Any way I put together the title it was this long monstrosity, so I just removed the filler words and then some.
So, one of the WordCamp SF sessions that I was eagerly awaiting the video being available to share is Kathy Seirra’s “Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users”:
Kathy Seirra is one of my favorite speakers, because she makes me feel like I can kick fleshy parts you sit on too!
WordPress community superstar and regular web tools collection contributor Jeff Chandler (jeffr0) recently published a passionate article, “Stop Blaming The WordPress Team“. The article is about plugin developers blaming WordPress for too frequent updates without testing of popular plugins. His conclusion ends “So the next time you upgrade WordPress and realize your favorite plugin is broke, don’t blame the WordPress team, blame the source.” There are almost 200 comments on the article, and reading through them I imagine almost all perspectives are represented.
My hope is you don’t blame anyone. Maybe, it’s the core WordPress developers fault, maybe it’s the plugin or theme’s author, but that matters much less than everyone involved staying positively pumped.
The worse possible outcome is plugin developer and theme designer exhaustion. These people are as much the WordPress team as anyone is!
Thank contributors. For many that is all the compensation they are looking for, but don’t berate the contributor that is looking for more.
The blame game doesn’t help. Instead, if the plugins or themes you use are a gift to you (free), blog about, comment on forums, write the authors directly thanking them for the work that you miss because it isn’t working with the newest version of WordPress. Why wait till there is a problem, thank them today.
If you really need to blame someone, blame me. I can take it.
“If Movable Type was as popular, and under the same amount of scrutiny, I can’t imagine they would still be storing passwords as plain text.” upset at least one reader of “Movable Type Pro, Setting Social Networking Free, Vaporware, WordPress, BuddyPress“. His comment wasn’t polite, so I’ll answer without here without publishing it or calling attention to the comment author.
While working on the TypePad and Movable Type AtomPub Exporters (still in progress), programmer Ronald Heft Jr had a problem interacting with the WSSE authentication both use. The problem ended up being in his own code, but it also led to some interesting observations about how the authentication works.
TypePad doesn’t require as secure code.
This is a good reminder that allowing programmers a less secure option, and they will likely take it because they trust you, and have other deadlines.
WSSE authentication is inheritantly insecure.
When Ronald looked in his Movable Type database he found that the passwords were stored in plain text. WordPress remote access development lead Joseph Scott explains that the only way to support WSSE is to store the passwords in plain text on the server, which is one of the reasons why WordPress won’t be supporting WSSE.
Six Apart VP Anil’s response today on the official Six Apart blog to my Movable Type Pro Introduction video parody doesn’t surprise me, but where is the link love?
Earlier this week my Automattic colleagues and Effigent released WordPress for iPhone and iPod Touch. Now, the source is also available and Trac is set up for reporting bugs and participating in development!
I’ve tried it on my iPod Touch. They’ve done a great job! And are urgently working on fixing the worse bugs.
It’s already in the top 50 free apps.
Some friends have asked if WordPress and Automattic will be participating in the Open Web Foundation. It does look like a brilliant initiative, but as far as I know we weren’t invited. That’s really unfortunate, because I don’t think there could have been a greater gesture of co-operation in the blogging industry than David Recordon of Six Apart inviting us to be founding members.
Don’t worry, it won’t stop us doing everything we can to support the open web.
If you get “Error establishing a database connection” when trying to set up WordPress.org on your Mac, are sure that the database name (DB_NAME), username (DB_USER) and password (DB_PASSWORD) are correct, the solution is very likely that you need to set mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock in /etc/php.ini.
I’ve been searching the web to find out if any of the iPhone Applications in the App Store are open source. So far I haven’t found any. How about you?
Is the Apple $99 iPhone developer tax too steep of a barrier?
Will WordPress for iPhone be among the first? The most popular?
Tuesday Update: I somehow missed Matt’s article on this topic. It does seem that WordPress will be among the 1st.
Many of the commenters including Scott Wallick would like to see a WordPress app on their other brand of phone, mostly BlackBerry and Nokia, developed using MIDP2/J2ME which sounds like it would then run on many platforms: S60, (Open) Symbian, Android, and OpenMoko. Unfortunately I don’t imagine much of the UI code can be reused for such initiatives, but the backend should be fairly portable.
Mark Jaquith reminds us that the iPhone isn’t an open platform (further reading).
Thursday, July 24th: WordPress on iPhone has been available since Tuesday, and now the source is also available.
Google Gears has been enabled on WordPress.com for a couple of weeks now for some members, but was only announced this week. Andrew Ozz (azaozz) added this feature a couple of month ago in the development version of self-hosted WordPress. I’ve been using it for about a month, and even though I have a decent internet connection (15156 kbps measured), I really notice how quick Gears makes the visual editor’s Insert Link popup pop. Over all, it feels a little quicker.
Reading some of the comments there is some confusion about whether this allows an offline mode of WordPress and also about the privacy of using this Google browser add-on.
Today is the end of week 4 of coding for WordPress’s Google Summer of Code. It’s hard to believe it has already been 4 weeks, and there are only 2.5 weeks until the half way mark. This year, we’re running a tighter program and I think the results will speak for themselves.
Like last year, I’m mentoring Ronald Heft, Jr’s. He is working on TypePad AtomPub-based Content Importer. Ronald has been good about keeping me updated, asking good questions, proposing solutions, prioritizing issues, and sharing his results with the community.
Today seemed like a good day to take a look at the code and take it for a spin. I identified some issues and Ronald immediately responded with a plan to investigate and address them.
It isn’t quite ready for you to test importing from TypePad, but things are looking good. It’s getting close.