress in Sweden
Edenstrom wrote in the other day: “Several Swedish companies are pioneers using WordPress 2 as their new open source CMS platform. The nationwide magazine Fokus.se) and the food site taffel.se are two fresh examples. The bureau goodold.se are promoting WordPress as their choice of CMS.”
MacWorld WordPress Meetup
Tomorrow, Wednesday, there’s going to be a WordPress meetup at Chaat Cafe.
WordPress in South Africa
Paul De Sousa writes in: “One of South Africa’s largest media groups, Avusa, which owns most of the countries BIGGEST newspapers is now using WordPress. Here are 2 of their MU installations: The Times is South Africa’s first interactive newspaper, it’s part of The Sunday Times which is the countries largest newspaper. Financial Mail is a largely financial newspaper also owned by Avusa. It’s expected that in the near future more rollouts for other publications, newspapers, and magazines will happen as WordPress is ingrained into our online strategy.”