WordPress.org

I’m turning 28 next week on January 11th. My friends and family always complain that I’m impossible to buy for, and it’s true, I don’t need any more stuff. (Exception is a mixtape / playlist, I eat those up.) The most important luxuries in my life are time, friends, and time with friends. The thing I covet is impact. So this year going to try something different: I’m giving up my birthday to raise money for charity: water and provide clean water to people that need it. 100% of money donated goes directly to projects in the field. Please donate — let’s build some wells.

WordPress 3.3.1 is now available. This maintenance release fixes 15 issues with WordPress 3.3, as well as a fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability that affected version 3.3. Thanks to Joshua H., Hoang T., Stefan Zimmerman, Chris K. and the Go Daddy security team for responsibly disclosing the bug to our security team.

Download 3.3.1 or visit Dashboard → Updates in your site admin.

One of the performance enhancements that arrived with WordPress 3.3 was the ability to use %postname% as the permalink setting without taking a hit in performance. Otto goes into in-depth detail with regards to the patch he wrote to fix the problem which involved lots of help from friends.

Related posts:

1. Otto To Head The WordPress.org Redesign

To celebrate the launch of a new WordPress course that will be offered by Grumo Media, Miguel has produced a song specifically for the course with his guitar. Not a bad tune.

Related posts:

1. Video Featuring Matt Of WordPress With Dries Of Drupal

It’s the new year, so what does that mean for you and your blog?

Are you going to pick a new theme, maybe customize the one you have, perhaps blog about more things and spice up your posts with some added media and links, or maybe something as simple as just blogging with an up-to-date browser?

Last year, I made a resolution to blog more often on my personal blog. I definitely met that goal with 107 posts in 2011 vs. a meager 28 in 2010. This year, I’m aiming for even more.

How about you? What’s your 2012 blogging resolution?

Making the rounds on Twitter today is a WordPress plugin called Dashboard Site Preview that allows you to preview your website from the WordPress dashboard. The plugin was created by 10 year old, Jesse Friedman who goes by jesseenterprises on WordPress.org. According to Brad Williams, this guy attended WordCamp Philly in 2011 and used what he learned at that event to create this plugin.

Dashboard Site Preview adds a widget to your dashboard which is a simple iframe that shows you the front-end of the website. For widescreen monitors, you can maximize the use of the preview by setting the dashboard to display widgets in 1 column.

Not quite sure if this will save time when compared to other methods such as displaying the front end within another browser tab or within a browser window on a secondary monitor. However, this plugin excels at being a great learning experience for Jesse. I don’t know about you but I think it’s very encouraging to see younger folks getting involved with coding. After all, Matt Mullenweg believes that scripting is the new literacy.

Related posts:

1. Fix For Filosofo Comment Preview Plugin
2. Plugin Code Repository Bookmarklet
3. Review Of Front End Editor Plugin

New plugins

WordPress Ultimate CMS is an easy to use plugin to create, customize, and manage custom post and page types, custom archives, and custom taxonomies.

Updated plugins

BuddyPress Mobile is a mobile BuddyPress theme optimized for viewing on iPhone, iPod touch, and will also work on Android and some Blackberry devices.

Twitter Blackbird Pie allows you to add awesome looking embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts just by adding simple shortcodes.

Ultimate TinyMCE beefs up your visual editor with a plethora of advanced options.

Lester ‘Gamerz’ Chan was recently interviewed by Singapore magazine, GoDigital. You’ll have to use your mouse to scroll through the first few pages to get to the interview but once there, you’ll read some great insight into who Lester is as a person. Here are a couple of tidbits I took away from the interview.

Lester became involved with WordPress before there was a WordPress. That is to say, he worked with B2 which is the predecessor to WordPress and what WordPress is based on.

His personal site, Lesterchan.net is one of the top three websites in Singapore.

He will continue to maintain his plugins for security purposes.

He has the same shoe size as me. (11)

While the magazine is flash based, I managed to take a screenshot of the first page of the interview to help give you a taste of what’s inside.

How many of his plugins are you using on your site? Here on the Tavern, we’re using WP-Polls, WP-PageNavi, and WP-Stats.

Related posts:

1. Matt Mullenweg Interviewed By KTEH

I attended an interesting high school called the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, or HSPVA for short. More than computers my main passion when I joined was the saxophone, particularly jazz, and that’s what I studied for 4 years alongside many talented friends who would later become professional musicians.

As a result of this interest, almost from the beginning of this website (then photomatt.net) I had a section of my site for jazz quotes. It’s actually remained frozen in that old design for four years or more, and it was one of my resolutions for 2011 to relaunch it.

Well, with minutes to spare, I’m happy to share with you guys the new Jazz-Quotes.com.

There is a lot of work left to do on it to turn it into the more of a community-driven site that I envision, but there’s no reason the few hundred people a day that come to my site looking for jazz quotes shouldn’t get to enjoy them in this fresh new design on a dedicated domain. (Powered by WordPress, natch.)

Happy new year, everybody! I think 2012 is going to be an amazing year. Now to put another log on the fire.

DHH writes at 37signals Stop whining and start hiring remote workers. Automattic does the same, except we use P2 for our projects and virtual water coolers, IRC for our chat, Skype and Google+ Hangouts for calls and screensharing, and pretty much never email. When people read these things about 37signals their first criticism is always “does it scale?” For Automattic it has to a hundred people and growing.

Admired is a stylish and fully customizable theme.

Blaskan is a responsive and accessible theme that uses modern web technologies.

Dotos is a minimalistic theme in the sense that it puts complete focus on the photos, not text blogging.

How many of you still update your themes footer every year to change the copyright date? Thanks to a small snippet of code, you can add this to your footer.php file which will negate the need to manually change the copyright information every year. The code snippet is php the_time(‘Y’) An excellent primer for how to use this snippet within the footer.php file is explained via Lorelle VanFossen.

Related posts:

1. Incsub LLC Accused Of Copyright Infringement
2. Code Snippet To Reduce Memory Usage
3. Copyright And The GPL

The independent web is growing quite a bit. Although we have these great cloud servers for WordPress, the software that people run and install themselves is still as popular as ever. Our services are bringing more people online, but they’re also bringing more people who want to own their own space on the web–they want to own a house instead of rent an apartment. When we were first starting out, I thought, “Downloading and uploading software, managing databases, no one wants to do that.” But it turns out, a lot of people do.

Posts like these from Matt Mullenweg are always fun to read. Via Open Web FTW on GigaOm.

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Yesterday, I received an email from a freelancer who wanted to know if I had any places I could point him to to get more WordPress gigs. The economy is still bad, people are still collecting unemployment, looking for work, but the one constant I’ve noticed is that there is always a need for a WordPress developer either through an established firm or helping out with a specific project. I reached out to those who follow me on Twitter and requested that if they were currently hiring WordPress developers to send me a reply back along with a link to the job offering. Here are the folks that replied back to me.

Page.ly – A dedicated WordPress specific hosting company

While not available on the site just yet, Marshall Oram responded that they are looking to fill a full-time position at their office located in Phoenixville, PA. If interested, contact him via his email address.

Metaltoad – Metal Toad Media is a digital strategy agency looking hard for Drupal and WordPress developers.

B5Media – Full-time position located in Toronto, Canada. These guys manage some popular websites!

Ravidreams – WordPress services company looking for dedicated individuals who eat, sleep, and breath WordPress.

10Up – Jake Goldman mentioned on Twitter that they have recently hired employee #7 and are looking for #8 which could be you!.

I can guarantee you that there are definitely more WordPress gigs out there to be had. I see requests for them all the time on Twitter. If you’re a company that needs WordPress freelancers or looking to fulfill a position, feel free to publish a link to your job offering within the comments. Links to jobs that require bidding will not be published.

Related posts:

1. Extensive Checklist For WordPress 3.3 That All Developers Should Check
2. Ottawa WP Developers…..Drink!
3. Nomad-One Interviews Six Great Theme Developers

New plugins

Clean Widget IDs allows you to get rid of auto generated HTML id’s for your widgets.

IPLocationTools adds a widget to your sidebar to track real time visitors to your website.

Updated plugins

Email Address Encoder is a lightweight plugin to protect email addresses from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

Looks like Drearmeda who is one of the guys behind Sucuri.net has placed some WordPress ink on his arm. He’s certainly not the first to get a WordPress logo as a tattoo and probably won’t be the last. While it’s cool to see this kind of enthusiasm for the software, some people might look at this as going over the top. I don’t think something like this symbolizes the community as turning into a cult around WordPress. It’s just a persons unique way of showing their enthusiasm for the software, which doesn’t bother me a bit. Does it bother or worry you to see a software logo tattooed on someone’s body?

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Developers are going to want to add this page to their list of resources. Dominik Schilling has written a guest post for WPEngineer.com that covers a wide range of constants that can be used with WordPress. I’ve used and seen many of those constants defined within the WP Config file. It’s pretty cool to see such a wide range of constants available to change the behaviour of WordPress all in one place.

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If you have a WordPress plugin in the official directory, you can now add some pizzaz to your listing with a custom header image.

To add a custom header image to your plugin listing, you’ll need to have a 772 × 250 pixel jpeg or png checked in to your plugin’s SVN directory at assets/banner-772×250.(jpg|png). After a few refreshes, the image should appear for everyone.

For some examples of the new header image at work, see Akismet, bbPress, BuddyPress, and Jetpack.

This is still an experimental feature, so there is always a possibility that the dimensions, placement, and other aspects may change in the near future.

Don’t steal my Theme Options, from The Theme Foundry. It seems at least few people interpreted my post last week as suggesting there should be no options. While I think that software should just work, I also suggested that a half-dozen options could be removed from WordPress, not the other 50-something options. Nonetheless, the Theme Foundry post is a great case study in how you should be approaching options — in a careful, meticulous fashion. “We talked it over, and decided we’d go one-by-one through the options and scrutinize like madmen.” That quote makes me want to go find and don my Theme Foundry t-shirt.

Created two months ago, the WordPress.org support forums has added a new section specifically for those that install and or use WordPress on a localhost. Installing WordPress onto a PC or Mac that can be used locally without an internet connection can at times become quite the endeavor. Thankfully, there are software suites such as WAMPServer and XAMPP that make the process of installing all of the necessary software to turn a machine into a web server very easy.

The following link has an assortment of community created tutorials for various setups to install WordPress on your local machine. There are also a number of links published within the WordPress Installation Techniques Codex Article.

Related posts:

1. Should The WordPress Support Forum Only Support Themes From The Theme Repository?
2. Improving The WordPress Support Forum
3. Meet The WordPress.org Support Forum All-Stars

Intriguing interview conducted by Gihyo.jp which is a Japanese focused developer resource site.

As your experience straddles both, where do you think open source excels? And where is it weak?

The open source model is probably best in the world at bringing together hundreds of people, from casual passersby to those who are deeply involved, to make constant, incremental improvement to core software. For projects with a clear goal―like the Linux kernel or Wikipedia―having an efficient method for people to contribute outstrips anything any proprietary company could do. The weaknesses are that it’s harder to make radical changes and do design. And those two are very much related. Open source is best at incremental improvements of things you already do, as well as responding to user requests. But with open source, it’s a lot harder to move the community to do something that users have never imagined they want. The problem is not impossible to overcome. But it means that whoever is leading the change must lay out the case as a compelling direction for the future―and to do it before a single line of code is written.

I can imagine those who have witnessed the development of WordPress for at least the past two years may take exception to the last sentence in that quote. In my opinion, that is not how most WordPress development works. I might as well cite the classic example known as the Capital_P Dangit function. The so called compelling direction was laid out after the change was added to WordPress 3.0. The change occurred without a trac ticket attached to it which further illustrates the point that sometimes, the compelling case to add something to WordPress never happens before one line of code is written.

While I’d definitely like to see dialogue occur between users and developers on certain proposed features before one line of code is written, it’s often been said to me that we’ll end up talking in circles with no lines of code ever being written. It’s easier to talk than code. So where does the balance come into play? WordPress history shows us that plugins appear to be the balance makers. Additions or reverts to core are often remedied by someone releasing a plugin, after the fact. This is the road WordPress development has chosen to go down more often than not. It’s definitely annoying at times but I’m happy to see that WordPress has such a large user base that someone, somewhere, will most likely develop a plugin to right the wrongs of WordPress. Those wrongs are considered from a per user basis as even I realize WordPress can’t hit the sweet spots for all users.

In the life of WordPress, there are both good and bad milestones. One year later, I still consider the addition of the Capital P function as a big mistake that will go down in my history book as a bad milestone. I chose to use this example as it best reflects the complete opposite of Matt’s response to the original question. I’m hoping that things change and that at some point, what Matt says becomes the norm for how WordPress development works, not the other way around. We need to see more events like this complete with published results and open discussion about those results.

Related posts:

1. WPWeekly Episode 52 – Matt Mullenweg Interview
2. Matt Mullenweg Video Biography Interview
3. Sitepoint Interview With Matt Mullenweg

Bizz is a very clean and minimal theme that is ideal for business and portfolio websites.

Sunny Blue Sky is a blue theme which includes a cloudy blue sky and sun that is shining and good looking.

New plugins

Widget Shortcode adds a [widget] shortcode which enables you to output a widget anywhere you like.

WP Snowfall creates snowfall effects for your WordPress site.

Updated plugins

Front-end Editor enables “edit in place” functionality on your site.

Tweetable allows you to integrate Twitter with your WordPress blog, automatically tweet new posts, display your latest tweet in your sidebar, etc.

The results are in from the WooThemes survey. Presented in a handy infographic, this year’s survey brought to life some interesting facts from the 2,000+ WordPress users who took it.

Among those surveyed, 90% feel that WordPress has graduated from blog publishing tool to full-fledged CMS, 68% use WordPress for sites requiring extensive CMS functionality, 77% make money from WordPress while 31% make their living from it, and 76% find responsive web design to be an important factor in their theme choice.

While we’re on the subject of surveys, you may want to take this short 5-question survey to help improve the quality of the main WordPress.org site.

Indigo is a clean theme with deep, dark, rich blues and blacks.

Parament is a great all-purpose theme featuring a dark color scheme with bright orange highlights and a textured background.

Today we’re exited to unveil a refresh to the BuddyPress.org site. It’s something we’ve been tinkering with for a while, and we think you’ll like some of the improvements we’ve made:

1. Activity updates are turned off
   Over the course of using the previous design, there was always confusion whether to use the Support Forums or ping someone directly via their activity stream. The verdict is in, and the Support Forums won.
2. Hidden Groups and Members Directories
   Since BuddyPress.org is used primarily to support the platform itself, we really wanted to show off everything it can do here. That proved to be more than we needed, so we’ve scaled it back a bit and hidden the links to the directories. They still exist, there’s just not really any reason to visit them anymore.
3. Restyled Profile Pages
   We consolidated the user profile into the header area to better match the new WordPress.org profiles site. With the removal of the direct activity stream updates, we think this simplifies the whole profile browsing experience.
4. Updated Plugins, Themes, and Showcase
   This is huge, and these areas have needed some attention for a while.
5. Group Gravatar Changes
   In the past we’ve relied on Gravatar to serve up monsters for Plugin Groups. We’ve turned them off in most places honestly because it really didn’t make any sense; we’re using the primary plugin author’s Gravatar instead.
6. Toolbar Integration
   We’ve updated BuddyPress.org to the latest versions of WordPress and BuddyPress to take advantage of the cool new toolbar introduced in WordPress 3.3.

A big thank you to everyone that’s been using BuddyPress.org so far. You’ve really helped us shape BuddyPress.org into something we’re happy and proud to be using. If you experience any weird issues with these new changes, please leave us some feedback and we’ll be sure to get things fixed.

With the Santa hat on, Matt Mullenweg has decided to try out an experiment specifically for plugin authors and their respective plugin pages. He’s decided to give plugin authors a little more control with regards to how their plugin pages look by offering them a chance to upload a 772 x 250 pixel image that will be used as a banner. Here are a couple of excellent examples of this experiment in action:

Inline Quote Tag
Hello Dolly!
WordPress SEO By Yoast
YARPP or Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
bbPress
BuddyPress
TinyMCE Advanced
JetPack
FancyBox

One thing that I am thankful for is that most of the images I’ve seen have not detracted away from the information presented on the page. Right now, there is consistency amongst all of the various plugins hosted on the repository. I want that consistency to stick around. However, I will say that some of the plugin banner images give the page an additional pop and enhance the offering. As long as the header images are somewhat nice to look at and relevant to the plugin, I support this change!

Related posts:

1. Donate To Plugin Developers Day – March 1st
2. Plugin Code Repository Bookmarklet
3. Absolute Privacy Plugin Now At v1.2

WooThemes has released the results of their 2012 WordPress Wishlist survey. Instead of dishing out numbers and statistics, they have compiled and released the information in the form of an info graphic. Of particular interest are the results from both questions related to WordPress as a CMS. 90% think that WordPress is a full-fledged CMS. 68% of respondents mostly use WordPress on websites requiring extensive CMS functionality. I believe that’s a very encouraging sign of WordPress maturing as a platform and slowly but surely, getting rid of the label that it’s just for blogging.

Related posts:

1. WPShout Releases Results Of Their Webhosting Survey
2. Vote In The Widget Survey
3. WooThemes To Go Back To Their Roots

The new default theme for WordPress 3.4, appropriately named Twenty Twelve, is officially on the drawing board.

This year’s theme will be overseen by none other than WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The focus is to develop a theme that is “kind of different from before, generally palatable, and that Matt likes.”

Some new things to look forward to include a variable height header image, less “clever things that aren’t super-useful,” and this will be the first default WordPress theme to have no header image by default.

For some odd reason, I have stuck to the default themes ever since Twenty Ten debuted, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what Twenty Twelve has in store for us.

VaultPress now supports one-click database restores direct server-to-server so you don’t need to download or upload anything.