Tag 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.

A New Favorite Comment Spam

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This blog is a honey pot for hand rolled comment spam. Here is a new favorite spam comment:

(without prestigious )With reference to previous Emails so I see that your solution was to ban me complicity , firstly thanks as this blog had no adds on it , you have given me the ammunition to go forward in a legal fight which I doubt, I would win, but in English courts to sue under £5000 , You can not recover costs

I wish I had any idea what they were writing about.

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.

Being Part of It

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Being allowed to make it my own, to make it “better”, to collaborate, to be human, is what makes me passionate about open source and free culture.

This bug was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Probably not many people had ever run into it. But after hours of puzzling over those broken image tags, it felt darned good to find it, and — more importantly — squash it. And after the release of WordPress 3.0, nobody will have to scratch their heads over it again. Yay me!
Dougal Campbell, “Bug Chasing“, March 7th, 2010

Time.com Hiring WordPress Developer

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Who says WordPress isn’t for the enterprise? for the Fortune 500? Not our long list of WordPress.com VIP Hosting customers obviously.

One of those customers, Time.com, is looking for a “Senior Front End WordPress Developer“.

*4+ years of PHP + MySQL development experience
*Experience with WordPress development, themes, plugins and other customizations
*Front-end markup experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript
*Strong core PHP development experience
*Ability to work with and modify existing code
*Ability to develop applications from scratch
*Ability to work successfully in a team environment
*Ability to understand and work with people in a creative environment
*Strong attention to detail
*Ability to read and integrate third party API’s

Bonus is you’ll get to regularly collaborate with my team.