Category Archives: WordPress

You Do Not Scale

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“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

Ma.tt: not a robot

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Even after working for Matt Mullenweg for over four years now (my longest job!), it still totally pumps me up how forward thinking, thoughtful, and human Matt is.

From the ThemeShaper article “Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory“:

“…it became obvious to me that we had to figure out the GPL issues first so introducing a WP.com marketplace wouldn’t inadvertently harm the WordPress community by sucking the air out of .org theme development, so I held off the revenue and success we knew this would bring to work out the GPL issues out with the community.

…

But very explicitly this is an experiment. We’re not psychic and there are many open questions: Will anyone buy these things? How will the private forums work for support, both for our users and partners? How long does it take us to review and get a new theme online? What’s the most effective price ranges? How many themes and partners should we have? How do we promote the premium themes, while balancing adding new free ones? Will any of them ever be more popular than the Smoothie? (51,109 blogs and counting.)

Go read the full article.

Could WordPress have a better BDFL?

WordPress does one thing very well…

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…allow everyone to easily publish on the Web!

And to make that happen, WordPress must be an easy to develop and design web publishing environment.

Stop! This is comparing apples and oranges. [WordPress] is a honed, refined blogging product that does one thing very well, whereas Drupal is a flexible, extensible CMS plus a huge set of tools for building websites, web applications, and integrating with other tools.
By “jam – Senior Wr….”, “The time is right for Drupal products“

It’s frustrating that competitors are still trying to pigeon-hole WordPress. The satisfying irony is that I expect WordPress’s use for non-blog sites is growing faster than the competitors.

Sure, we have biases. We are biases towards familiarity, usability, and not stressing people — letting people be awesome!

A leading example of what you can do with WordPress 3.0 CMS features is what CBS, with the help of VOCE Communications, have already created for nearing 200 CBS Radio and CBS Local properties. Sites like:

There are countless other examples, but a few have been cataloged at wordpress.org/showcase/tag/cms/

WordPress Activate Theme Action

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There isn’t yet a WordPress activate theme hook. In the last week, it’s come up twice where WordPress.com Hosting VIP partners wanted some code to run once on theme activation.

It’s not an unusual scenario for our customers to create a new version of a theme, install it separately, and then activate it. Often this also allows reverting to the old version of the theme if something unexpected happens at launch.

In this scenario, it’s often easy to check for the existence of a new option, migrated, or other seed data, but sometimes you want to do something like:

global $pagenow;
if ( is_admin() && 'themes.php' == $pagenow && isset( $_GET['activated'] ) ) {
     // When theme is activated this code runs.
     // Still be defensive if you need to be, and check if
     // your baby is already born
}

Hat tip Frank Bültge.

ShrimpTest Starts Rocking the A/B Testing

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Mitcho has posted a 0.1 version of ShrimptTest, the A/B Testing Plugin for WordPress, and a brilliant video showing the results of his month working on it:

The plugin is already looking fantastic Mitcho style, and he’s just getting started!

Go to http://shrimptest.wordpress.com/ to download, try it out, and provide feedback.

Great Lineup for WordCamp SF Genius Bar Help Desk!

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I just posted the WordCamp SF 2010 Genius Bar Help Desk schedule.

Like previous years, I’m really excited about these amazing people so generously sharing their WordPress expertise one on one!

The WordCamp Genius Bar came about when myself and other WordPress participants felt regret for not being able to answer all of the excellent questions people were stopping us in the hall with at the first WordCamp (2006, has it really been 5 years). For WordCamp SF 2007, WordCamp Genius Bar was born, and has continued every year since with the help of Maya, Elea and numerous genius volunteers. It has become an ingredient in the WordCamp formula, the most potent batches anyway.

WordPress 3 Coming Together

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The delirious pace of WordPress 3 development has been delicious!

I’ve enjoyed not being able to keep up at all.

The sprint is on to feature freeze!

There’s going to be a patch sprint of sorts for 3.0 this week. Please grab a ticket, triage, patch or test:http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/32. The feature freeze is March 1, so everything still on that report in 7 days from now will be punted to a future release.

There are a few incomplete tasks out there that need to get done to finish implementing new features (both small ones on that report, and the major 3.0 features). If you’re interested in helping but aren’t sure where you can, venture over to #wordpress-dev.

Andrew Nacin on wpdevel, Feb 22th, 2010

Jane Wells puts up a “Patches Welcome” sign on a “a handful of small UI enhancement tickets that are low priority for the hardcore devs, but that I’d still like to see make it into 3.0.” Jane will “try to post a couple of pet tickets each day throughout the sprint week that is coming up.”

Better, stronger, faster blog network creation and management will be huge!

Mostly I can’t wait for the twenty ten theme, and the slow death of the (poorly) justified text that may have been the Kubrick themes only shortcoming.

PS. Emphasis above and below (bold) is all mine.

PPS. WordPress 3 will look so good in the title of the next technical book you write ;-)

Wednesday, Feb 23, 2010 Update: Jane has posted “Menus, the Merge, and a Patch Sprint!“ with details on the WordPress Development Blog, including the tidbit that WordPress 3 will have much improved menu management.

WordPress Declaration of Independence

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The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

We hope to gather broad community support to make sure we can continue to serve the public good through freely accessible software.

About Web page, WordPress Foundation

There are already a lot of great comments on the welcome post “Getting off the ground“. Here is a one of the many juicy comments made by Matt in response to a question posted there:

Sure, as a quick summary: [Wordpress.com and the WordPress Foundation] completely separate, but share a similar name and my involvement. One is for-profit, the other non-profit. They both have similar goals in terms, but the Foundation can take a long-term multi-decade approach to solving these problems without regard for short term profit, market conditions, or shareholders. I’ve always had a vision for two simultaneous approaches to the WordPress way, the heart and the mind, but it’s just now coming together.

Versatile and Elegant, WordPress, Democratizing Publishing

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The combination of the elegant and versatile WordPress and the ground breaking Kubrick made that possible, turning the democratization of publishing from an idealized concept into a concrete reality.
Tina Daunt, “The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet“, Huffington Post, Jan 8th, 2010