WordPress.org

A few days ago, Jeff wrote a post encouraging WordPress plugin developers to be more transparent about trackers they apply to your website via their extensions. He referenced Pooria Asteraky’s discovery that a social sharing plugin had applied 13 trackers on a vanilla installation. This is no surprise, really, as a site owner installs social sharing plugins with the express purpose of sending information out from the website via Javascript or some other means.

Otto left a comment on the original post, clarifying which trackers might indeed be harmful or unwanted. He said, “Our primary concern in this regard would be plugins that do things without the consent or without the knowledge of the website owner.” This is an important distinction to make, as many trackers perform a welcome and valuable service, such as Jetpack stats, Gravatar or Google Analytics. The trackers you want to hunt down are those that collect information about users or activities on the site without consent.

Let’s hunt trackers!

Since plugin authors may not always be transparent about what kinds of trackers their plugins install, especially if they’re not hosted on WordPress.org, site owners need some way to sniff these out. That’s where a free tool like Ghostery comes in handy for finding out what services might be communicating to and from a website. It operates as a browser extension and there are versions available for Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE, iOS and Firefox for Android.

Here’s an example of what it looks like when I installed it to Chrome, which was painless and instant.

Once installed, the extension looks for third-party page elements (or “trackers”) on the web pages you visit and displays them in the corner of your browser. It verifies these trackers against Ghostery’s extensive library of more than 1,700 trackers and 3,400 tracking patterns, including beacons, advertisements, analytics services, page widgets, and other third-party page elements.

Get the Details Behind the Trackers

If you suspect that a plugin might be “phoning home” from your website, inserting ads or invisible pixels for tracking, Ghostery gives you a quick way to track down the tracker and find out who is behind it. It’s not just for use on your own website – you can check out other sites as well. Here’s a quick example run on a WordPress.org plugin page:

You can click on each individual tracker to see the URL and find out more information. For the most part, you’ll see a harmless list like the one above. The Ghostery tool comes in handy if you feel that you may have been hacked or have noticed some suspicious activity on your site. The information Ghostery provides will help you to investigate your plugins and/or themes to find the culprit. It’s also useful for inspecting other sites for a small window into their third-party connections.

Block Unwanted Trackers

Ghostery also lets visitors block trackers based on the type of function they perform or on an individual basis. This is particularly useful if you want to block trackers that violate your privacy by collecting your behavioral data.

The ultimate goal here is to use Ghostery to find more information about invisible trackers and control your privacy online. Though it has a broad use outside of WordPress, Ghostery provides a first line of defense for finding plugins that “phone home” and using that knowledge to disable them and report on their activities.

There are all sorts of frontend editors being created for WordPress. We’ve already covered Barley, Inline Access, and PrettyPress. Each plugin takes a different approach to solving the problem.

Post Customizer, developed by 10up continues the trend of taking a different approach to solving the problem of live editing. Post Customizer works in a similar fashion to the theme customizer. When a user previews a page or a post, an interface is loaded that looks just like the theme customizer. From this interface, you can edit the post excerpt, post thumbnail, save changes to the post or close the interface without saving. Selecting text within the post displays a simple editor that makes it easy to style words, apply unordered lists etc.

Idea Turned Into Reality

I got in touch with John James Jacoby, one of several developers for the plugin (along with Carl Danley, John Bloch, Taylor Lovett, and Drew Jaynes). I found out why the plugin was created, the decision to use the customizer interface and whether or not this is just a prototype or something they want people to use on a routine basis.

Tavern – Is this plugin a prototype of an idea to edit posts or does 10up plan on improving the plugin? Does 10up want people to use it?

JJJ – Both! It was an idea I’ve had in my head for a while, and we threw it together at our company meetup and then it sat mostly unloved for a few months. We spent a few hours getting it to a workable state, and open sourced it for improvements and feedback. We actually built the majority of it over the course of two evenings, just hacking together and rapidly prototyping.

Tavern – When it comes to the post customizer, does it not make sense to be able to have the category and tags be editable from within the customizer? At that point, you’re sort of substituting the post writing screen although you don’t see the customizing interface until after you hit preview.

JJJ – Sure. Pretty much any metabox is game for inclusion. We specifically wanted to provide an interface for editing post content after the original post was written. We’d like to work Revisions into the sidebar, so authors can scroll through updates live.

Nice Idea But Needs A Lot Of Elbow Grease

While the idea is great, the implementation and experience needs to be improved before users can feel comfortable with using this plugin. Here are some things I noticed.

Update Or Save – The theme customizer that the interface is based on does not feel natural when editing posts. When editing themes, I realize an update will save the changes I made to the theme. For posts however, I’m used to clicking a save button. While the update button does the same thing, it just doesn’t seem right.

Exiting The Interface – I’m used to closing interfaces with an X on the top right portion of the screen. Despite the post customizer using a familiar layout, I keep looking to the right of the screen for a way to close the editing panel. It’s as simple as clicking the close button but I’m always looking somewhere else to get out of the editing interface.

It’s also weird that upon closing the editing panel, I’m taken back to the WordPress editing screen that’s missing the right sidebar. It’s here that I have to click an X to completely close the editing interface. Clicking close and then the X feels redundant. I’d rather see the close button take the role of doing both tasks and returning me to the normal editing panel without any additional steps.

Editor Toolbar Sticks To The Top Of The Post – When the editing toolbar is enabled, it sticks to the top of the page. While I could use keyboard shortcuts, I’d rather see the editor appear above the text I’m highlighting so I don’t have to scroll or move my mouse so much. When the edited text is not highlighted, the toolbar should disappear.

Excerpts Reload The Entire Page – The first time you try to edit the excerpt in the sidebar, it reloads the entire page along with the interface. I found this to be a jarring experience and would like to see the excerpt loaded without having to reload the entire page.

Interesting Take On The Post Editing Idea

I never would have thought that the theme customizer interface could be used to edit posts. Post Customizer proves the idea has merit. It will be interesting to see how this plugin evolves over time. If you’re interested in contributing back to the plugin, you can fork it on Github.

WordPress themes that integrate well-known front-end frameworks, such as Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation, offer a full range of UI tools to help users quickly customize their websites. Not having to style a ton of UI components can be quite liberating when creating a new site, especially when you combine that with the publishing power of WordPress.

Romangie is a new theme in the WordPress Theme Directory and is one of only a handful to support the latest Twitter Bootstrap 3 release. The theme is fully responsive and, although it is based on Bootstrap, it’s not heavy-handed with the styling, nor does it look like your typical Bootstrap site.

Romangie was created to have a simple design with a focus on content and performance. The theme supports all the WordPress post formats out of the box and includes styles for videos, music, chat, logs, quotes, galleries, etc.

In addition to its responsive design, Romangie is also retina ready, which means it will look great on small devices and larger formats, all the way up to 27″ Full HD displays. The theme uses scalable fonts as icons, instead of jpg images, so it won’t go blurry on high definition displays.

Romangie features at a glance:

• Built with Bootstrap 3 at its base
• Retina ready
• Includes full width page template
• Fully styled post formats
• Sidebar and multiple footer widget areas

View a live demo to see it in action.

Because Romangie is built on Bootstrap 3, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the new features of the framework, including the improved grid system, Glyphicons, new panels and list group components, a mobile-first design approach and much more.

A lot of work has gone into this theme to ensure a modern browsing experience for users on all devices. If you want to combine WordPress with all that Bootstrap 3 has to offer, this theme is a great starting place.

You can download Romangie for free through your WordPress themes panel. For more information or to contact the theme’s developer, visit the Romangie theme homepage.

WordPress 3.8 was released just a few days ago. There were 188 contributors that helped make WordPress 3.8 a reality. I’m proud to say that I was among those 188 contributors. I never thought I’d be able to make the list but thanks to some help, I was able to contribute in my own way. The following is my experience contributing to WordPress.

During the development of WordPress 3.8, I used the WordPress Beta Testing plugin to keep up with changes on my local server. While testing the default theme TwentyFourteen, I noticed a typo within the theme details. I could have reported the typo to a default theme team member and it would have been fixed immediately. However, once I discovered the typo I knew it was an opportunity to contribute to the core and make it on the contributors list.

Is Fixing A Typo Really A Contribution?

Before I reported the typo, I thought about whether fixing a typo would classify as a contribution. It was a small change that involved adding one letter to a word. I asked my followers on Twitter what they thought.

Curiosity question. If I fix a typo in WordPress core, is that enough to get a credit link for a contribution or is that not enough?

— Jeff (@jeffr0) December 11, 2013

What I learned is that some people have contributed to WordPress simply by removing white space from code. Konstantin Obenland contributed to WordPress by adding an underscore where it was appropriate. The moral of the story is that no matter how small the contribution, every little bit counts and helps to improve the software. There is no need to feel guilty or unworthy of being listed as a contributor if all you did was fix a typo.

Getting My Patch Into Core

After discovering the typo, I immediately reached out to Konstantin Obenland who was a member of the team responsible for TwentyFourteen. I reported the typo to him and he recommended that I create a new ticket on Trac. Bug reports along with their associated patches go through Trac in the form of tickets. Trac is not for the faint of heart. It’s an intimidating website for those that don’t frequent it often. Even though I’ve participated in the WordPress community for years, Trac still rattles my nerves when I create a ticket.

Using Konstantin as a mentor, he walked me through the process of creating the ticket. He also created the diff file for me that I uploaded as a patch. I didn’t know how to create diff files so it was nice of Konstantin to create one for me. Once the patch was uploaded, the ticket was out of my hands. After some edits to the ticket, the right people saw the patch and applied the fix to WordPress 3.8 before it was released.

WordPress Needs Core Contributor Mentors

WordPress would benefit from having a list of people that act as mentors for those contributing to WordPress for the first time via Trac. Drupal has gone through great lengths to make core contributing mentorship a priority. They have an entire site dedicated to mentoring new contributors. Even if it were not as organized as Drupal, I’d like to see a list of mentors I could get in touch with to walk me through the process of patching a bug or fixing a typo in core.

A few years ago, WordPress tried to create a core mentorship program but it didn’t take off. The contributor team was much smaller than it is today and WordPress didn’t have regular working teams. I asked Jen Mylo if there are any plans to try and create a mentorship program now that there are a lot more people involved with the core development of WordPress. She tells me that she is currently working on a proposal for a formalized mentorship program across all of the contributor teams.

We didn’t really have regular working teams then, and even the core team back then was much smaller active group. We’re in a much better place now to support formal mentorship programs since we now have regularly meeting teams, team reps posting weekly updates, etc.

Jen says the proposal will be posted sometime before the end of the year.

Contributing Was Awesome

Despite it only being a typo, contributing to the core of WordPress was exhilarating. For a brief moment, I felt like learning PHP and MySQL to contribute everything I could to WordPress. After the excitement went away, I came back to my senses. Special thanks to Konstantin Obenland for holding my hand during the process of contributing. The last thing I want to do on Trac is make the core WordPress developers job harder by improperly filing tickets. Instead of screwing up, it’s better to not mess with Trac at all. At least that’s the way I’ve approached it.

While there is a handbook devoted entirely to contributing to WordPress, it’s not the same as being guided through the process with an experienced individual. Thankfully, most of the WordPress community is approachable and getting help is as easy as tweeting, skypeing, or emailing someone.

At the end of the day, I contributed to WordPress and you can too.

Piwik is leading the way when it comes to open source web analytics software. More than 1,000,000 websites are using Piwik for analytics, according to the current Builtwith assessment. The team has just launched its 2.0 release with a brand new website and redesigned mobile app. This release is the culmination of seven months of work from the Piwik team and community.

Haven’t heard of Piwik? That’s probably due to the fact that Google Analytics thoroughly dominates this space. But there’s something exceptional that sets Piwik apart from Google Analytics. Piwik is free and open source, affording you privacy and full control over your data. Piwik takes about five minutes to install on your server. You can track multiple websites and keep all your data in the same place on your own server, away from prying eyes.

Piwik: An Open Source Alternative to Google Analytics

The Piwik dashboard has everything you’d expect from a comprehensive web analytics platform, including recent visits, keyword information, visitor location map, browser information, referrer information, and real-time visitor stats, and more available via widgets.

I had the chance to chat with Piwik founder and lead developer Matthieu Aubry. Given that Google Analytics is considered the default choice for the vast majority of websites, I asked him what is the number one reason people choose Piwik over its more popular competitor. He replied, “There are many reasons but I think the number one reason for many choosing Piwik over Google Analytics is privacy and keeping control over sensitive user data. This is becoming all too important. Another good reason may be that people like the simplicity of the UI and the openness of the platform.”

Part of that openness is that developers are encouraged to extend the platform using the Piwik APIs and many are already doing some creative things. “There are several businesses using the API to provide web analytics to many of their customers’ websites automatically (by creating website users and scheduled reports using the API),” Aubry said. “Others use the API to request data and display it elsewhere. The tracking API is also used to implement custom app usage tracking within Mobile apps. Finally, what we hope to help developers build 3rd party plugins similar to WordPress or other popular open source frameworks. This will be our chance to bring a lot of innovation in analytics!”

How to Use Piwik With WordPress

Piwik is licensed under the GPL, just like WordPress. The WP-Piwik plugin integrates Piwik into your WordPress site, adds the tracking code and displays a summary of stats in your admin panel.

Instructions for setting up WP-Piwik can be found on the WordPress Integration page and the the plugin is available in the WordPress repository.

What’s New in Piwik 2.0?

In addition to the new website, Piwik users will enjoy a host of new features with this 2.0 release:

• Launch of the Piwik marketplace for plugins and phemes
• Browse and install plugins and themes directly from within Piwik
• New completely redesigned mobile app, allowing users to monitor web traffic on the go
• Piwik 2.0 has now been translated by volunteers into 53 different languages

The team has also launched a new Piwik Pro service that will offer professional analytics services for businesses, NGOs and governments, as well as cloud hosting and enterprise deployments. The service also includes custom integrations and support.

If you’re curious about Piwik but would rather try it before installing on your own server, check out the live demo. Piwik is not just for web analytics – you can also use it to track e-commerce, server logs and intranet analytics.

Many website owners are willing to trade privacy for the convenience of Google Analytics. But if you’re serious about owning your own data and protecting sensitive information, it’s nice to know that there are open source options like Piwik that can provide the same comprehensive level of analytics.

It’s been a long time since the Tavern has received a new coat of paint. I’d like to introduce you to the new WordPress Tavern. This design is a child theme that we created, based on Stargazer, a new parent theme from Theme Hybrid. WPTavern is now responsive and looks good on any mobile device without the need to use a special mobile theme. If the font used for the content looks familiar to you, it’s because it’s the same one used within the newly redesigned backend of WordPress.

We’ve tried to maintain some of the personality unique to WordPress Tavern such as the wooden floor. This time however, the wood is a lighter shade which brightens the website. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Angie Meeker for the inspiration behind the new Tavern header logo and Scott Reilly for playing the role of guinea pig. The beer mug in the header will be used as our brand image across the various social networking sites.

This is the first of many big changes on the way. With the redesign in place, keep an eye out for the WordPress Tavern forum to make a return. If you come across a bug while browsing the site, please get in touch with us. When providing a bug report, tell us what browser and version you’re using. Be as descriptive as possible.

Many people around the world are already in the thick of celebrating a host of international holidays, including Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and more. If you’re celebrating a holiday involving gifts and you’re not sure what to buy the beloved WordPress geek in your life, we have a few suggestions. Even if you don’t celebrate any holidays, you may want to stash these ideas away for birthdays. After conducting a quick poll on Twitter, it turns out there are many ways to make your favorite WordPress fan happy. Here are a few suggestions based on the replies I received:

WordPress Coffee Mug

The new WordPress coffee mug is available from the WordPress swag store. I gifted one to myself and can say that it’s just as handsome and shiny as it appears to be in the picture. The back says, “Proudly Powered by Coffee.” This cup is the perfect size – it contains the exact amount of coffee I can drink before it gets cold.

A License to Sublime Text

The Sublime Text editor is a best friend to many people who write code. Many developers consider it to be the holy grail of text editing tools.

If you can sneak around and verify that your friend is using an unlicensed copy, a surprise license given as a gift will delight the socks off of him or her.

Jetpack Battery Pack

The Jetpack Battery Pack is a fancy, portable external battery charger. Emblazoned with the Jetpack logo, this unique gift provides a quick charge to cell phones and other mobile devices. The Jetpack Battery Pack is only available from the WordPress Swag Store.

A Treehouse Membership

Treehouse is a place where the WordPress fan in your life can pick up new skills by enrolling in courses that teach everything from design to mobile development to business skills. Technology enthusiasts love to learn new things and a gift membership might be just the right avenue. Also, Treehouse donates an account to a public school student for every new Gold account purchased.

BuddyPress Theme Development

BuddyPress Theme Development is a book that will teach you how to create BuddyPress themes from start to finish. You couldn’t find a better gift for the BuddyPress designer, developer or enthusiast in your life. BuddyPress Theme Development is available on Amazon in paperback or kindle version.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is the beloved form-builder of choice for many WordPress users. These days Gravity Forms is going far beyond just building forms with their latest release introducing a complete API. The WordPress person in your life may already have a Gravity Forms license, so you may need to engage in a little bit of creative questioning to find out.

Professional WordPress Plugin Development

If you’ve got an aspiring WordPress plugin developer on your gift list, the Professional WordPress Plugin Development book is an excellent choice. There’s certainly a lot to learn for free online but sometimes it helps to have information in a book to take you through different topics in an organized way. Professional WordPress Plugin Development is available on Amazon via paperback or kindle.

A CodePen Account

CodePen is a site where developers can edit HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code in the browser and see instant previews of its output. It’s a fun place to play with code and share your creations. A CodePen Pro account allows the user unlimited private pens, asset hosting, collaboration mode and more.

WordPress T-Shirt

You can never go wrong with a WordPress T-shirt as a gift. T-shirts and hoodies are pretty much the standard uniform of many tech professionals. The WordPress Swag Store has a nice assortment of t-shirts and hoodies in both men’s and women’s fits.

The Gift of Time

One of the most common replies I received to my WordPress gifts survey was time. Everyone needs more time in the day. For those who have families, it can be particularly tough to fit in a full-time job, time with the kids and contributions to open source projects. Giving someone the gift of time is nearly impossible, but there are ways to approximate it. Offer to babysit, make a meal, perform some car maintenance or time-consuming chores. Efforts to help your friend or family member free up time could be far more meaningful than any gift you could buy.

The Jetpack plugin code is now available on github and the team welcomes your pull requests. With the addition of Jetpack, Automattic now has 106 public repositories on github. That’s a lot of shared code!

Jetpack has been downloaded nearly eight million times since its debut on WordPress.org. If you’ve enjoyed using Jetpack and have some ideas for improving it, github is a great way to contribute back to the plugin. Your code will improve the Jetpack experience on millions of websites. There are also other ways to contribute without writing any code:

• Join the Jetpack Beta Test group
• Lend a hand answering questions in the Jetpack support forum
• Report bugs, with reproduction steps, or post patches on Jetpack’s trac

Learn the Basics of Contributing to Open Source Software with Jetpack

Jetpack probably has one of the most organized guides to contribution that I have ever seen for an open source plugin project. The team has created contribution opportunities for users and developers at all levels. The guide outlines ways to contribute at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels.

What really stands out about the Jetpack contribution guide is that it actually teaches you the basics of contributing to an open source project, including topics such as:

• How to check out the source code – Learn how to install and navigate subversion
• How to create a great bug report – Learn the anatomy of a Trac ticket and how to submit tickets
• How to write and submit a patch – Get step-by-step instructions for submitting a patch
• Best practices for WordPress development – Get more information on PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding standards

Let’s face it. Nobody springs from the womb understanding how to create a good bug report or submit a patch. That’s why guides like this are so important. Getting involved on a smaller project like Jetpack is an opportunity to test your wings in an area where you have an interest. If you have an open source project where you want to attract more contributors, consider creating a detailed, organized guide in the same way Jetpack has outlined contribution opportunities. That little extra effort in documentation might open up the floodgates to contributions.

Plugins collecting information and phoning home to a third-party without the user’s consent is a serious issue in the WordPress community. The WordPress plugin repository guidelines are clear on this matter specifically, point number seven and its sub points. Pooria Asteraky has published a post that explains why there needs to be more transparency across the WordPress community as a whole as it relates to ‘trackers‘ being installed on users sites via WordPress plugins.

According to Pooria, trackers are referred to as tracking codes that collect information such as statistics. After installing a WordPress plugin that provided social sharing buttons, he discovered through the use of Ghostery, that there were thirteen trackers installed on the website. Five of which had nothing to do with social networks. The rest of the post goes on to explain why this is not a good thing for the WordPress community and calls on webmasters, plugin authors, and everyone else on the web to be completely transparent regarding the trackers that are being used on their sites.

The Community Does A Good Job Policing Itself

WordPress is open source and so are all of the plugins hosted within the plugin repository. While there are plugin reviewers that voluntarily do their best to make sure nothing malicious ends up in the repository, some plugins slip through the cracks. However, because of the size of the WordPress userbase and how easy it is to look at the plugin’s code, those plugins usually don’t last long in the wild. If you come across a plugin that you think is doing something malicious and it’s on the WordPress plugin repository, contact plugins at wordpress.org. Someone from the review team will take a look at the issue and act accordingly.

Complete Transparency Is A Pipe Dream

Near the end of the post, Pooria outlines the final goal of transparency.

The final goal of transparency is to encourage all WordPress Users ( Webmasters) to publicly announce all the trackers and cookies of their sites to the public ( visitors and viewers of WordPress Sites).

This is a goal that in my opinion, will never be realized. Otto makes a number of points I agree with. I think it’s asking too much for webmasters to list out ad scripts, cookies, trackers, analytics, etc to their website for public display. In fact, it should be assumed that any webpage a user visits will be running some sort of statistic gathering software or leave cookies behind in the browser. This is the nature of the web. It’s not like users don’t have an option to combat these assumptions. There are a myriad of tools available such as browser extensions, desktop software, and privacy settings within the browser.

The Correct Way To Gather Usage Info Within Plugins

If you’re going to track users of your plugin, I highly suggest going about it the same way as Joost de Valk. WordPress SEO developed by Joost de Valk will ask users after they have activated the plugin for the first time whether or not they want to enable tracking.

This is an acceptable method within the WordPress plugin repository guidelines as it’s asking for the users consent.

Be Up Front and Honest With Users

Between the plugin review team and the WordPress community, most users don’t have anything to worry about. It’s not that gathering usage information is bad as it’s a wonderful way to track data to improve software. What’s bad is gathering that information without anyone knowing it’s taking place. As a plugin author, do the right thing. Be up front and honest about gathering usage data. Give users the choice and for those users that enable tracking, don’t give them a reason to lose their trust.

Tantek writes on the 10th Anniversary of XFN.

BuddyPress 1.9 was released to the world today thanks to many volunteer contributors who worked hard to make it happen. This release pays tribute to Sammy’s Pizza in Providence, Rhode Island, where lead developer John James Jacoby has enjoyed many fine pizza pies.

Here’s a quick tour of the three main highlights of this release.

New Notifications Component

BuddyPress is introducing a new component for the first time in two years. The 1.9 release has moved notifications to its own component so that they’re all centralized in one place.

Notifications also have an improved API in 1.9 so that developers can easily tie their extensions into them.

Dynamic Menu Items

BuddyPress site admins will be thrilled to find that 1.9 includes dynamic menu links. It’s now easier than ever to build menus with dynamic links such as “My Profile” or “Settings” that are specific to logged-in users. Dynamic menu items are separated into logged-in and logged-out user links.

If you previously used a plugin to generate dynamic menu items, you can now delete it and use the built-in BuddyPress links at Dashboard > Appearance > Menus.

New Widgets

BuddyPress 1.9 introduces three new core widgets to help you customize your social network:

• Friends Widget: A list of recently active, popular and newest friends of the displayed member.
• Log In Widget: Adds a simple “Log In” form and/or “Log Out” link
• Sitewide Notices Widget: Displays Sitewide Notices from the Private Messaging component.

Developer Goodies

BuddyPress 1.9 reinstates the bp_redirect_canonical() functionality. phpDoc inline documentation has been improved as well as compatibility with the develop.svn.wordpress.org unit-test suite.

On top of all that, the BuddyPress Codex has been completely revamped with a design refresh and loads of new tutorials and guides.

The BuddyPress core team is already cooking up new ideas for the 2.0 release but will take some time off for the holidays before getting started. The team will be sending out a brief questionnaire after the beginning of the new year to get community input before setting the goals for BuddyPress 2.0. If you’re keen on shaping the future of BuddyPress, watch for that questionnaire and make sure to voice your opinion. In the meantime, enjoy all the new goodies packaged into 1.9. It’s already fully compatible with WordPress 3.8 so you’re safe to upgrade to the very latest.

Today the BuddyPress team is excited to announce the release of BuddyPress 1.9 “Sammy”.

What’s new in 1.9

Notifications

BuddyPress has always come packaged with the ability to alert members of relevant goings-on. Things like friend requests, private messages, and group invitations, have been routed through a very simple core process that alerts members via email and a bubble in the top toolbar area. In BuddyPress 1.9, Notifications graduates to a full component, complete with a user interface for seeing past notifications, an improved API for developers to interface with them, and lays the foundation for future improvements and integrations to this functionality.

Navigation Integration

Since WordPress 3.0, site administrators have been able to easily create and manage the navigational elements of their sites, and until now, BuddyPress’s components have been unavailable as options. In BuddyPress 1.9, we’re introducing context aware navigation menu items that are only available for either logged in or logged out users, allowing your menus to dynamically adjust for your members. We think this is really cool, and is a feature that will really help integrate BuddyPress into existing installations.

Widgets

We’ve added a few more widgets to help connect your community to the rest of your site:

• Friends Widget: a list of recently active, popular, and newest friends of the displayed member.
• Log In Widget: adds a simple “Log In” form to your site.
• Sitewide Notices Widget: display Sitewide Notices from the Private Messaging component.

Developer Bits

BuddyPress 1.9 includes improvements to make it easier to develop plugins and themes for BuddyPress:

• Improved inline documentation for developers that are crazy enough to go snooping through the code.
• Improved compatibility with develop.svn.wordpress.org unit-test suite
• We’ve brought back bp_redirect_canonical() for helping redirect to top level/default members sections.

Sammy’s Pizza

On the east side of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A, on historic Hope St. just a few blocks north of Brown University, sat Sammy’s Pizza, home to one of the most delicious pizzas I’ve ever tasted. Sammy’s was my neighborhood hangout for the 2 years I spent in Providence, and not a day went by I didn’t stop in and at least say hello. The owner expanded into the next-door property and transformed Sammy’s into a gorgeous restaurant now known as The Kitchen Bar, where Sammy still continues baking the best pies in New England (in my opinion, anyways.) BuddyPress 1.9 is named “Sammy” in honor and memory of the great times I spent with some of my favorite people, eating my favorite foods, in one of my favorite places. If you happen to be in the area, stop in and tell Sammy I say hello!

Kudos

BuddyPress wouldn’t be what it is without the continued efforts of a volunteer staff of contributors. If it’s development, design, wireframes, UI, UX, you name it, these people helped make it happen for BuddyPress 1.9:

AliMH, asakurayoh, boonebgorges, burakali, dcavins, ddean, DennisSmolek, dimensionmedia, DJPaul, dtc7240, ericlewis, gametako, geoffroycochard, graha washbrook, hanni, haykayltduk, henrywright, hnla, imath, johnjamesjacoby, jessjurick, lenasterg, mboynes, megainfo, Mike_Cowobo, modemlooper, olivM, needle, netweblogic, r-a-y, ryderlewis, sbrajesh, sgr33n, sooskriszta, terraling, tomdxw, trishasalas, vhauri, williamsba1, wpdennis

Fin

This release cycle, significant effort has gone into improving our documentation. The BuddyPress Codex is the place to get answers about how things work, how to extend the codebase, and to learn a bit about the history of the project. If you think you’ve found a bug, or want to help improve the software, head over to buddypress.trac.wordpress.org and lend a hand.

Download BuddyPress 1.9 “Sammy” today from the wordpress.org plugin repository, or from your WordPress Dashboard.

Brian Richards has announced that he is giving away 12 full year scholarships. Winners will be given access to every new session published in 2014. According to Brian, that’s at least $360 in live, personal training. Winners are chosen every day at 12PM Eastern Time. To enter the drawing, you’ll need to tell Brian how the scholarship will benefit you or someone you know.

I want to hear about why you (or someone you know) would benefit from a full-year scholarship to WPSessions.com. What do you want to learn? How will you put this knowledge to use? What more can you do with another year of steady and continued growth under your belt? Tell me all this and more in a comment on this post, and if I like your story you get the next 12 months of sessions for free.

WPSessions.com provides monthly, high quality presentations from experts in the WordPress community. Every presentation is broadcast live to viewers around the web and recorded for indefinite long-term viewing. Each session focuses on a single topic, bringing together 3 different presenters to discuss the topic’s many facets at an extremely low-cost per event. To learn more about Brian Richards and what WPSessions is all about, check out this interview from June of 2013.

Here’s a quick performance tip for self-hosted WordPress sites. WordPress loads a number of scripts from its /wp-includes/ directory, depending on what you have active on your site. Use WordPress.com Libraries is a new plugin, created by Automattician and plugin developer Ben Lobaugh. Once installed, it automatically switches the URL on built-in WordPress Javascript files to serve them from the WordPress.com CDN instead. Rather than taxing your local server, you offload those requests to WordPress.com, thereby decreasing load time and bandwidth consumption.

Here’s a quick sample of a site’s scripts before installing the plugin:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://example.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.10.2'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://example.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.js?ver=1.2.1'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://example.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/jquery.ui.core.min.js?ver=1.10.3'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://example.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/jquery.ui.widget.min.js?ver=1.10.3'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://example.comm/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/jquery.ui.tabs.min.js?ver=1.10.3'></script>

The plugin automatically changes the script URLs in use to call the ones hosted on WordPress.com:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://wordpress.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.10.2'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://wordpress.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.js?ver=1.2.1'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://wordpress.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/jquery.ui.core.min.js?ver=1.10.3'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://wordpress.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/jquery.ui.widget.min.js?ver=1.10.3'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://wordpress.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/jquery.ui.tabs.min.js?ver=1.10.3'></script>

Don’t look for a settings panel, as it doesn’t come with any options. You simply install the plugin, activate it and you’re good to go. Everything happens automatically in the background. As a general warning, make sure to check through your site after installing this in case anything has broken. In my tests everything worked fine but if you’re running an older version of WordPress, it may not work predictably. The plugin is still in development and will likely receive updates to improve it over time.

It’s tough to say how much of a performance boost you’ll get and how much bandwidth you’ll save by installing this plugin, because it depends on which scripts you have active on your website and how heavy your traffic is. However, every small bit helps, especially if you’re not already using a CDN. Install the Use WordPress.com Libraries plugin for free from the WordPress plugin directory.

In 2008, Automattic created a WordPress theme entitled Prologue. A year after its launch, Automattic released P2 to take the place of Prologue. P2 was a revolutionary theme as it enabled communication to happen in near real-time and arranged comments so that they were equally as important as blog posts. From 2009 to 2013, P2 handled 80% of the communication that took place within the company. Earlier this year at WordCamp San Francisco, Beau Lebens who works at Automattic announced the successor to P2. It won’t be a theme. Instead, it will be a plugin entitled o2.

o2 is named after the section of the Automattic creed that states “I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company“. o2 was built from the ground up around the idea that communication is oxygen. In this light, the features of o2 make total sense:

• Intended to be used within a network
• Focused on the client side or frontend
• Native infinite scroll
• Improved real time commenting
• Cross-site Search (Search multiple o2 instances within a network)
• Cross-posting (Post on more than one o2 site at the same time)
• Keyword + Name Notifications
• Shared Tags
• Email Integration (Post and comment by email)
• Drag and drop media uploading
• Jetpack Integration

While o2 is a plugin it will ship with a default theme called Breathe based on the Underscores starter theme. o2 is being built as a platform so developers will be able to create plugins and themes to extend its capabilities.

The Progress Of o2

One of the downsides to o2 is that it will initially not contain any of the network functionality that was mentioned in Beau Lebens WordCamp session. When I asked Beau to clarify, he responded:

The initial version is not using websockets, but the AJAX polling is much more efficient and reliable (and accurate) than it ever was in P2.

We’ll still be playing with websockets at some point, but it hasn’t proven to be critical to making a great experience thus far, so we’ve pushed it back a bit as a priority. Instead, the commenting system will be an up to date version of P2 which gives us a better foundation to work on top of.

The initial announcement was on August 8th, 2013 but o2 has yet to be released. I reached out to Beau Lebens to get a status update on the project and asked when we might see it become available for public use. He told me that the team is very close to starting a controlled beta or alpha on WordPress.com. Testing will continue into the new year. Once the initial testing program concludes, we’ll likely see something made available for self installed WordPress users. We can expect this to happen sometime around February or March of 2014. Beau Lebens points out that these release dates are very rough estimates, and it depends largely on how things go with the initial trial group.

Watch Beau Lebens at WordCamp San Francisco 2013 Announce The o2 Plugin

The WordPress post editing experience is one of the next major features that will be evolving to meet the needs of modern publishers. We don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but there’s a trend emerging where everyone is taking a stab at re-imagining the post editor. Free and commercial plugins are popping up all over the place, each with a different take on improving the publishing experience.

PrettyPress is one that landed in the WordPress plugin repository over the weekend. The plugin offers a live front-end preview of your post while you’re typing.

Essentially, it’s a Ghost-style editor without the Markdown. You could, however, install another plugin to add Markdown capabilities.

PrettyPress aims to streamline WordPress publishing by simplifying the editing layout. It removes the distraction of having to switch back and forth between the frontend and backend to preview post formatting.

While testing the plugin, I appreciated the fact that it doesn’t completely take over the post/page editor. Instead, it places a “Launch PrettyPress” button in the sidebar of the editor so that users can select when to activate the side-by-side screen.

The plugin uses Javascript and jQuery to create the side-by-side layout with live preview and the PrettyPress developer notes that larger posts may have some performance issues. This is one aspect of the plugin that they plan to improve in the future. If you like this style of editing experience and you want to test it out, download the PrettyPress plugin for free through your WordPress dashboard.

I spoke with Sarah Millstein at the Lean Startup Conference earlier in the week. After a bit of intro we talk about how Automattic iterates, approaches hiring, and management.

Another Sunday, another round of stories from the Snowden files. I hope people don’t become fatigued of these continuous revelations, and it leads to change. Another good read is from the Atlantic How Americans Were Deceived About Cell-Phone Location Data. Precise but misleading language is a dangerous tool.

This weeks episode features Chris Cochran, co-organizer of Wordsesh. In this episode, we discussed the inspiration behind the event, Wordsesh 2, what may be coming with Wordsesh 3, and much more. We also talked about the release of WordPress 3.8, covered all of the new features and gave our thoughts on the new default theme, TwentyFourteen. Last but not least, I challenge you to figure out whether the sound you hear in this episode is a baby, or a kitten. Leave your answer in the comments.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress 3.8 Released
Get More Admin Color Schemes For WordPress 3.8
Coming Soon: An Issues Tracker for WordPress Documentation
Jetpack 2.7 Introduces Google+ Publicize Support and Adds Cloudup oEmbed
Envato To Re-Focus On Community After Lifetime Earnings Reach $140M
WordSesh 2 Video Playlist

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Next Episode: Friday, December 20th 3 P.M. Eastern – Special Guest Chris Lema

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Listen To Episode #131: