November 2013 • Post Status

Barley for WordPress is a simple and effective inline editor

I’ve had an opportunity to play with Barley for WordPress, an inline editor plugin. Barley is a two-sided product. Barley is a hosted, PHP based CMS, and Barley for WordPress is a WordPress plugin that extends the hosted Barley editing experience to WordPress publishers.

My first thought when seeing Barley for WordPress was that it was interesting timing, considering the front-end editing WordPress core plugin project that’s currently under development. Colin Devroe is a co-founder of Plain, the company behind Barley, and I asked him about how Barley for WordPress fits in:

Inline editing is still very new to most people. Just as there isn’t any one email client or Twitter client that is right for everyone, surely there isn’t any one inline editor that will be just right for every use case.

We hope to bring the Barley editing experience to many more platforms and we hope people begin to expect a great, simple, yet full featured editing experience wherever they see Barley pop up. So we sort of hope Barley becomes a standard.

Using the Barley inline editor

I was a little skeptical when I heard about the Barley for WordPress project. It seems a bit odd to me that a company would build a PHP based, non-WordPress CMS and then extend that publishing experience for self-hosted WordPress. However, they’ve done a very nice job with their editor. Barley for WordPress is a smooth writing experience, and I could imagine it being very useful for a lot of site owners and consultants that cater to mostly non-technical users.

There isn’t a whole lot to say from a technical perspective. I’ve used this product on a demo site, but I haven’t been able to analyze the code at all. But from a user perspective, it works quite well. Their demo video gives a good perspective on the experience:

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Jeffrey Zeldman is joining Automattic’s advisory board

Jeffrey Zeldman announced in a tweet this morning that he’s joining Automattic‘s board of advisors. Zeldman is the king of web standards and has been a huge presence in the web community for over 15 years. He’s the founder of Happy Cog and co-founder of A List Apart, and An Event Apart, and A Book Apart.

Zeldman.com is one of the oldest blogs on the internet, and now runs WordPress. Zeldman’s company, Happy Cog, also designed the dashboard for WordPress 2.5 in 2008.

With his new role on Automattic’s board, it’s a great opportunity for the company to receive valuable insight from someone who perhaps has as much perspective about the general web as anyone else.

I asked Matt Mullenweg for his thoughts regarding Zeldman joining the board:

Jeffrey was a huge influence in getting me involved in web development through his work helping the world discover web standards. He continues to be an inspiration and one of the leading voices of the independent web. It’s an honor to have his advice as we grow Automattic, WordPress.com, and Jetpack.

The most recent interview I know of between Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s founder, and Zeldman, is this episode of The Big Web Show in 2010, which is entertaining to look back on.

Zeldman’s show, The Big Web Show, is still running and now airs on Mule Radio, and is one of my favorite podcasts.

Jeffrey Zeldman is the latest addition to the small board of advisors of the company that makes WordPress.com. Below is a list of the leadership team and board members I’m aware of. I’ve emailed Matt Mullenweg to request a complete list. Update: Mullenweg informs me they don’t have a public list of advisors.