projects

Two New Ways To Get WP News

I got word of two projects today which may be valuable sources of information dealing with WordPress within the near future. The first is called WPSource.com. WPSource.com is an aggregation website that displays the 5 most recent headlines from major players within the WordPress community. The site features a fancy drop down animation once a headline is clicked.

WPSource Screenshot

A small excerpt from the post is displayed with a read more link at the bottom of the excerpt. When you browse to WPSource for the first time, it takes a little while for the page to load which can’t be blamed fully on the domain itself as it’s pulling the 5 headlines from outside sources. Even though this is a work in progress, I would like to see either fav icons of the site listed along side the headlines or some other images to really give the site some spice.

Our second contestant is adii who is building a community oriented project which will be a WordPress magazine which will highlight content from the thought leaders within the community of WordPress. The types of content that will be aggregated include: general and misc WordPress news, themes, designs and designers, plugins and development.

WordPRessMagazine Project

As you can already tell at a glance, both projects are circling around to the same conclusion but displaying the results in two different ways. Even though adii does not have a public demo, I can already tell you that I enjoy seeing the aggregated content displayed in this fashion versus WPSource. If the ability to subscribe to the specific categories will be possible in this iteration, I’ll have it give this design bonus points as it will help me condense these feeds into my Feed Reader.

When I look at this design mockup, I sometimes feel confused by where the post is being aggregated from. However, I enjoy the fact that this design will place more importance to the favicon as it’s use and importance has gone through the floor.

As it stands, WPSource is farther ahead in development as they at least have a working demo/project online that works. However, once the Magazine project comes online, it will definitely give WPSource a run for it’s money. One nice thing about both of these projects is that they are aggregating content from a wider variety of members within the WP Community instead of aggregating the usual suspects which Planet WordPress already does. May the best project win!

WordPress Group Projects

WordPress Group Projects

Thanks to Utahcon who sort of started the train, I’ve decided to create a forum for WordPress based group projects. As you can see from the image above, we have already started working on developing a way for the Codex to be printer friendly or at least provide a PRINT link on Codex articles. We have also begun to work on creating a Recent Posts hack that displays posts that are not on the front page. For example, my recent posts plugin shows the last 5 posts I’ve published on this blog. However, this is a moot point as those 5 blog posts can be seen by scrolling down the front page. The plugin hack we are working on would display posts that were on the second page of WordPress, not the first. So far, we are making progress, but we are still short of having a working solution.

I thought this would be an awesome idea. Instead of one person putting together a plugin or coming up with a solution, we can have multiple people participate until the project is completed. I consider a project completed as being one that has a working, tested solution.

I do have a few guidelines setup in the forum which describe how I want the group projects section to be managed:

The Group Projects Section of the forums will house all of the various group projects that are created by you and myself. If you are going to start a group project, please use a very descriptive thread title so that we can understand at a glance what the group project is.

Each forum thread within this section of the forums will be a single group project. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to participate in the project until that project has been completed.

Do not post anything in this forum that will not be a group project, if you do, the thread will either be moved or deleted.

Please register an account on the forums and participate in the various projects and also, let me know what you think of the idea.