WordPress 2.2: Three Things Developers Will Like. Also check out Aaron’s 10 things you should know about 2.2.
Category Archives: WordPress
2.2 Dropped
WordPress 2.2 “Getz” is now available. Go get it! It’s totally worth upgrading. Here is Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie playing It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing to listen to while upgrading, you’ll be done before the song is.
DePo Clean Theme
Derek Powazek, an inspiration to many of my early online activities, is now blogging with WordPress and has released his theme, the DePo Clean WordPress Theme.
WordPress Stats
On Saturday night (because that’s how we roll) we launched WordPress.com stats plugin for WordPress.org bloggers, and it’s gone incredibly well so far. We’re coming up on our first full weekday since launch, it’s running on 2,750 blogs already and tracked about a million 1.3 million pageviews today. A few bugs popped up, of course, but that’s life in software.
AllthingsD on WP
All Things D is a fantastic new WordPress MU powered site that I think is a really good example of what the platform can do. Being from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, they anticipate a healthy amount of traffic so they’re hosted on our VIP platform. Toni has some more details, including all the cool people involved in bringing the project together (the real work).
Random Redirect Plugin
I wrote a quickie plugin based on an idea from Techcrunch, when you visit the URL it redirects you to a random post from your blog.
Delaying 2.2
The WP dev team has decided to hold back version 2.2 for at least a week or two from the original date of April 23 while we polish things up. I’ll post an updated release date as soon as we figure out how long everything is going to take. (Which is extra-hard in open source development.)
NASA on WordPress
J. J. Toothman wrote in that NASA is using WordPress for their new Ames Research Center project. Sweet!
Plugin Authors Get No Love
One interesting thing in the whole adware themes discussion is the people claiming if we require GPL it’ll kill the number and quality of themes out there, that the best themes have ads in them, that they couldn’t make themes if they weren’t getting the SEO gaming money, et cetera and so on.
There are two types of WordPress add-ons, themes and plugins. Are there any similarities?
- Plugins are just as hard or harder to write and design as themes.
- All plugins in our directory are required to be GPL or compatible.
- Plugin authors almost never get links on the front-end of a blog.
- I’m not aware of any plugins that bundle advertising with the intention of gaming search engines, like themes are.
Despite all of this, the plugin ecosystem around WordPress is flourishing, especially since we made the plugin directory, and hundreds have been added. It seems any of the doomsday scenarios people are expecting to happen to themes would have happened to plugins years ago. If ad-bundled themes really are better, a suggestion I find insulting to all those who volunteer their time for WordPress, then maybe they should start their own theme directory with only adware themes and they should get a ton of traffic.
(And just to respond to the title, I think plugin authors get tons of love, and hopefully we can help them get more with upcoming revisions to the plugin directory.)
Sponsored Themes Essay
I’ve posted my essay, On Sponsored Themes, on Weblog Tools Collection to continue the discussion that’s been happening there around themes with embedded adware. Check it out and comment over there if you have an opinion, there is also a WordPress Idea on the matter.
NYC Meetup Update
Based on the comments on the last entry I think we’re going to kick off the April 11 meetup at Bryant Park at 6:30, and if needed migrate for drinks at 8 PM when the park closes to someplace like Heartland Brewery on West 43rd. How’s that sound to the New Yorkers in the audience? Update: Scott says “The northwest corner of the park is the most accessible (south of the Starbucks, east of the Verizon shop). Plus that’s where the coffee is.” That’s where we’ll meet. I’ll be in a beige overcoat and green shirt.
McAfee CEO
The new CEO of McAfee is blogging on their WordPress blog, very cool to see another CEO blogging. Hat Tip: Robert Accettura.
Good Morning Switch
Good Morning Silicon Valley, one of my favorite blogs, has switched to WordPress. 🙂
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Хабрахабр / Блоги / WordPress / Мэтт Мюлленвег. I have no idea what that means, but I was interviewed for a Russian Digg-like website and if you can read Russian it might be worth checking out.
Summer of Code
WordPress is part of Google Summer of Code this year, with some real rock-stars mentoring. It’s a great opportunity for students, if you know anyone who loves solving problems and would be a good fit please encourage them to apply.
Selling Links
“Let’s face it, we’re selling links here. Call it ‘buzz’ all you want, but it boils down to selling links. That skews Google’s index and they’ve come out against that quite publicly. If we’re all given the freedom to disclose in our own manner, we’re a moving target. If we’ve all got disclosure badges everywhere, it’s easy for them to penalize/ban us all.”
The comments on this PayPerPost blog encouraging disclosure are interesting, it seems even their own users recognize that they’re doing something Google should/will penalize.
Perhaps rather than trying to find better ways to hide from Google, they should just stop the questionable behaviour in the first place. This is one of the reasons we took an early stance by banning PPP on WordPress.com, and other blog hosts should do the same.
WP Meetup and WordCamp 2007
March 9th in Austin we’re going to have a WordPress meetup at BarCampAustin. I heard the fighting robots caught on fire so there’s no competition at that timeslot anymore. Also, you heard it here first, WordCamp 2007 will be on 7/21 and 7/22 in San Francisco.
OpenID on WordPress.com
You can now use your WordPress.com URL as an OpenID, and we’re going to release the MU plugin that does it after getting some kinks worked out. This is also a bit of a coming out for Simon Willison, who implemented it all. Welcome to the team. 🙂
At SxSW
Just a quick reminder, I’m going to be in Austin at SxSW next week and if you see me please introduce yourself. I’ll have a stash of WordPress stickers at all times. 🙂 There is also shaping up to be a little meetup on Saturday at Barcamp around 6, so block that out. Finally I’m speaking on Monday.
Blank Slate
Daring Fireball: Blank Slate talks about basing your work off a template vs. starting from scratch. I think both can be valid, there are enough (over 1000) WP templates out there that finding one that’s close enough to what you want and customizing from there can be a great way to bootstrap and get started quickly. But longer term, invest in design. (This reminded me I have a long todo list for this site to catch up with.)