WordPress.org

On this weeks edition of the show, Alex Denning was my special guest along with the new owners of WPShout.com, Fred and David of PressUp Inc. In the show, Alex and I talk about the last four years of publishing content on WPShout.com, what types of opportunities it’s opened up for him, and what it took to put together his annual webhosting review posts. Later in the show, I was joined by David and Fred. We talked about their plans for WPShout.com, their WordPress background and if they have any plans to monetize the site. Since Alex is now going to be focusing on school and has sold his website, I want to take this opportunity to thank him personally for spending his time making WPShout a great resource in the WordPress community.

If you will be attending WordCamp London in November, be sure to attend Alex’s session or at least say hi to him. It’s his first WordCamp and he’s speaking!

Stories Discussed:

WordPress 3.7 Released
Definitive Guide For Disabling Updates
The Menace Of Theme Creep
How to find live examples of just about any WordPress theme

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Friday, November 1st 3 P.M. Eastern – Our special guest for next week’s episode will be Cory Miller of iThemes.com to talk about his experience of leading one of the most successful commercial WordPress theme businesses on the web.

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Listen To Episode #125:

It’s easy to get distracted while writing posts. You’re in a browser and you probably have a few other tabs open with notifications beeping at you from every direction. On top of that, the WordPress post editor has a ton of meta boxes competing for your attention. With all of this going on, how can you focus on crafting beautiful words?

The Distraction Free Writing Mode (DFWM) feature was introduced in WordPress 3.2, giving users the opportunity to find a zen place for writing while staying within the dashboard. It’s launched via the “fullscreen” button in the editor, whisking you away to a screen with an intentionally-limited button selection. These buttons fade away in the top menu as you begin composing. Here’s the default DFWM screen:

Enhance Distraction Free Writing Mode with the Visual Editor

Many users love the minimalism of this screen and will write the text of their post but format it later within the regular post editor. Just Writing is a new plugin that aims to keep you in the DFWM for the entire writing and formatting process.

Essentially, the plugin enhances DFWM by adding the visual editor to the top with the other buttons. It also disappears as per the normal behavior. Here’s a look at the enhanced version with all the extra buttons turned on:

With the plugin installed you gain the “Undo” and “Redo” functions, text align, underline. proofreading and everything that you would expect with the visual editor. Beyond that, Just Writing also performs a few more subtle functions:

• Adds a Preview button to the right of the Save button
• Moves the exit link to the right of the new Preview button as a real button
• Re-orders the button list to make more sense
• Per-user preferences for enabling Just Writing
• Per-user preferences for which buttons to display

Even if you’re not a fan of the visual editor buttons, the extra Preview button is a definite improvement over the DFWM in its default form. Installing the plugin also doesn’t universally apply the settings to all users. Each user is able to choose the buttons he wants to display to create his own zen writing place.

Customize Your Distraction Free Writing Mode Experience

Enhanced? Isn’t the point of the distraction free writing mode to get rid of everything and just write? Sure there are some of you out there who hate the visual editor with a passion, but there are also many who currently depend upon it.

Just Writing isn’t an all-or-nothing plugin. It has an options panel where you can add or remove support for any of the visual editor buttons:

These options allow you to select the buttons that help you to stay in the flow while composing posts.

Just Writing is available for free in the WordPress plugin repository. If you feel like the Distraction Free Writing Mode is missing a few functions, give this plugin a spin and see if it enhances your writing experience.

Today following the release of WordPress 3.7 many users are wondering where the settings page is to configure these options. The answer is that there is no settings page in the WordPress admin. If you upgrade to WordPress 3.7, the default behavior is that you’ll be automatically upgraded for security and minor releases.

The fact that it’s security and minor releases only is a very important distinction here. These generally do not break anyone’s website, plugin or themes. If you’re using a plugin that gets broken due to a security release, then that raises a red flag and a few questions about how that plugin is interacting with the WordPress core.

If you want to make changes to WordPress default behavior of keeping your site current with security/minor releases, you will need to edit your wp-config.php file.

I asked Andrew Nacin if there is a plan to expose the core update configuration options to the UI in the future. He replied that there is “no good reason for an opt-out UI now, but as we grow more confident, I imagine an opt-in UI for major versions could be next.” So maybe this is around the corner, but for now, read on to learn how to configure your updates.

3 Basic Options for Core Updates in WordPress 3.7

Let’s simplify things here. You basically have three options for WordPress core updates:

1. Update the core for minor versions (on by default):

If you’re running WordPress 3.7, there’s nothing you need to do to turn this on. You’ll be automatically updated for security and minor releases. Here’s what it would look like in wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'minor' );

2. Disable all core updates:

If you’re uncomfortable with WordPress keeping your site current with minor releases and security updates, here’s how you turn it off. Add this to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false );

However, I would encourage you to read this definitive guide from Nacin before turning off core updates completely.

3. Get all updates, including development, major and minor releases:

This is the cowboy option that is probably more likely something you’d want to enable on a personal blog. If you turn this on in wp-config.php, you’ll be automatically updated for every release that WordPress puts out:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true );

You can also apply all of the above via new filters added in WordPress 3.7, as outlined in the codex article on Configuring Automatic Background Updates. Filters are also available for plugin, theme and translation updates should you want to add those in the mix, too.

If you’re scratching your head and trying to get your brain around all of these options, wondering what to do, then just leave the default options in place and don’t mess with it. WordPress strongly discourages disabling the automatic security updates. These updates have been heavily tested and are quite safe. Getting hacked because you didn’t want to take security updates would be really lame. The best option is to leave security updates in place.

WordPress 3.7 has been released and the big news is that WordPress now has the ability to update itself. This begins a new era of automatic background updates for security and minor releases. Web hosts around the world have been eagerly awaiting this release and are cheering its arrival. The upgrade process has been greatly improved and boy is it ever solid:

We ended the WordPress 3.7 beta cycle with 112,434 automatic background updates attempted and not a single critical failure.

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) October 25, 2013

Not a single critical failure. Try blaming Nacin for that, folks.

WordPress 3.7 is dubbed Basie, after Count Basie, an American jazz pianist with an unparalleled talent for improvisation. He learned to improvise while playing along to silent films for a local movie theater. Before he was famous, Basie sharpened his improv skills by playing jazz piano at parties and resorts. He went on to create his own jazz orchestra and mentor many other musicians along the way.

It seems fitting that this release honors Basie. The web is full of hackers who seek to exploit any vulnerability they can find in WordPress. Users have to be quick to improvise and secure our sites as soon as minor releases are shipped out. Automatic background updates give millions of users the ability to stay current with each security update. The beautiful thing is that it’s totally effortless on the part of the user.

On the surface you won’t see too many flashy UI improvements, but under the hood you’ll find a better engine. When you search WordPress you’ll see better and more relevant results. Developers will be happy to find improved support for multisite, advanced date queries and a ton of new functions to play with. You can review every last detail on the dedicated 3.7 release page.

WordPress 3.7 has a beautiful about.php page that you can only see if you upgrade. Hint, hint. It includes a live demo of the new password strength meter that will help you to create stronger passwords.

This release also includes better global support for translations, meaning that it will automatically install language files and silently keep them up to date. There’s a trend here: WordPress is doing a lot more for you in the background so that you can focus on creating content. This sets the bar pretty high for what users can expect from their publishing software in the future.

Now that WordPress can update itself, I am once again reminded that this software is a living, breathing thing. Andrew Nacin, Dion Hulse and Jon Cave had the help of 211 contributors in shipping 3.7. Hats off to these folks – they’ve worked hard and done well.

Time to celebrate with a few tunes from Count Basie and his jazz orchestra to kick off your upgrades. By the way, if you’re configuring automatic updates for everything, this is the last time you’ll ever have to update WordPress manually.

Version 3.7 of WordPress, named “Basie” in honor of Count Basie, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. This release features some of the most important architectural updates we’ve made to date. Here are the big ones:

• Updates while you sleep: With WordPress 3.7, you don’t have to lift a finger to apply maintenance and security updates. Most sites are now able to automatically apply these updates in the background. The update process also has been made even more reliable and secure, with dozens of new checks and safeguards.
• Stronger password recommendations: Your password is your site’s first line of defense. It’s best to create passwords that are complex, long, and unique. To that end, our password meter has been updated in WordPress 3.7 to recognize common mistakes that can weaken your password: dates, names, keyboard patterns (123456789), and even pop culture references.
• Better global support: Localized versions of WordPress will receive faster and more complete translations. WordPress 3.7 adds support for automatically installing the right language files and keeping them up to date, a boon for the many millions who use WordPress in a language other than English.

For developers there are lots of options around how to control the new updates feature, including allowing it to handle major upgrades as well as minor ones, more sophisticated date query support, and multisite improvements. As always, if you’re hungry for more dive into the Codex or browse the over 400 closed tickets on Trac.

A New Wave

This release was led by Andrew Nacin, backed up by Dion Hulse and Jon Cave. This is our first release using the new plugin-first development process, with a much shorter timeframe than in the past. (3.6 was released in August.) The 3.8 release, due in December, will continue this plugin-led development cycle that gives much more autonomy to plugin leads and allows us to decouple feature development from a release. You can follow this grand experiment, and what we’re learning from it, on the make/core blog. There are 211 contributors with props in this release:

Aaron Brazell, Aaron D. Campbell, Aaron Holbrook, Aaron Jorbin, adamsilverstein, Alexander Hoereth, Alex Mills (Viper007Bond), Amy Hendrix (sabreuse), andg, Andrew Nacin, Andrew Norcross, Andrew Ozz, Andrew Spittle, askapache, atimmer, Barry, Beau Lebens, ben.moody, Ben Miller, Bernhard Riedl, BFTrick, Billy (bananastalktome), bmb, Brandon Kraft, brianhogg, Brian Richards, Bryan Petty, Carl Danley, CharlesClarkson, Chip Bennett, Chouby, Chris Olbekson, Chris Rudzki, coderaaron, Coen Jacobs, Colin Robinson, cyonite, Daan Kortenbach, Daniel Bachhuber, Daniel Convissor, dartiss, Daryl Koopersmith, Dave Ross, David Laietta, Dion Hulse, dllh, Dominik Schilling (ocean90), dpash, Drew Jaynes, DrProtocols, Dustin Filippini, dzver, Edward Caissie, enej, Eric Andrew Lewis, Eric Mann, Evan Solomon, faishal, Faison, Foofy, Frankie Jarrett, Frank Klein, Gary Cao, Gary Pendergast, Gaya Kessler, George Stephanis, Gizburdt, goldenapples, gradyetc, Gregory Cornelius, Gustavo Bordoni, hakre, Helen Hou-Sandi, Ian Dunn, Ipstenu (Mika Epstein), itinerant, J.D. Grimes, jakub.tyrcha, James Collins, Jen Mylo, Jeremy Buller, Jeremy Felt, Jesper Johansen (jayjdk), Joe Hoyle, Joey Kudish, John Beales, John Blackbourn (johnbillion), John Fish, John James Jacoby, John P. Bloch, Jonas Bolinder (jond3r), Jonathan Christopher, Jonathan Desrosiers, Jon Cave, Jon Lynch, Joost de Valk, Joseph Scott, Josh Betz, Justin de Vesine, Justin Sainton, K.Adam White, Kailey (trepmal), Ketwaroo, kevinB, Kim Parsell, kitchin, Konstantin Kovshenin, Konstantin Obenland, koopersmith, Kurt Payne, Lance Willett, Lee Willis (leewillis77), lessbloat, Lew Ayotte, Luke Gedeon, Marcin Pietrzak, Marco Cimmino, Marco Galasso, Mark Jaquith, Mark McWilliams, Marko Heijnen, Mel Choyce, Michael Beckwith, Mike Hansen, Mike Schinkel, Mike Schroder, Milan Dinic, mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine), Mr Papa, Naoko Takano, Naomi, Nashwan Doaqan, NateJacobs, nathanrice, Niall Kennedy, Nick Daugherty, Nick Halsey, Nick Momrik, Nikhil Vimal (NikV), Nikolay Bachiyski, noahsilverstein, nofearinc, nukaga, nullvariable, Oleg Butuzov, Paolo Belcastro, Parham, Paul Biron, Paul de Wouters, pavelevap, peterjaap, Peter Westwood, Philip Arthur Moore, Pippin Williamson, plocha, Pollett, Ptah Dunbar, Rami Yushuvaev, Rasheed Bydousi, RayBernard, rboren, Reuben Gunday, rfair404, Richard Tape, Rick Radko, Robert Chapin, Robert Dall, Rodrigo Primo, Ron Rennick, rpattillo, Ryan Boren, Ryan McCue, Sam Hotchkiss, Scott Reilly, scottsweb, Scott Taylor, scribu, scruffian, Seisuke Kuraishi (tenpura), Sergey Biryukov, ShinichiN, Simon Prosser, Simon Wheatley, Siobhan, Siobhan Bamber (siobhyb), sirzooro, solarissmoke, Stephanie Leary, Stephen Edgar (@netweb), Stephen Harris, strangerstudios, sweetie089, swissspidy, Takayuki Miyauchi, Takuma Morikawa, Taylor Lovett, tivnet, TobiasBg, Tom Auger, toscho, Travis Smith, Ulrich Sossou, vericgar, Vinod Dalvi, Weston Ruter, wikicms, Will Norris, Wojtek Szkutnik, wycks, Yoav Farhi, and Yuri Victor.

Enjoy what may be one of your last few manual updates. See you soon for version 3.8!

The questions are simple but the answers are not. Can a theme that is built for developers using best practices be successful in the commercial space? Can a commercial theme add value without adding functionality and bloat? Those are the questions that a trio of WordPress developers are going to try to answer with their 3them.es experiment.

Michelle Schulp of Marktimemedia has published her experience at Pressnomics 2013 and the reasoning behind the new experiment. While at the event, she attended the Commercialization in the WordPress ecosystem panel session featuring business owners Pippin Williamson, Carl Hancock, Cory Miller, and Helen Souness. In that discussion, the following question was asked. How do you build a commercial digital product, especially one built using the GPL, that adds value in a way that is distinguishable from its competitors? According to Michelle, the panel was quick to dismiss commercial themes as being easily commoditized.

After talking with a number of people at the conference, Michelle decided to partner with Kiko Doran, and Josh Broton to start the 3themes experiment.

3themes is a unique collaboration because we will also be documenting it every step of the way: recording our weekly meetings on Google Hangout in the form of a podcast, blogging about our process on the website, hosting code on GitHub, voicing our thoughts on Twitter, etc. We want this not only to be a case study in the commercial theme marketplace, but in working as a small distributed team and problem solving just as we would for a client. The hope is to create some dialogue in the WordPress community, as well as just have some fun and see what great things we can build together.

If you’re interested to see where this goes, check out the live Google hangout at 8:30 PM CST on Tuesday nights as they begin the process of experimentation by first building their website and brand.

This is going to be an excellent experiment and I bet many are curious as to what the end result will be. If you remember, Justin Tadlock performed a similar experiment via ThemeForest with mildly successful results.

If you run a local WordPress meetup, you’re invited to move it under the central WordPress account on meetup.com. Jen Mylo created a form where meetup coordinators can submit their meetup to be included. The awesome benefit is that WordPress will cover the meetup.com dues for your listing.

Jen posted a number of simple guidelines that were created by active meetup group volunteers. Your group will have to fulfill these before submitting to the central account. I won’t list them all here, but this is a summary: Essentially, you can’t use your local meetup to pimp out your business or yourself. Leave Mr. Salesman at home and join a meetup to connect with other WordPress fans. Meetups are for the benefit of the community and polite and respectful behavior is expected. If you organize a meetup that qualifies, use the form to get in touch with Jen Mylo.

A some point in the future, meetup group listings will most likely switch over to using SupportPress, as they do for WordCamps. For now, they’ll be consolidating all the meetups on meetup.com. Please note that the meetup interest form is not just for new meetup groups but is also available for existing WordPress meetups that want to transfer the group over to the central account.

It’s very cool that WordPress is supporting local meetups by covering their meetup.com dues. Help spread the word to get this information out there to local meetup organizers that you know.

If you’ve ever used a WordPress site with thousands of posts and/or hundreds of pages, you might have found it a challenge to quickly navigate to the content you’re looking for. Jarvis is a new dashboard quicksearch plugin that addresses this very problem.

Created by the folks at The Web Development Group, the Jarvis plugin lets you easily search anything that you’re looking for inside the WordPress admin area, including plugins, themes, content, settings pages and everything else.

Jarvis is available on WordPress.org but it also has its own homepage where you can find a demo that shows how it works:

While different areas of the WordPress dashboard do include a search option, i.e. installed plugins or post content, there is no centralized search form to search everything. Ever install a plugin and then can’t, for the life of you, find its settings page? The Jarvis search helps you to instantly locate it. I can see how this could be very useful for a new user. For example, one might not know that the import feature is located under Tools. Using Jarvis he can quickly search and navigate to the import screen.

There’s another similar tool out there called WP Butler, which also launches from the admin bar. I don’t know if Jarvis grabbed some inspiration from its code or not but the tools seem somewhat similar in that they both make it easier to get to pages in the WordPress admin.

Beyond just helping you find things, the Jarvis plugin allows you to quickly zoom through the WordPress dashboard. For many, typing in a search box is second nature and much quicker than mousing around to the correct menu. Jarvis search appears to be lightning fast. This is one plugin that seems to be universally beneficial to both new and experienced WordPress users.

The folks at The Web Development Group created Jarvis to fill a need they saw in the WordPress admin area. This tool is the first of many that they plan to release. You can download it for free at the WP Jarvis homepage or via the Add New plugins page within the WordPress admin.

I’ve long been a fan of WordPress developer Jeffrey Pearce, better known online as Jeffikus. He’s created several educational resources for WordPress over the past few years. Today he released Pulse on github. Pulse is an open source plugin that will help developers get started with Heartbeat API development.

What is the WordPress Heartbeat API?

The Heartbeat API was a new feature as of WordPress 3.6. It currently powers the autosave, post locking and log-in expiration warning that users receive while writing posts. This API works in the background to manage communication between a user’s browser and the server, enabling the creation of WordPress-powered asynchronous apps.

Jeffikus’ Pulse plugin example demonstrates how to do two simple things:

• Outputs console data for a logged in user – the object will state that the user is logged in:
  
• Outputs console data for a non logged in user – the object will state that the user is not logged in:
  

This plugin doesn’t actually perform any specific function, except to show you how you can interact with the WordPress Heartbeat API. It’s a learning tool to help developers get started building their own plugins.

At the bottom of the Pulse plugin readme file on github Jeffikus includes a list of all the tutorials on the Heartbeat API that helped him to learn about it in the first place. If it wasn’t for other developers writing about what they are learning, he probably wouldn’t have had the inspiration to create this handy starter plugin. Hopefully, developers can use it to build something cool and help contribute back to the Heartbeat API documentation.

The membership plugin Your Members has announced that they are ceasing operations. Your Members, which has been around since 2008, was one of the early successful commercial plugins in the membership space. The tale of the plugin’s demise is an interesting one because it has more to do with development than anything else.

We started work on YM13 early this year and it became clear the new version wasn’t going to work with our current codebase. Indeed it reached the stage where even little changes are causing massive issues. So in August it was decided that we needed to make YM13 the last release on the current codebase and start on YMv2. I was rereading the blog posts that are sitting in drafts explaining where we were going and why, we never published them.

It became clear it was just not financially feasible to build YMv2 we estimated it was 6 to 9 months work to do what we wanted to do properly and to do it we need to do it properly. We also believe we can’t continue to support and update the existing codebase.

While the developers of Your Members received offers to be purchased, they declined them as they didn’t feel the buyer would provide the community with genuine support and were after their email list instead. Thus, it was decided that Your Members be withdrawn from the market and would no longer be for sale.

One of the unique aspects of Your Members is that it contained a sunset clause. Now that the plugin has been withdrawn from the market, that clause has been invoked meaning everything in the Your Members download, including assets are available under the GPL license. Prior to closing, Your Members operated under a split license with the PHP licensed under the GPL and all other files under a different license. The plugin as well as the documentation will now live on Github.

Is This The Way To Close a Business?

It’s disappointing to see any business fold but I have to hand it to the folks behind Your Members. They are making everything open source and laying the ground work for anyone else who wants to try to pick up where they left off. How do you feel about the way they closed up shop?

Managed updates have always been one of the main selling points for WP Engine’s WordPress hosting packages. Customers have the luxury of never having to update their own sites because WP Engine keeps them on the cutting edge:

We keep your site secure without you having to think about it. Whenever WordPress issues a security update, we test it, and then proactively apply it to your site.

However, the company announced today that it will not be offering support for WordPress’ new ability to update itself.

WP Engine will not be supporting the background updates for WordPress. We will continue managing the updates for your installs, testing each release on our infrastructure, and fully managing the releases of the minor updates. For example, when there is a security update to WordPress, as soon as the patch is released, we’ll update all customer sites to ensure we continue to keep your sites safe and sound.

I asked WP Engine to clarify this statement. Does this mean that customers cannot enable automatic updates via the WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE define in wp-config.php? It seems that is the case. Their official policy is that automatic background updates will be disabled and customers will not be able to turn them on:

The function will be disabled because when we update we also automatically create site backups for you.

WP Engine will still continue to update customer sites as they always have. There’s no change here, but it is always interesting to note when a company restricts access to something that will soon be native to WordPress.

Playing it Safe

One huge advantage of enabling automatic background updates for WordPress is that a site can get those security improvements the very same day they are released with no waiting time. The same applies with major releases, plugins and themes, if one wants to live adventurously. However, if you host with WP Engine, you’ll have to settle with living on the safe side.

WP Engine customers will either need to manually update their sites through the dashboard or wait for WP Engine to initiate those updates. The company tries to ship security updates out as soon as possible and these updates are usually applied within the same day. The reason for this is to keep customers from accidentally breaking their own sites without backing them up. WP Engine customers will be upgraded within a week or two of the 3.7 release, as per their announcement today. For many customers, this is exactly why they have chosen WP Engine. Not having to worry about testing major updates is a huge relief for WordPress site admins.

The Future of Managed WordPress Hosting: A Growing List of Restrictions

I am surprised that this popular WordPress hosting company is preventing its customers from taking advantage of one of the most exciting new features of WordPress 3.7. Although customers always have the freedom to manually update their sites early, they will not be permitted to allow WordPress to update itself. This makes sense as a company policy, but as a developer I can’t help but see it as a limitation.

Why not allow developers to override the WP Engine restrictions via WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE in wp-config.php? Your average user isn’t likely to venture into this file to make any modifications, so it would be safe to assume that anyone who applied those settings knew what they were doing. The WP Engine infrastructure, however, does not allow for this.

WP Engine does a lot of things right when it comes to speed and prioritizing the customer’s ability to have a development environment. The company is a proven and reliable WordPress host that I would recommend to anyone. For many customers, trading freedom for security is well worth it in order to have their sites fully “managed.”

But what about the others who may want the freedom to let WordPress update itself? The company has very good reasons for limiting developers from doing this. But will the number of restrictions continue to grow? Managed WordPress hosts are a relatively new development in the marketplace of WordPress services. It will be interesting to see how their policies develop in relationship to WordPress core enhancements, which more often than not err on the side of giving more freedom to the user.

The WordPress ecosystem is made up of thousands of websites, code repositories, blogs, forums, etc. To a new WordPress user, it can be intimidating or downright frustrating figuring out where to go. My goal with this post is to provide a map for those who are brand new to the world of WordPress to be able to navigate with confidence. I’ve personally experienced being in a city I’ve never been to before and not knowing which direction to travel to reach my destination. It’s a frustrating experience. This guide ought to alleviate those frustrations for WordPress first timers.

Themes

So the default theme isn’t your cup of tea. Before going to Google and searching for “free WordPress themes” head over to the WordPress Theme Repository. It’s the safest place to obtain a new design for your site. Themes that are added to the repository are scanned and go through a thorough checklist before they are accepted. All of the themes hosted on the repository are free of charge. If you want to know the reasons why using Google to find free WordPress themes is bad, watch this video by Leland of Themelab.com.

Plugins

Much like the theme repository, WordPress has its own plugin repository filled to the brim with plugins to add functionality to your WordPress powered website. The WordPress plugin repository is the safest place to get code to add features to your website. Plugins are scanned and reviewed by volunteers before they are accepted into the repository. However, this does not guarantee that the code will function properly or is 100% secure for your website.

Support

The WordPress.org support forums enable the community to help each other. Creating an account is free of charge as is the support. The forums are staffed by volunteer moderators that do their best to help as many people as possibly every day. With so many people seeking help, you should exercise patience when using the forums.

Documentation

If you feel a little adventurous and want to try helping yourself first, you can visit the Codex. This Codex is like a repository for all of the detailed information for how WordPress works, inside and out. The main page of the Codex provides a number of great links to those starting out with WordPress.

Learning WordPress Through Video

While there is no official classroom to learn WordPress material, WordPress.org has the next best thing in WordPress.tv. WordPress.tv is the official website dedicated to WordPress that contains recorded sessions from WordCamps held all over the world. In fact, there is an entire how to section on the website dedicated to tutorial type videos.

Creative Inspiration

If you’re not sure what WordPress is capable of or have run into a creative block, you should browse through the WordPress showcase. The showcase is a collection of websites that have taken WordPress to the next level. There are a lot of great looking designs as well to help provide inspiration.

WordPress Face to Face

While not officially a part of the WordPress.org project, Meetup.com is used by WordPress users all across the world to put together local meetups that bring like-minded people together. I’ve attended multiple WordPress meetups in my area and I’ve helped a lot of new WordPress users find their way. It’s one of the best forms of learning and getting WordPress help that I can imagine.

Keeping Tabs On WordPress Development

While there are not many posts on the official WordPress blog, it is where official news of releases are published.

Installing WordPress On Your Phone

There is an official WordPress app for most of the smart phone devices currently out on the market such as iOS devices, BlackBerry, and Android. If you’d like to install WordPress on your phone, be sure to check out the mobile section of the WordPress.org website to see if there is one available for your device.

Wrap Up

Now you might be wondering, why didn’t I include this site or that site when putting this guide together. The purpose of the guide is to provide a map that contains the essential information new users need to know. Using this knowledge as your foundation, you should find yourself more comfortable in the WordPress ecosystem. After getting to grips with WordPress, new users will expand beyond these pillars and discover the other resources that are on the web dedicated to WordPress. It doesn’t make sense to point new users into different directions when the above information is all they really need to get started.

David Bisset may have been the first person to coin the term “Armchair WordCampers”, referring to those who live vicariously through WordCamp attendees via Twitter. The concept sparked an idea for him and he decided to create WP Armchair for this very audience.

His first version was actually created for the WordPress 10th Anniversary, a site he collaborated on with the WordPress Foundation.

Bisset is a WordPress and BuddyPress developer. He also helps to organize WordCamp Miami. The inspiration for creating WP Armchair came from his experiences as an organizer and an attendee at WordCamps.

I monitor WordCamps and conferences via Twitter hashtags and simply thought there was a better way. I notice that a lot of people are interested in monitoring conference activity as well. Even those that attend conferences – I see many of them with their laptops open to Tweetdeck or some Twitter client. I figured there should be a better way, especially since social networks like Instagram are becoming more popular.

On top of that, as a WordPress developer, I wanted the solution running on WordPress. And instead of passively showing pictures and tweets, the site would naturally store these as custom post types. So it serves as an archive of the conference.

In a way, the WP Armchair websites are chronicling the history of these WordPress events as seen through their respective hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, Vine and Flickr. Right now, each event is a separate site but Bisset said that he’s likely to combine them all into a multisite installation somewhere in the near future.

When WP Armchair monitored WordCamp San Francisco the site was able to aggregate 1,600 tweets and 1,020 photos. For WordCamp Europe, the site captured even more – in the end it was 4,223 tweets and 1,500 photos. WordPress fans monitoring from afar were able to get a taste of how awesome these events were and perhaps even resolve to attend next year.

What Plugins Make WP Armchair Work?

If you visit any of the WP Armchair sites you’ll see support for videos, pictures, embedded tweets, post favoriting and more. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes to bring all of this event information into the site.

I asked Bisset to tell me about some of the important plugins he uses to make WP Armchair work and he gave us a look behind the scenes.

I wrote three plugins that scanned Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr for tweets, photos, and videos based on a hashtag and saved them as custom post types. These make up the bulk of the site, but I also used the following plugins:

Bulk Delete – comes in handy when you want to get rid of alot of tweets or instragram posts that aren’t related to the conference (maybe you used a bad keyword or hashtag). Since tweets can come in 30 or 40 at a time, this plugin does save a little bit of time.

Love It Pro – was great to drop in and give site visitors the ability to mark posts as favorites. It was a fun experiment during WordCamp San Francisco.

Gravity Forms – on some installs, it allows us to quickly get forms (surprise!) in place for user registration, so some people could upload their own photos to the site via the WordPress Mobile app or a custom form.

Search Everything – allowed the cool ability to search for tweets, instagram photos, etc that were created by a specific user or via keyword. As an example, you could search for your own name and see if anyone mentioned you on whatever social networks the WPArmchair site was scanning. Unfortunately, it looks like Search Everything isn’t being supported as of now, so I recommend switching over to SearchWP.com.

WP Armchair Theme and Plugins are GPL and Available on github

Bisset has made both the WP Armchair Theme and plugins available on his github account. He invites contribution to the project. “There are no doubt better and different ways to do what the site does, and I welcome anyone who wants to improve it,” he said.

The WordPress Foundation has also made some of the WP Armchair functionality available to its officially hosted WordCamp site using a new plugin called Tagregator, which is also open to contribution.

Bisset believes that WP Armchair is a valuable resource for both those at home and those who are attending WordCamp events. It has even been used by The Front-End Design Conference, a non-WordPress event, to aggregate the references to the event on social media. Ultimately, WP Armchair is about bringing people and ideas together.

Even if you did go to the conference, you would be able to see everyone’s photos there instead of a gallery of a smaller group of photos the site admin posted a few days later. You also get to see who authored interesting tweets and potentially find new people to follow this way… people that are in theory just as motivated by WordPress as you are.

Monitoring posts from WordCamps online is by no means a replacement for actually attending the event. Realistically, you won’t be able to attend every WordCamp in the world, but WP Armchair gives you a better way to monitor online from wherever you may be. Many thanks to David Bisset for taking us behind the scenes and for creating a way for WordPress fans around the world to join in on events together.

WP Super Cache version 1.4 is out now. This release finally removes the mfunc, mclude and dynamic-cached-content tags as I warned about three months ago.

If your site uses that dynamic cached content functionality do not upgrade yet. There is a replacement dynamic cached content system but it’s not compatible so you’ll need to update your themes and helper plugins. It’s not difficult but there’s a lot to take in. I hope the example plugin and explanation in that post gets you most of the way there.

If you don’t use mfunc and it’s friends then you should upgrade immediately and it should be painless.

This release also has a few bug fixes and other features. It will now try to repair broken installs after a site migrates. It will update the wp-config.php and rebuild wp-content/advanced-cache.php. It will also delete tags and category cache files when a post publish status changes.

Related Posts

• WP Super Cache 0.8.4, the garbage collector
• WP Super Cache 0.8.7
• WP Super Cache 0.9.9

WP Super Cache 1.4 originally appeared on Holy Shmoly!.

The second release candidate of WordPress 3.7 is now available for testing!

Those of you already testing WordPress 3.7 will be updated automatically to RC2. (Nice.) If you’d like to start testing, there’s no time like the present! Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”) or download the release candidate here (zip). Please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums if you think you’ve found a bug, and if any known issues are raised, you’ll be able to find them here.

Developers, please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 3.7. If there is a compatibility issue, let us know as soon as possible so we can deal with it before the final release.

For more on WordPress 3.7, check out the announcement post for Release Candidate 1.

WordPress 3.7 should be arriving any day now. Everyone is excited about WordPress’ new ability to update itself for security and minor releases (and even themes and plugins, if you’re adventurous). The new password strength meter is highlighted on the About page for the release with a live demo that users can play with after they upgrade. But there’s one cool new feature that hasn’t received as much fanfare: advanced date queries.

You might be wondering what’s so exciting about advanced date queries. Alex Mills, better known online as “Viper007Bond” was the originator of the patch to improve date arguments for WP_Query, a class for querying the database for specific content. Up until now, WordPress had no easy way to get a set of posts that fall within a specific date range.

A few months ago, Alex introduced a patch that adds the ability to get complex date-based queries when fetching both posts and comments from the WordPress database. Code examples can be found on his post where he roughly outlines a few ways one might implement date-based queries.

There are virtually unlimited combinations. Here are a few examples of what is possible with the new advanced date queries:

• Query all posts written on a specific day over the years, ie. the author’s birhtday
• Query all the posts written before or after a certain date
• Query all posts written on Monday mornings
• Query 5 most recent posts made after midnight but before 5am

You can check out all the date parameters in the codex and browse a few of the examples. Imagine all the fun that could be had here! The advanced date queries should enable developers to do some interesting things with displaying timelines, custom archives, selectively random post widgets and anything else imaginable with date ranges.

Advanced date queries replaces bulkier methods used in the past, such as adding a filter to posts_where. How did we ever live without it? Check out the canonical discussion on Trac to explore the evolution of this feature and put it to good use in WordPress 3.7.

EngineThemes.com recently released version 1.0 of their latest project, ForumEngine. ForumEngine is a theme that uses Custom Post Types to turn WordPress into a forum. I caught wind of this new theme via a review published on WPLift by Joe Fylan. It’s nice to finally see theme companies thinking outside the box for once instead of whipping up the next boring portfolio theme. I have not had the opportunity to try out the theme but based on Joe’s review, there is one thing in particular that may be a showstopper for a lot of people.

Unfortunately, in order to use this theme, you’ll either need a brand new WordPress install, separate WordPress install, or be willing to see your existing content disappear.

With ForumEngine installed on your site, the site now functions as a forum, which the threads accessed directly from the homepage. Any existing posts that might’ve been on the site or those you create afterward activating the theme will now no longer be accessible, essentially removing the main functionality of WordPress: creating posts so bare that in mind if you wish to use this alongside a regular blog – you would need a separate installation. – Joe Fylan

I remember when the discussion around bbPress 2.0 was taking place. It was suggested that using a plugin that utilizes custom post types be used. At the time, bbPress was transitioning from being stand alone software into a WordPress plugin. Now we have a theme that is using custom post types and if I remember correctly, community members like Justin Tadlock frown on this practice. I reached out to John James Jacoby to get his thoughts on this theme as well as how its implementation compares with bbPress.

bbPress 2.x does use custom post types, and actually uses three of them. Forums is only a post type because of a lack of taxonomy term meta, otherwise it would be a custom taxonomy. CPT’s are fine, though it’s too bad it completely overrides the blog. Seems pretty pointless to make users decide to have either a blog or a forum, and not both.

bbPress takes other things into consideration, like forum profiles VS blog author archives, separate roles for the forums VS the blog, and goes the extra mile so forums only intersect with the blog when you want it to. If a theme was really going to do this “correctly” it should probably use a CPT for topics, and comments (with a custom comment form template) for replies; that way the behavior is familiar.

Forums are such an integral part of online communities, if I were looking for forums inside of WordPress, baking it into a commercial theme that won’t work with my existing blog doesn’t sound very appealing.

While I like the design and the thinking out of the box idea in this theme, not being able to use it with an existing blog is a huge blow towards it ever becoming a popular alternative to bbPress or other forum solutions. However, thanks to the advice provided by John James Jacoby above, there are ways of going about it that make sense. I hope to see other theme providers give it a shot. At the very least, it would be good to see theme providers list native bbPress support as one of their selling points.

WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences that celebrate everything related to WordPress, and are a great opportunity to meet other WordPress users and professionals in your community. This has been a great year for WordCamps — there have been 56 so far in more than 20 countries, and there another 15 on the calendar before the year’s over. If there’s one near you, check it out! In addition to getting to know your local WordPress community, most WordCamps attract some traveling visitors a well, giving you the chance to meet contributors to the WordPress open source project and get involved yourself.

Here are the WordCamps on the schedule for the rest of this year.

October 25-27: WordCamp Boston, Boston, MA, USA
October 25-26: WordCamp Malaga, Spain
October 26: WordCamp Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal
October 26: WordCamp Sofia, Bulgaria
November 7: WordCamp Cape Town, South Africa
November 9: WordCamp Porto, Portugal
November 9-10: WordCamp Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya
November 15: WordCamp Edmonton, AB, Canada
November 16-17: WordCamp Orlando, FL, USA
November 16: WordCamp Denver, CO, USA
November 23-24: WordCamp London, UK
November 23-24: WordCamp Raleigh, NC, USA
November 23: WordCamp São Paulo, Brazil
December 14: WordCamp Las Vegas, NV, USA
December 14-15: WordCamp Sevilla, Spain

No WordCamps on this list in your area? Not to worry! There are thriving WordPress meetups all over the world where you can meet like-minded people, and we maintain a library of WordCamp videos at WordPress.tv.

Get Involved

• If you’re interested in organizing a WordCamp in your area, check out our WordCamp planning site.
• If you’re interested in starting a WordPress meetup in your area, let us know and we can set up a group on meetup.com for you.
• And speaking of WordCamp videos, we’ve recently enabled volunteer-generated subtitles/closed captioning of the videos on WordPress.tv to make them more accessible. Interested in helping? Check out the WordPress.tv subtitling instructions.

If you want to grow in your BuddyPress skills, there’s a new book on the market that you’ll want to get your hands on. BuddyPress Theme Development has just hit Amazon. The digital version is out now and you’ll be able to get a printed copy on October 24th, 2013. Packt will also have a version of the book that includes access to code for those who want to “follow along at home” with the code examples.

Written by expert BuddyPress theme developer and contributor, Tammie Lister, this book will help you learn how to create BuddyPress themes from start to finish. BuddyPress Theme Development provides a comprehensive guide to BuddyPress theming with practical, hands-on tutorials that will put you on the path to building your own themes.

Tammie walks you through the basics, such as how to use CSS to make changes to themes. She also includes more advanced topics like creating custom templates for BuddyPress components. You’ll learn how to add functionality to enhance your community, including how to build your own widgets into your theme. Once your theme is finished, Tammie shows you how to run theme-checks to ensure that it’s ready for launch.

I checked in with Tammie for a mini Twitter interview on the details of the book. She has been working on it since just after BuddyCamp Miami, which took place in early April of this year. Many theming books are outdated even before they hit the shelves, but Tammie has made sure that everything in her book is up to date with the upcoming BuddyPress 1.9 release. She is the developer heading up the work on the new template pack that will ship with BuddyPress 1.9.

If you’re a BuddyPress developer looking for resources to keep your skills sharp, BuddyPress Theme Development is a good one to add to your collection. Packt Publishing couldn’t have found a better person to write this book. Get your copy today on Amazon or pre-order the printed edition from Packt Publishing to get the eBook and PacktLib access thrown in for free.