Wordpress

Its Not So Bad

Have you seen the WordPress 2.5 backend lately? Chances are, you have and perhaps the chances are even greater that you didn’t like what you saw. As for myself, I enjoyed the more modern look with the exception of the color scheme used. All of the color shades appear to be a bit too bright for my liking which ends up giving the backend a washed out look to it. But the features and enhancements to the UI such as the tagging and media uploader have impressed me.

The three major complaints that folks seem to be having with the redesign are these: not being able to rearrange the sidebar in the write panel, ungodly amount of scrolling, and the color scheme. The good news is that March isn’t here yet, so perhaps things will change before then. The bad news is, these are all valid complaints. I personally have to admit that the current Write Post panel within 2.3.3 is much easier and nicer to use than the one in 2.5. The ability to bring things up to the top of the sidebar which you use most often, just about eliminates the need for scrolling. If the WordPress devs add this functionality back into 2.5, they will kill two birds with one stone. People will be able to modify their write panel, solving the scrolling issue while this will also help to diminish the waste of white space.

But if 2.5 is released as we currently see it, based on the reactions I’ve read so far, many people will be displeased. In fact, some people are threatening not to upgrade unless a classic admin panel option is installed or a plugin makes the backend look like it does now. I think that is stretching it a bit and all you’re really doing is hurting yourself by not upgrading. But the fact of the matter is, WordPress is Open Source, and that means that a high demand for something, usually encourages developers to churn out a solution.

So what could this mean? Well, if you recall a post that was made on WeblogToolsCollecion.com not too long ago, you’ll see that there are about a dozen or less admin themes available for WordPress. I believe the number of admin themes available is so low because the current WordPress administration area actually fits the bill for so many people that only the ones who truly dislike it, want to change it to something else. However, in WordPress 2.5, we may see a change in the tide. If the dis satisfaction continues or grows once 2.5 is released, we may see admin themes being released as much as we see frontend themes. This means an awesome amount of choices for backend designs might arise out of this issue which I believe isn’t a bad thing.

Is It WP Or MT

If it weren’t for the Welcome To Movable Type text, I wouldn’t believe it. Mark has created a Movable Type plugin which mimics the WordPress back end in almost every way. Why was this done you may ask? According to Mark, this was more of a joke than anything else, but the plugin is real and it helped to prove a point that alternative interfaces could be created for MT with little effort required.

MovableTypeWordPressDashboard

Based on the comments thus far, many people are impressed as well as shocked to see such an accurate rendition of the WordPress back end on Movable Type. Although Mark obviously prefers to use MT as his platform of choice, he undoubtedly has a soft spot in his heart for the clean, slim lined WordPress back end which after the release of WordPress 2.5, may not exist anymore.

At any rate, I was just as shocked as anyone else to see these screenshots as well as the demo. No need to be upset, although there does appear to be a rivalry between the two platforms. Aaron Brazell, a big WordPress fan himself of B5Media chimed in on the design and he said it was cool. I think likewise and I hope the comments on that MT plugin continue to be positive and not end up turning into a flame war.

If you want to see a live demo of this plugin in action, check out MT-WP BackEnd Demo (username: demo password: demo)

Please let me know what you think of this plugin and it’s similarities.

Yahoo Interviews Matt Mullenweg

Yahoo had the opportunity to have a conversation with Matt Mullenweg when he stopped by to talk with Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. Some of the topics that were covered in the interview:

  • Turning 24
  • Surprising uses of WordPress
  • The next big WordPress release (new features)
  • Scaling Automattic and WordPress.com
  • bbPress (Automattic’s message board software)
  • PHP4 vs. PHP5
  • PHP vs. other languages for web development

Some interesting things that I picked up from the interview are as follows:

  • Lots of websites are using the core of WordPress for other applications.
  • 2.5 is going to be the largest release since 1.2
  • Lots of things that WordPress users were used to have been reworked.
  • WordPress is going for an even more slimlined, simplified user experience.
  • Automattic still employs 18 people. 14 of those 18 people deal with coding.
  • WordPress.com is still growing by leaps and bounds. WordPress.com seems to be hosting a number of savvy or high trafficked blogs.
  • Talkpress will indeed be a hosted version of BB Press. It will be looked at as an experiment that might or might not be successful. BB Press will reach 1.0 this year.
  • 2.5 won’t contain database changes, it will mostly deal with the use intgerface.
  • PHP 4 compatibility with WordPress will not be broken anytime in the near future.

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.

WordPress 2.3.3 Security Release

WordPress.org Logo

The WordPress.org team has released an official update to WordPress dubbed 2.3.3. This update fixes a serious security flaw that was discovered within the XML-RPC implementation. By using this flaw, a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog.

The team also managed to place three bug fixes into the patch which can be viewed here. These types of releases for WordPress.org are serious. No, the world will not end if you do not upgrade. However, you are putting your site at an increased risk of being exploited. As was reported by me on WeblogToolsCollection.com, malicious users are in fact taking advantage of the flaws found within the WP-Forum plugin. If you are using WP-Forum, you are encouraged to disable the plugin until a security patch has been released.

Visit WordPress.org to see the complete details regarding this release.

Another Mile Stone Reached

As it turns out,

Akismet has caught 10,023 spam for you since you first installed it.

It wasn’t too long ago when Akismet blocked the first 1,000 spam messages. In just a short time after that, it’s now 10,000. Next Stop, 100,000. And if the past is anything to go by, 100,000 will be reached in no time at all! Thanks Akismet for saving me a ton of time and hassle.

Going To WordCamp Dallas – Are You?

The other day, I happen to purchase a ticket to WordCamp Dallas. The ticket cost me $20 and the event will mark the first conference I have ever been able to attend. The event is being organized by Charles Stricklin, host of the WordPress Podcast. If you want to know more about what WordCamp is, check out the post I wrote for WeblogToolsCollection.com called What Is WordCamp?

The event will be featured by some interesting speakers/speeches such as:

  • Matt Mullenweg on WordPress 2.5 and Beyond
  • 45 Ways To Power Up Your Blog by John Pozadzides
  • How to prevent, detect and stop content theft by Jonathan Bailey
  • Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell
  • C’mon, Let’s Talk! Building influence and interaction with blogging by Liz Strauss
  • WordPress Power Tips by Lorelle Van Fossen
  • SEO For Bloggers by Chris Smith
  • Aaron Brazell
  • A panel of people to discuss the business of blogging: Mark Ghosh, Liz Strauss, and Aaron Brazell
  • Testing With WordPress by Jacob Santos

I’m pretty stoked about going to an event where people want to meet me and vice versa. I’ll be able to meet Ronald Huereca in person as well as, Charles Stricklin, Mark Ghosh, Lorelle Van Fossen, Matt Mullenweg and others. I plan on taking quite a few photos along with some video clips of the event. If I can manage to get a voice recorder, I also plan on getting a couple of interviews completed and then turning that into a WordPress Weekly episode.

If you are attending the event, let me know.

Move Over Gratavar Its Ravatars Turn

Ever wanted to add some flare to the commenting section of your WordPress blog? Grok-Code has coded up a nifty little plugin called Ravatars. Ravatars displays a random avatar for each visitor that is generated at random. The icons are based on email so if a user uses the same email address for each comment, the same Ravatar image will display. You can choose to customize the plugin to display Ravatars that are related to your theme or visitors can opt to configure their own avatar via Gravatar.

Ravatar comes with a default set of images, or you can remove those and upload your own. It works by creating a hash of the email address, and then using the hash to choose an image and the place where the image should be cropped. Uploading your own images gives you the power to customize avatars for your site. A backpacking site might use use nature scenes. Or you might pick images that match your blog’s color scheme.

ravatarexample

In order to customize the plugin, you should upload photos to the plugins/ravatars/parts directory. As of this writing, the only two image formats supported are .jpg and .png. Grok-Code recommends keeping the amount of avatar images within the directory to around 40 although if your blog contains a lot of unique comments, you will most likely need to increase the amount of images if you want each commenter to have  their own image.

You can download the Ravatar plugin from their release page by clicking here. The release page also contains installation instructions as well. If you happen to download and install this plugin, let us know what you think of it. I think it will be a nice way of spicing up the commenting section so it doesn’t appear so bland.

WordPress Dev Cycle To Possibly Change

According to Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers behind WordPress has announced that the Automattic Dev team is considering a change to the WordPress.org development cycle.

We are considering building this extra time over the holidays into our roadmap. This would mean one less release per year. We’d release in Spring, Summer, and Fall, and then again in Spring of the following year. With six months of development time, the Spring release would contain the bigger features that don’t fit into the shorter Summer and Fall release windows.

I’m actually hoping that they go through with this decision. I’m thinking that the extra development time will help to decrease the amount of bugs in the Trac. You know, those pesky things that are more of a nuisance than an actual bug. This dev period would also give individuals more time to CATCH UP. You shouldn’t be far behind as far as versions go anyways, but the extra time could be beneficial.

Forum2pt0 Is Back

Forum2pt0

I’ve been giving the forum idea some second thoughts and have decided to bring them back online, right were we left off. With my new interest in WordPress, I have created an entire section in the forums dedicated to various aspects of the open source project hoping that this will help build an awesome community of WordPress users. I’ve since replaced the link to the forum to the top navigation bar of the blog. If you don’t feel like moving your mouse that much, you can check out the forums here.

I’ve also created a child forum for WordPress weekly so be sure to check out the forums again and lets see if we can’t make this forum rock the house.