Matt Mullenweg just delivered the 2013 State of the Word, his annual update about WordPress. He started off discussing the history of WCSF, and the first WordCamp San Francisco 8 years ago. It was pretty low tech at first, and organizers have learned a great deal since then. There have in fact been 314 WordCamp’s…
I work a decent amount with Multisite. Not a ton, but maybe on about 10% of the websites I build. There’s sometimes confusion at work as to what’s a good use for Multisite and what is not. I also see this in the greater WordPress community. Let’s discuss what some common issues are, and how…
Let’s pull the bandaid off real quick, and it won’t hurt as bad: Theme Framework has turned into a marketing term. I lean more every day to giving theme framework the premium treatment. Just because a product costs money doesn’t make it premium at all. Nevertheless, the marketing term came and it stuck, and almost…
I saw today that WordPress.com has released a new WordPress theme geared toward comic writers, called Panel. It reminded me of an older project called ComicPress. ComicPress was probably ahead of its time in terms of just how niche it is, and in 2011 it had stopped major development. However, looking at the theme on…
WordPress.com has launched the MP6 dashboard redesign to everyone this morning. The comments on Matt Thomas’ announcement post are pretty enlightening as to how regular folks feel, and also a bit entertaining. In short, most are happy and some are very unhappy. Not many people are in the middle. I do think a couple of…
Tung Do, the owner of DevPress, has written a post that he knows may be more ambitious than he can handle. He notes a longstanding desire to “revolutionize the WordPress-experience” and he wants to do so by transforming DevPress into a hosted web platform. While Tung says he is not aiming for the WordPress.com audience,…
GigaOM recently launched a redesign, and in their development, really focused on improving page load times. The results are especially impressive, considering how much content they are loading per page view. Their interview with WordPress.com VIP is definitely worthwhile.
Twenty Thirteen is officially available on WordPress.com now. This is very interesting to me, as it leads me to believe the new functions around post formats will remain in 3.6, even if the new UI does not. Designed by Joen Asmussen, Twenty Thirteen is a nice, spunky addition to the default theme collection.
This is a surprising move. WordPress.com has partnered with a company called ShopLocket to enable eCommerce for WordPress.com customers. Anyone ever heard of or used ShopLocket? Seems like a pretty direct response to Squarespace’s eCommerce offering to me.
Sarah Gooding has done a nice comparison of WordPress.org and WordPress.com. This could be useful for when you’re trying to explain the difference to clients.
Techcrunch reports that WordPress.com has teamed up with menu-distributor startup Locu to display menus in their restaurant vertical. Locu customers (and now WordPress.com customers) can add their menus to the Locu interface and Locu integrates those menus with various other services, like OpentTable, Facebook, and Citysearch.
Austin Gunter has done a nice feature on the WP Engine blog on a new plugin called Swiftype. It seems the folks behind Swiftype have been “blessed” by the WordPress.com VIP team as a more relevance-based search solution. I’m certainly going to check it out soon.
Ever tried using the default RSS widget included with WordPress to show a photo blog or media embedded in a RSS feed? This plugin adds that feature. It will grab images (that have been embedded) and show them on the front end. Now you can show off your WordPress.com photo blog or other photo site.
Earlier today, I tweeted (big news, right?) that the WordPress.com verticals that have been launching left and right seem like little more than SEO plays on the landing pages. Well, James Farmer, founder of Edublogs – a huge WordPress Multisite instance for educators – has laid it all on the table. Never one to hold…
The Daily Post on WordPress.com has a post explaining more about the WordAds system on WordPress.com. WordAds is a managed ads system Automattic created for the platform, so bloggers can monetize their blogs. It’s relevant, as traditional advertisers like Google Ads are not allowed.
Michael Fields posted on the theme review team listserve this morning that the WordPress.com Theme Team has created a resource page for theme guidelines. They use this resource for reviewing themes submitted to WordPress.com, but it can be useful to the theme review team, and your own themes, as well. Thanks theme wranglers! edit: I…
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