WordPress.org

Earlier today, I read an article that took all of the hard work volunteers completed for inclusion into WordPress 3.8 and flushed it down the toilet. The main reason for their criticism is that WordPress is boring. The software is not changing enough to keep pace with competitors such as SquareSpace, Ghost, or Medium. The premise of the article is that WordPress will not be the future of web publishing within the next 10 years. However, nowhere in the article did the author explain which platform that would be and why.

Experimental Plugins Are Good!

WordPress has gone through at least 3 major redesigns of the administration interface. Those were radical changes involving colors, layouts, and moving links around. Each change brought a new round of anger from those that had just gotten used to the previous design. I’ve used software that renovated the user interface and it’s not easy adjusting to change, especially when a user considers it a change for the worse. The back-end of WordPress hasn’t seen a major redesign for a while and that is one of the reasons why the MP6 experiment took place.

Instead of the typical development process of changing everything in core, MP6 was developed as a plugin alongside core so that experiments could be conducted with colors, fonts, and various other changes. I love this development process for two reasons. First, it makes it easy to help out during the development phase by using the plugin. Second, using the plugin before it gets merged into core gives me an opportunity to become familiar with the user interface changes. Despite all of the changes within MP6, the final design is really just an improvement of what we already have in WordPress 3.7.

WordPress Can’t Afford To Renovate

It’s experiments like MP6 that have me embracing iteration versus renovation. Why completely change things around if it’s not broken? In my opinion, that’s what change for the sake of change is. Sure, renovating an old kitchen into something sleek and modern is wonderful. But with WordPress being used on 20% of the web, it doesn’t make sense to push out major changes that could stop the growth of WordPress or worse, decrease market share due to so many disgruntled users. As features that would have been developed in core are starting off as plugins first, we should see changes merged into WordPress at an accelerated rate. Therefore, it’s only a matter of time before WordPress “catches up“.

I don’t have any doubt that WordPress will be celebrating its second decade of existence powering 30% of the web or more. Since iterations are small changes over time, it’s interesting to think about what WordPress may look like 10 years from now. I’d rather be part of the journey instead of getting everything all at once.

Julie Bort at Business Insider writes How Automattic Grew Into A Startup Worth $1 Billion With No Email And No Office Workers. Includes a short interview with me at the end.

BuddyPress 1.9 beta has been slightly delayed, but lead developer John James Jacoby says that it’s not too far off course. There are 43 tickets left in 1.9. During the BuddyPress development meeting today, BP core contributors addressed tickets that need more attention and caught everyone up for where 1.9 is headed.

BuddyPress 1.9 Will Introduce a New Notifications Component

One of the exciting new features coming in the next release is a separate notifications component. “I’ve wanted it to be it’s own component for some time, and we’re doing that in 1.9,” Jacoby said. “We’re adding a UI for it now, and allowing for read/unread marking. There are some improvements to the underlying code, but no breaking changes, schema changes, etc.”

According to BP core developer Boone Gorges, the new notifications component is largely adapted from BP_Core_Notification. He clarified: “The underlying code is actually brand new, in a new component directory, bp-notifications, with new function/class names.”

The good news is that third party plugins will not be affected by changes made to add the new notifications component to the core. Jacoby assured developers that this is not going to break everything. “Existing plugins/third party plugins will continue to work as they do.”

For 1.9 they are shooting for the following features to be included with the component:

• Ability to enable/disable at the component level.
• Add a UI for read/unread notifications.
• A control panel for moderators to see all notifications, to clear them, delete them, etc…
• Allow users to toggle notifications back to unread.
• Improve the BP_Core_Notification class methods so they are more flexible like the activity and group components.

A dedicated notifications screen will be introduced to provide a log of notices for each member and is likely to be located at: members/username/notifications. The new component will allow for a lot more interesting interactions with BuddyPress notifications.

Goodbye BP Default Theme

The last part of the BuddyPress development meeting was dedicated to discussing the inevitable retirement of the BP Default theme. BuddyPress 1.7, released earlier this year in April, introduced theme compatibility. This made it possible for BuddyPress to be dropped into any WordPress theme. Boone created a ticket that proposes a solution to stop offering bp-default on new installations.

As of 1.9, we should no longer offer bp-default as an installable theme for new installations. This will be the first step in the longer-term task of removing bp-default from the BP codebase, and spinning it out into its own theme.

The patch Boone submitted stops BuddyPress from registering the bp-themes theme directory unless it finds one of the following cases to be true:

• The current theme is bp-default (get_stylesheet())
• The current theme is a child of bp-default (get_template())

That means that there is nothing to worry about if you are running the default theme or a child theme derived from it. You will still be able to update your community to BuddyPress 1.9 when the time comes.

There is some work to be done here, as the team will need to provide an upgrade route for bp-default for future BuddyPress releases, but everything is moving in the right direction. As of 1.9, the BP core team will stop active development on the default theme. With that, BuddyPress will bid a fond farewell to BP Default and will focus on making its components more awesome for all WordPress themes.

WordPress 3.7 made big strides towards helping users create stronger passwords with the new password strength meter, powered by the zxcvbn library. Despite having this excellent tool available, many users have admitted that they are in fact too lazy to come up with a strong password and would prefer to have a password generator available within the WordPress admin.

Aaron Campbell opened a trac ticket on a related topic five years ago, requesting a button that generates a random password to use when creating a new user account in the admin section. Brad Williams chimed in on the original ticket to suggest the cPanel password generator as a good UI example of how WordPress might include this feature. The same idea was also presented by Ryan Duff two years ago in a post on the WordPress Ideas page. While the password strength meter is now active on this screen, you still need to create the password yourself.

Proposal to Add Simple User Password Generator to Core

Several months ago, Pippin Williamson created a new ticket, proposing the inclusion of the Simple User Password Generator plugin, created by the folks at 10up, to accomplish this. This plugin also adds an option to encourage the user to change his password when logged in to the admin. It also has an option to send existing users the new, auto-generated password. It looks like this enhancement is on track to be included in WordPress 3.8.

More Password Wishlist Items

The Simple User Password Generator plugin is excellent but it doesn’t take into account editing your own password at profile.php, which is just as important as setting up new user passwords. It would be helpful to include its capabilities on this screen for changing passwords.

Hopefully the new addition will be extensible so that other plugins can make use of it. It would be nice to be able to easily add this to BuddyPress front-end password management in the settings screen via a plugin.

Ultimately, maintaining a strong password is the responsibility of the user. Do you think that WordPress users would, on the whole, be better served with a built-in password generator? Given that there are already many third party services such as LastPass, 1password and others that can do this in the browser, should we be adding this to the core?

Chris Lema recently published a great article that in my opinion, really shines a light on the positive aspects of the WordPress community as a whole. Chris calls it “Approachable WordPress”. In his story he describes how easy it is to approach anyone in the WordPress community, regardless of their popularity.

WordPress Celebrities

Chris’ story reminds me of my trip to Dallas in 2008 where I attended my first WordCamp. This event was a huge milestone. It’s where I met Mark Ghosh of Weblogtoolscollection.com, which at the time, was the most popular website dedicated to WordPress. It’s also the first opportunity I had to meet other people within the WordPress community face to face. Attending WordCamp Dallas was like going to a family reunion. All of the attendees were friendly and enjoyed being in each others company.

The highlight of that event was that it was the first time I had the chance to meet Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of WordPress. It was such a surreal experience as I had placed Matt up on the pedestal of Hollywood celebrity. I didn’t think I’d be able to get anywhere close to the guy. After all, he helped create the software that was taking over the web. I remember when he showed up on Saturday afternoon as his family drove him to the event from Houston, TX. If I remember correctly, he had his wisdom teeth pulled and that’s why he wasn’t feeling well. After arriving, I introduced myself to him. Turns out, he knew exactly who I was because of my writing on Weblogtoolscollection.com. During the event, I conducted a one on one interview with him, dined with him, conversed with him as much as I could, without having to go through any bodyguards.

It’s this experience with Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Dallas that really opened my eyes. Since then, I’ve attended a number of WordCamp events and have been able to recreate that experience with multiple people within the WordPress community. I wanted to share that story as well as Chris Lema’s because the message behind both is true. In fact, Chris says it better than I could.

Want to talk to the guy behind WordPress 101 – hit me up, I’ll introduce you.

Want to talk to the guy behind the Matt Report – hit me up, I’ll introduce you.

Want to talk to the dudes that are the baddest podcasters in town – hit me up, I’ll introduce you.

Who do you want to meet?

Here’s the amazing thing – you don’t even need my intro. Ping them directly on Twitter and watch – they’ll reply.

That’s Approachable WordPress

Cart66, previously known as PHPurchase, was one of the very first WordPress e-commerce plugins on the scene. Over the years the company has experimented with different WordPress e-commerce products but this week marks a major milestone. Cart66 Hosted has launched the first fully managed WordPress e-commerce platform.

In partnership with the folks at Pagely, the Cart66 Hosted platform provides fully managed WordPress hosting plus its flagship e-commerce product, Cart66 Cloud. This hosted solution was created to make security and PCI compliance something that customers don’t have to think about. Store owners can concentrate on selling, instead of trying to wading through all the technical aspects of managing an online store.

The Cart66 Cloud handles everything related to the secure storage and delivery of digital products, customer order history, storage of customer credit cards, payment gateways and all the e-commerce features you would normally get by installing a dozen different plugins and add-ons.

The Rising Cost of WordPress E-Commerce

Cart66 is delving into an area of e-commerce products and services that hasn’t yet been fully explored by other companies. The all-in-one approach is unique, given that most of the leading WordPress e-commerce solutions have business models centered around creating dozens of commercial add-ons or high cost bundles. Each piece of that puzzle adds up, especially when you include the costs of hosting, PCI compliance, backups and anything else server-related. Even with conservative estimates on all of these requirements, the price tag and responsibility of hosting and securing an online store will be fairly considerable for the average small business.

There’s also quite a steep learning curve for hosting your own WordPress e-commerce site. It’s not easy and will require store owners to study up on everything related to site maintenance and security. Many prospective store owners would gladly opt for a WordPress-powered store but have trouble grasping the whole concept of hosting, much less installing SSL certificates or getting a dedicated IP address. No matter how easy a WordPress e-commerce plugin is to use, if the user cannot get WordPress operational in the first place, he’s out of luck. The only other option for someone in this position is to pay a developer thousands of dollars to set up and build his store for him.

Cart66 has identified a segment of the market that has been overlooked. What do you think about hosted e-commerce? Is this a product that’s long been needed in the WordPress market?

Widgets make WordPress stand out as one of the most user-friendly CMS options available. The ability to easily place content blocks and features into a widgetized area has made website customization possible for millions of people who don’t know how to code. As mobile browsing has increased over the past few years, widget design is now moving to accommodate use on mobile devices. Due to the popularity of widgets in general, new designs must also accommodate users who have dozens of available widgets.

Better Widgets

Shaun Andrews’ Widgets Area Chooser plugin is on its way into the core for WordPress 3.8, but he’s not done improving widgets. Andrews is on a quest to make WordPress widgets better. To that end he has a couple of plugins that are currently in development. Better Widgets is one that he created in order to add more incremental updates.

Right now, if you check out the plugin’s page, all you will see is a vague description: “This makes widgets better. Trust me. Or don’t.” Since this is a plugin for continuing improvements to widgets, you’ll just have to install it and check it out.

Better Widgets offers a new layout, which briefly made an appearance in MP6 and includes separate scrollable areas for available widgets. It also provides better feedback when saving widgets.

Andrews may add a search filter to the plugin somewhere down the road, which would help users to quickly filter when searching a large number of widgets. He is also looking at adding the ability to drag widgets over closed sides, which would then automatically open so you could drop them in, similar to how dragging files around works in OS X. This is one plugin to watch for future updates if you want to be on the cutting edge of WordPress widget development.

Widgets in the WordPress Customizer

The widgets team is also working on an experimental plugin that allows users to edit and preview widgets in the WordPress Theme Customizer. The Widget Customizer plugin is being developed as part of the ongoing Widgets UI Refresh effort and the team hopes to have it ready to present for consideration in WordPress 3.9.

Widget Customizer gives you real-time previews of the edits you make to a widget before making them live. With this plugin turned on, no changes are live until the Save & Publish button is clicked. All widget-related actions are previewable before publishing, including:

• Adding a new widget
• Editing existing widgets
• Reordering widgets
• Dragging widgets to other sidebars
• Removing widgets from the sidebars

If you want to test it out, install Widget Customizer on a test site. The plugin’s description advocates the new feature by stating, “No longer do you have to edit your widgets blind!” Editing a widget and then having to navigate to the front-end to see what you did is in essence blind editing. Once you try the Widget Customizer, you may never go back to the old way of editing widgets.

The Better Widgets and Widget Customizer plugins are paving the way for the future of WordPress widgets. If you’ve ever been frustrated with widget management, you can breathe a sigh of relief, because some very nice updates are underway. Would you like to see real-time previews added to the core? What do you wish you could change about widget management?

One of the earliest “jobs” I had as a kid in Chicago was printing the menu for the local pizza restaurant. Back in the early 80s, it was quite rare for a kid to have a computer, let alone a color printer. Owning one of the earliest color printers, I immediately found several local businesses who were willing to swap out services and merchandise in exchange for some well designed menus that they could  update with specials every month. I developed a long relationship printing flyers and pizza take-out menus in exchange for free pizzas every weekend. Not bad for a 13-year-old with an eye for proper layout. I was a young entrepreneurial spirit forged in tomato sauce and mozzarella.

Things are not much different thirty years later. There are more restaurant owners looking to build customer loyalty than ever. While online review services like Yelp and Foursquare have made finding a restaurant easier, it is the establishment’s main website that is often the determining factor for new restaurant customers. Independent restauranteurs and franchises are increasingly turning to capable WordPress designers to develop and create appetizing online presentations. Though there are many different WordPress themes for restaurants, we will focus on what plugins can be used on nearly any theme. Here are some plugins to help with the development and presentation for WordPress based restaurant sites.

Easy Restaurant Menu Manager

For simple yet stylish menus with very little setup, my first suggestion is Easy Restaurant Menu Manager. ERMM gives you several options when setting up various dishes and beverages. Add categories like starters, sandwiches, desserts and drinks. Determine the display order of your categories. Include a description for each item and optionally display the price. CSS can be modified directly within the plugin. It also features different icons to add to the dish indicating spicy, heart-healthy or vegan options that might be presented. Just about any other kind of business that has a menu of services or products could use this plugin. Whether it’s a spa, restaurant or car detailing shop, Easy Restaurant Menu Manager offers an elegant presentation that can be easily customized to fit your site theme.

Locu For Restaurants

For a robust third-party integration of menus, a restaurant owner may want to consider Locu for Restaurant Menus. The Locu service lets one add their menu and specials on the Locu site. The plugin then displays the menu in the form of a shortcode. Though there is nothing noteworthy about that functionality, it’s the other services of Locu that make it appealing. In addition to site embed capability, the Locu site also submits the restaurant menu to sites like Foursquare, City Search and Open Table. Premium Locu subscribers can also submit their menus to Trip Advisor, Yelp and their own Facebook page. Once you update the menu on Locu, it updates everywhere else in real-time.

Open Table

Many people have found Open Table to be a convenient way to get a table at a local restaurant. Restaurants that participate in Open Table can also use the service within their WordPress sites by utilizing the Open Table Widget plugin. Requiring only the restaurant ID number, the plugin renders a table reservation form as a widget. The prospective diner only needs to enter the date, time, and party size. I’ve personally used the Open Table reservation service as a dining customer and found it to be a very good user experience. It’s great to grab a last-minute table or for planning well in advance.

GravityForms

We all like to use Gravity Forms for the usual “Contact Us” pages and lead forms. But GF is also a very powerful conduit for catering order forms. Internally, GF has the capability of doing math! That means  you can create a catering order form that actually adds up the total as someone chooses their items and sides. It allows a restaurant or caterer the option of taking delivery orders without having to build a full-blown e-commerce setup on their site. When payment is fulfilled at a later time or in circumstances when there are always follow-up confirmation calls, a form can do the job perfectly.

Gravity Forms also allows for conditional logic. Does a caterer have a different menu option for serving a party of 20 vs a party of 200? You bet they do! Gravity Forms can present completely different menu options based on number of guests, distance from the restaurant and dietary restrictions. From the perspective of the restaurant staff, Gravity Forms can send out different notifications to the Chef, Catering Manager and to the person responsible for scheduling staff for event service. The notification email provides a comprehensive order list, total price and special food request notes. The address field has a Google map link, providing directions from the restaurant to the event venue in just one click. I have used this plugin for just about every type of business out there. When I put it to use creating a catering order form, I gained a whole new respect for the plugins capabilities.

Foursquare Perks

Many restaurants choose to reward people who frequently check in through Geo-Social channels like Yelp and Foursquare. In the case of Foursquare, there is a great plugin that allows a restaurant to proudly display venue statistics in near real-time. Foursquare Venue gives the restaurant site the ability to display total check-ins, how many people are currently checked in and who the current “mayor” of the location is. The mayor is the person who has checked into a particular place the most. Why not reward the mayor with a free side dish or drink with every order? Make it a contest of social supremacy. It’s good to be king! Obviously you will want to use caution with the real-time statistics. Nothing looks worse than a big fat zero in the column of current people checked in. If you have a restaurant with a lot of social check-ins with Foursquare, this may be a plugin that you want to use.

Think Of These Plugins Before Your Next Restaurant Client

Think of these plugins the next time you are involved in a restaurant site build. They will help to provide a much more engaging experience for future customers. Remember to always test your plugins on a staging site. Accepting pizza as payment is still considered a valid site developer currency, especially in Chicago or New York. Somewhere out there is a budding 13-year-old kid eagerly awaiting their first bite of WordPress-traded pizza. Hopefully these plugin features have helped to get the youngster more negotiating power, like a few extra toppings or some bread sticks to boot. Though much like a chef using a test kitchen, be sure to try these plugins on a staging site first. Using an unfamiliar plugin to a new environment could be a recipe for disaster.

One of the features added to the recently released WordPress 3.7 was support for language packs. “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.” While support has been added to core, there is still a lot of work to be done to properly have this feature implemented to the WordPress.org website.

Otto has published an excellent guide for plugin and theme developers that explains what needs to be done to take full advantage of language packs.

So go forth, plugin and theme authors. Start fixing up that code. Many of you may have nothing to fix. Some of you may just need a header change. But it’s worth giving it a once over anyway. It certainly would be very nice if, as the new features begin to be added to WordPress.org, then your code was all ready and set to take immediate advantage of it, wouldn’t it? – Otto

Created by Tung Do of DevPress, DP Dashboard is a plugin that transforms the back-end of WordPress into something that is supposed to be simpler, modern, clutter-free, productive and an enjoyable experience. For me however, I preferred the experience of MP6. Instead of writing a lengthy review, I’m going to tell you what I liked and disliked about DP Dashboard.

What I Like

Typography – The typography is easy to read, even from a distance.

Numbered Menus – I like the idea of using numbers for top-level menu items just as long as the order doesn’t change.

Things I Don’t Like

Everything Is Too Big – DP Dashboard was created to provide a large screen experience by only supporting 1024 resolutions and above. He also added support for landscape view in tablet devices. I’m using a 20 inch widescreen LCD monitor and DP Dashboard has me thinking I don’t have a big enough screen. Buttons, text fields, menu items, everything is just too big.

This leads to a lot of unnecessary scrolling.

Not A Fan Of The Color Scheme – I don’t like the seaweed color scheme. There is also not enough contrast between the white and grey. On my monitor, they appear to be the same color.

Too Many Clicks Added To My Workflow – Using MP6 or the default post writing screen, the right side of the page has an area to drag around widgets. In DP Dashboard, the widgets have been replaced by links to the widgets. I prefer to have the widgets I use most such as Tags, Publish, and Categories on the right side of the post writing screen. By having the widgets I use most to the right of the post writing panel already open, it saves me a mouse click. Using DP Dashboard, I have the choice of scrolling down to find the widget I’m looking for, or clicking the link to take me straight to the widget. After using DP Dashboard for a day, I’ve concluded that I don’t like this workflow.

Conclusion

I’ve respected Tung Do’s work over the years. His WordPress themes always have a touch of class and sparkle that, in my opinion, is unmatched in the WordPress theme community. However, I can’t see myself ever using DP Dashboard. It doesn’t improve any part of my WordPress back-end experience versus MP6. I’ve left the plugin enabled for a day to perform typical administrative functions but the longer I use it, the more I want to disable it!

Instead of creating an alternative to MP6, I’d like to see Tung Do create his own version of MP6 using it as a foundation. I can tell that Tung put a lot of work into DP Dashboard, it’s just not my cup of tea.

When the Inline Documentation project was started in July at WordCamp San Francisco, a handful of contributors set out to tackle a massive list of hooks in 195 files. This effort continues and the team is hoping that they will have the hook documentation completed in time with the WordPress 3.8 release in December. Kim Parsell posted an update on the project and said that the progress to date is right at 50%.

Documentation Sprints at WordCamp Contributor Days

Some of the most recent WordCamp contributor days added new contributors to the ranks and spurred on a good chunk of the documentation to reach that 50% mark. Coordinators for WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Europe and WordCamp Sofia all included inline documentation as part of the contributor days, resulting in 35 more files documented and 47 people receiving props for submitting inline docs patches. More progress is also on the way in patches waiting to be reviewed.

How to Get Involved in WordPress Inline Documentation

Check out the master list for the remaining hooks that need to be documented and jump in on that post to claim ones that you want to work on. Make sure to read the PHP Documentation Standards, especially the newly updated sections on Documenting Tips, Formatting Guidelines and how to document duplicate hooks. Your contributions can help this project reach completion by the time WordPress 3.8 is released in December.

wpXtreme is trying to take the WordPress App Store idea to the next level. The site recently launched and provides a method to download plugins and themes through their marketplace. While their plugin didn’t function properly on my local WordPress install, it worked just fine on the Tavern website.

What Is wpXtreme Trying To Accomplish

While the app store is the best way to describe wpXtreme, it is aiming to be much more than that. In conversation with one of their lead developers, he told me “Even if we provide users with an App Store-like buying experience directly from the WP dashboard, we’re much more than this. wpXtreme is more of an ecosystem aiming to create a standard for plugins and (soon) for theme development. Specifically, all plugins available on the WPX Store are required a) to be built on WPDK [http://wpdk.io], an Open Source framework we developed, and b) get validated by our staff“.

Requirements To Sell?

In order to sell a plugin within the Xtreme marketplace, it must be built using their open source framework called WPDK. Sellers will also need to sign up to their developer program. This is a similar process Apple App Store developers have to go through by using the Apple SDK, having each app reviewed before it’s approved for sale on the store, etc. Unlike the Apple process, developers who create plugins using their open source framework can sell them on the Xtreme marketplace as well as anywhere else on the web. However, because of the requirements, not every developer will be able to tap into the audience wpXtreme offers.

Licensing

All plugins, themes, and support are provided as is under the GPL 2.0 license. When a marketplace item has a 1Y symbol, it stands for one year of product updates, priority support, and full documentation. This is in line with the business model a lot of commercial plugin developers are using. The free license provides access to basic support resources, partial documentation, and product updates. The interesting thing about free licenses is that if at some point the free item goes commercial, free license holders will be able to upgrade to a yearly subscription at a discounted rate.

The Marketplace

Their marketplace already has a number of plugins and themes available, most of them for free. If developers choose to sell plugins through them, they’ll be able to keep 70% of the sale with 30% going towards wpXtreme to cover their costs. As a user, wpXtreme becomes another resource for themes and plugins. Their plugin doesn’t replace the existing methods of obtaining them from the WordPress repositories rather, works alongside them.

The shopping experience is not bad. Browsing through themes and plugins was a breeze. The use of colors for items makes it easy to see important information. Clicking the more button takes users to a page that has ratings, features, a description, changelog, and a link to install the theme or plugin. You’ll need to be logged in to download any of the free themes or plugins. Thankfully, an Xtreme user account is free.

Have To Use One To Use The Other

The fact that plugins connected to wpXtreme will stop functioning if it’s deactivated is a huge turn off. When I asked why this restriction was in place, they told me it’s because the plugins are using wpXtreme which is a framework plugin.

All the plugins downloaded from the WPX Store require our wpXtreme plugin as the main “engine” to correctly work in a single WordPress installation. This means any plugin, no matter if a paid or free product, will be disabled as soon as the main plugin, i.e. wpXtreme plugin, gets deactivated.

What I can say for sure is that all plugins run exclusively on the wpXtreme “main” plugin because the latter is a framework itself and the former work as enhancements of the core functionality provided by wpXtreme. That’s the same approach we embraced for Extensions, which we introduced just yesterday, and how they work as plugin enhancements while they technically are plugins themselves.

I don’t like the idea of marketplace items relying on wpXtreme to be activated in order to function. If wpXtreme stops working or if the marketplace closes up shop, then whatever purchases were made in the marketplace will stop functioning as well. I searched their website for some type of sunset clause but I didn’t see any. I’d like to see them implement a clause that states that if they were to go out of business, that they would make it so that purchased items can work independently of their framework plugin.

What Will It Take To Succeed?

One thing that would help wpXtreme gain momentum is if their plugin was allowed to be hosted on the repository. Just like the WP App Store plugin, wpXtreme is not allowed within the repository because it provides no functionality. It also serves as a pointer to a third party. Unfortunately, two WordPress plugins that were actively developed prior to Xtreme launching will no longer be available in stand-alone form. Those plugins are WP Bannerize and WP CleanFix. Both plugins have been assimilated into the Xtreme marketplace with WP CleanFix now having a price tag of $15.00. However, both of these plugins now serve a primary role of pointing people to wpXtreme. Users have already expressed their displeasure at having to download another plugin to use an existing plugin.

A number of active developers will need to first pass the requirements and then buy into their idea of creating a better WordPress ecosystem. While those requirements act as barriers for developers, the process of having to install the wpXtreme plugin to access the store is a barrier to entry for users. Both aspects of the marketplace will need a large contingent of support in order to gain any steam along with any chance of long term success.

Today was an important day for nailing down the features that will be moving forward in WordPress 3.8. In an epic three hour planning and decisions meeting, Matt Mullenweg opened up the discussion by asking plugin leaders to provide a status for their proposed features. I’ve summarized a few of the highlights.

Widgets Area Chooser Plugin Gets a Green Light

The meeting started with discussion on the accessibility benefits of the Widgets Area Chooser plugin, which we recently featured on the Tavern. Shaun Andrews submitted a proposal at the last minute for its inclusion in 3.8.

Matt said, “I think this is a small but useful addition, and the trac ticket should allow any code issues to be worked out.” In the next day or two the plugin should be live on WordPress.com so that the team can gather a wider range of browser and user testing. It looks like this feature will be getting the green light.

Omnisearch Needs More Refining

During the meeting it was determined that the Omnisearch plugin needs more discussion on implementation and features, so work will continue there before it will be cleared to move on to core.

DASH Plugin Will Be Merged Into Core

Dave Martin, otherwise known as @lessbloat and the Dash plugin team leader, has been paired with core developer Mark Jaquith who will be working with them on merging the plugin into core. No major roadblocks were raised in the discussion of this feature.

When asked what the screen looks like for a site that doesn’t have much content, @lessbloat posted a screenshot of a brand new dashboard:

This feature is looking pretty solid and is cleared to merge into core. WordPress users can expect a beautiful new dashboard in the next release.

THX – All Systems a Go!

The Theme Experience plugin is now on its way into 3.8. WordPress users can expect a much improved way of viewing themes in the next release.

A few points were raised about enhancing what the plugin already does and making its features more discoverable in the UI. There’s plenty of time to polish it up. Matt noted that testing this feature with lots of themes will be important in order to ensure that the experience stays speedy.

MP6 Finally Cleared for Takeoff

Some work needs to be done on browser support and performance but other than that the plugin is looking pretty solid right now. MP6 will finally be rolled into the core in WordPress 3.8.

“MP6 is a shot in the arm,” Matt said. “It forces plugin devs to up their game, makes WP feel modern, and the importance of the responsive aspect of it cannot be overstated.” MP6 is a vast improvement upon the current admin design and is arguably the most highly anticipated addition to WordPress 3.8.

Twenty Fourteen – Not Yet a Lock For 3.8

Twenty Fourteen will be the next WordPress default theme. Because this is the most fully featured theme so far, a major challenge will be helping users discover what is possible with Twenty Fourteen. The development team is aiming to push as many of the customizations as possible into WordPress’ Customizer so that it’s easier to work with. Lingering development concerns mean that Twenty Fourteen’s inclusion in 3.8 is not yet a lock. The worst case scenario would be holding it back for the 3.9 release, but it hasn’t yet been decided.

Features Are Merging into the WordPress Trunk

During the 3.8 development meeting Matt paired each incoming feature with a core developer as a “buddy” to the plugin leader. “The role of the buddy is a support one to try to sherpa the plugin getting in as friction-free as possible,” he said.

The trunk is about to get a bit more volatile, so developers might want to turn off those nightlies for awhile. As features are merged into the trunk, Matt encouraged developers to see the trunk as “a place where things can and will break, versus a museum of perfect code that we all svn up to in production every morning at 5am.” Things may be a bit messy in the transition, but this is a good sign that WordPress is growing and improving in many new ways. Core development is ramping up for a very exciting 3.8 release in December.

If you have not had the chance to see Automattic’s new office in downtown San Francisco in person, you’re in luck. You can now take a virtual tour of the Automattic office via Google Maps. Joey Kudish who is an Automattic employee shared the news on his blog. According to Joey, a photographer stopped by, took pictures, and was able to map out the entire building, including the second floor.

The tour starts on the second floor and as noted in the comments, you’ll need to hit the back arrow in order to go down the steps. Notable stops on the journey include the custom shuffle board on the second floor and the mini WordPress museum on the first floor. My favorite image actually has nothing to do with the Automattic office. On the first floor near the entrance, if you look in the direction towards the museum in front of the steel beam, you’ll see a reflection of the the camera stand.

We know a photographer came into the office and took these photos. But this particular photo has me thinking he used a walking camera to take the photos for him. I only kid. But it sure does look like a walking camera in mid stride.

How Were These Photographs Created?

I got in touch with Alex Schoenfeldt of Scheonfeldt.com who was commissioned by Automattic to find out what type of equipment he used. While Google streetview uses a vehicle with cameras pointing in all directions to generate their panoramic shots, Alex achieves this using one camera. For this job, he used a Canon 5D Mark 2 with a Sigma 8mm fisheye lens. A Nodal Ninja Panoramic head all mounted on a Bogen Tripod. He used a technique called exposure bracketing to piece together the panoramic shots. He starts off pointing the camera in a northward position turning the camera 90 degrees. Three photos are taken for each 90 degree turn. One photo is taken overexposed. The next is underexposed. The last photo is taken with spot on settings. He’s then able to stitch the images together to form one image.

Until I spoke with Alex, I was unaware of the fact that Google Maps has a program in place that will train people on how to run a photography business. Alex completed the training program and is now able to offer photography services to businesses like Automattic. He also has the ability publish those images to Google Maps. It’s an interesting service for photographers and I see no reason why businesses wouldn’t take advantage of it, especially those who are proud of their offices and want to show them off to the world.

What The New Automattic Office Use To Be

By the way, while Google Maps knows where the Automattic office is located, their street view has older images showing the previous building tenants. It used to be a Fairtex location. Fairtex is a manufacturer of combat equipment and clothing for Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts. This should give you a good idea as to the amount of work and renovation that took place prior to Automattic calling this building their new home.

At the beginning of this year there were just a handful of WordPress themes available for Zurb’s Foundation framework. Most of these were basic starter themes for developers. As we near the end of 2013, Foundation is rapidly becoming more popular with front-end developers and the demand for WordPress themes is also increasing. In addition to the 10 free themes included in this article, Foundation-based themes are popping up on Themeforest and other commercial sites.

Many front-end developers prefer Foundation over Twitter Bootstrap, its more well-known counterpart. Foundation was created with a mobile first approach. It’s more style-agnostic when it comes to UI tools, which often translates into less work when theming. Foundation also provides native support for SASS, enabling developers to use compass in their workflow.

All of the WordPress themes below incorporate the Foundation framework. Their project websites are an example of what is possible when building with Foundation.

Reverie

In addition to inheriting all the Foundation features, Reverie also includes customized output for WordPress menus, caption and pagination. It has two built-in widget ares and two custom menus. Reverie can be used as a starter theme or as the parent theme to a child theme that you create.

Theme Info | Demo

Requried+

Along with Reverie, Required+ was one of the first ones on the scene to offer a Foundation-based WordPress theme. It is meant to be used as a parent theme and features commented code, flexible layout options with page templates and widget areas for different layouts. Required+ includes shortcodes to help you create columns, galleries and more using the visual editor. The shortcodes are offered as optional plugins. One unique feature of Required+ is that it offers editor styles for adding Foundation styles and elements to the post editor without using shortcodes.

Theme Info | Demo

Reactor

Reactor makes use of the WordPress Customizer to offer customization options. It includes shortcodes for UI elements such as pricing grid, orbit slider, buttons and more. Reactor was built with the developer in mind and offers an assortment of hooks, content actions and theme actions.

Theme Info | Demo

WP Foundation

WP Foundation includes four different page templates, a configurable via theme options panel, shortcodes pre-styled with Foundation’s styles and two different sidebars.

Theme Info | Demo

Base Station

Base Station is an extensible WordPress theme built on Foundation. It was built to be extended by developers, includes a number of hooks, and most of its functions are either pluggable or accessible via filters. The theme also has a feature called featured posts for highlighting your content. Base Station shortcodes offer support for alerts, buttons, featured posts slider, labels, login form and panels.

Theme Info | Demo

WP Foundation

WP Foundation is a free theme created by developer Micah Blu. This theme can be used as it is or easily customized via the options panel. WP Foundation theme options include basic branding, typography and a set of social buttons.

Theme Info | Demo

Foundation for WordPress

Foundation for WordPress is a responsive starter theme that features developer friendly markup, shortcodes, custom background and header and support for child themes and custom post types. The theme offers built-in navigation and widgetized sidebars to get you on your way developing your theme with Foundation.

Theme Info | Demo

Spine

Spine is a WordPress theme based on Foundation and Hybrid core. It features three custom menu locations and several different layouts, including no sidebar, one or two sidebars. The front page template is completely widgetized and you can use the theme customizer with live preview to customize your site.

Theme Info | Demo

SmartAdapt

SmartAdapt is a Foundation-based theme hosted on WordPress.org, which means that this is a solid theme that holds to the rigorous code standards maintained by the WordPress Theme Review team. It allows you to easily customize background, logo or header image, etc and includes social share button support (Facebook like, Twitter share, Google +1, Pin it).

Theme Info | Demo

_second-foundation

_second-foundation is another Foundation-based theme hosted at WordPress.org. It utilizes Masonry.js to create the responsive post grid display. This is a theme that you might select if you desire that specific homepage layout plus Foundation as a base.

Theme Info | Demo

Apparently to prove they’re paying attention subway conductors in New York have to point at a sign at every stop. Someone decided to make them smile. As I go back to New York today, it’s cool to learn something new about the city as well.

In this episode, we caught up with Cory Miller of iThemes.com to walk down memory lane starting with 2008. The year he launched the company. Then we progressed into the future and visited various milestones along the way such as the release of the Flexx theme, Builder, PluginBuddy, Backup Buddy, Webdesign.com, and iThemes Exchange. I loved talking to Cory about the early years of WordPress themes. We also covered the headlines of the week.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress 3.7.1 Released
Akismet Celebrates Huge Spam Blocking Milestone
WordPress 3.8 Development Heats Up With Discussion of New Core Features

WPWeekly Meta:

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You can now view the inside of Automattic’s office on Google Maps street view and walk around inside. To get downstairs go by the stairs and press the back arrow, a bit unintuitive but gets you to the main floor. Check out the custom shuffleboard upstairs.

The story around badBIOS, the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps, is fascinating and surprising. The capabilities of sophisticated attackers right now vastly outstrip the defenses of any computer user or company. The news that the NSA had broken into the networks of Google and Yahoo, unfortunately, wasn’t surprising given Google’s move to encrypt traffic between datacenters early in September.

When you embed a YouTube video in a WordPress post, it is generally added to illustrate your content. Sometimes your video is the main focal point of the post. Chances are that you don’t want to be sending users to related videos after viewing the embedded one. You want to keep the reader’s attention on your content. The video was meant to be a tool to capture that attention in the first place.

Turn Off Related Videos

Related videos is a YouTube feature that can be a lot of fun when you’re browsing YouTube, but it’s not so helpful on videos you embed in WordPress posts. There are two different ways to turn related videos off, depending on how your WordPress site is set up.

WordPress.com Sites and Jetpack-Powered WordPress.org Sites

On WordPress.com and on self-hosted WordPress sites using Jetpack, you can simply append ‘&rel=0‘ to the end of the YouTube URL to disable related videos at the end of the video.

Normally, you would just grab the URL from the browser window and paste it in on its own line:

On our site we are using Jetpack, so we just append ‘&rel=0‘ to the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPe4NbWQzkM&rel=0

The output for that is this ridiculously cute video with no related videos at the end:

The same method can also be applied if you opt for the Jetpack shortcode embed. More video customization options can be found in the WordPress.com documentation.

Self-Hosted WordPress Sites Without Jetpack

If you have a self-hosted WordPress site and you’re not using Jetpack, turning off related videos can be done by selecting the embed option directly from YouTube, instead of using WordPress’ oembed feature.

When you’re on the YouTube video’s page, select embed and then uncheck the option that says: “Show suggested videos when the video finishes.”

If getting the embed code is a bother, you might try using a plugin such as Hide YouTube Related Videos to do this automatically.

This topic tends to be a bit tricky, depending on if you are on WordPress.com, self-hosted with Jetpack or self-hosted without Jetpack. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution for everyone.