WordPress.org

Why Hanukkah and Thanksgiving Will Never Again Coincide, with lots of fun calendar geek information. Colbert has a funny take too.

There was an API outage on November 28th. Switch failures led to cascading problems that took approximately 50 minutes to stabilize.

At 04:19 UTC on the 28th November, a switch began failing. Traffic was routed to an alternate data center. Unfortunately a software bug meant that those servers were attempting to write to a master server in the first data center, and so those servers stalled. As a result from 04:20 UTC to 04:38 UTC the API was not responding.

Between 04:38 UTC and 05:01 UTC we deployed a series of fixes. Availability was between 95% and 50% during that time. The switch came back online at 05:11 UTC and availability returned to 100%.

At 07:20 UTC another switch failed, which caused a very brief outage and availability dropped to 60% during that time. This time however, traffic switched over to an alternate data center and by 07:32 UTC, the API returned to 100% availability.

WordPress users will have seen messages indicating that spam comments were temporarily held in the moderation queue during the outage. The Akismet plugin will re-try those now that the API is back up.

We’ve fixed several software problems already as a result of the failure. We’ve also identified some systems and software improvements that will prevent the same condition from happening in future, and we’re working to get those in place as soon as possible.

It’s been awhile since we’ve conducted a poll on WPTavern. This time, it’s a simple question. Do you prefer the left administration menu in the backend of WordPress to be expanded or collapsed? Personally, I prefer it be collapsed. I use a 23 inch monitor so I don’t have as much horizontal screen real estate as I’d like. I asked this same question on Twitter and so far, many of our followers responded that they use the menu expanded.

It’s a phrase that’s all too common in open source software development, “iterate quickly, release often“. The idea that any time a bug is fixed or an improvement is made that those fixes should be pushed out immediately to the end-user. The process is wonderful for companies operating under the Software As A Service umbrella but not so much for WordPress plugin developers. Coen Jacobs, a core developer for WooCommerce shared his thoughts on the matter in a recent blog post.

Coen explains that WordPress is now a large CMS and it’s time for plugin developers to help out by creating a sensible release strategy.

It’s the responsibility of the plugin developers to make sure their releases are as stable as they can be. There is no difference there between a plugin that adds social sharing buttons, or a full featured eCommerce plugin.

WordPress is no longer a small CMS, it’s being used in large, professional websites. Plugin developers have a great share in the success of the CMS in general. It’s now time to take it to the next level and make sure that we release updates responsibly and with our end users in mind.

It’s an annoying process to update a plugin three times a week. I’m all for developers taking a more sensible approach to how they release updates. Security fixes should always be released as soon as possible. However, if it’s just a minor fix such as a typo within the plugin’s readme file, there is no need to burden users with an update message.

Love them or hate them, it appears that GoDaddy.com is about to throw down and enter the managed WordPress hosting arena. While WordPress is already the most popular installation among GoDaddy hosting plan subscribers, a recent email blast to registered WordCamp Phoenix 2014 attendees shows that it’s ready to battle it out with established managed hosting providers like Flywheel, ManageWP, Pagely and WP Engine.

The news was shared yesterday by Sé Reed in the OC WordPress meetup group forum, who re-posted this email from GoDaddy. While no specific features or functions were mentioned, it is an interesting development from the world’s #1 domain registrar.

The email reads:

“GoDaddy is working on a Managed WordPress product and would love feedback from WordCamp Phoenix 2014 registrants. This new product offers optimal performance and security and automatically provides updated versions of WordPress. While you can already create and host an amazing WordPress site now, your feedback will help us build the features you want the most.”

What is your reaction to this news? Should GoDaddy be invading the space of established WordPress managed hosting solutions? Is this a genuine good-faith effort by GoDaddy or merely a play for pandering to the WordPress community? Let me hear you!

29 Dumb Things Finance People Say.

WordPress Plugin authors like Evan Herman are my favorite kind of developers. He loves the WordPress community to a degree that when he gives his contact information, he always includes his WordPress.org user name! I would classify Evan as a “lunch bucket” type of developer. The kind of guy that isn’t seeking notoriety or accolades and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty in mind-numbing code. He simply gets the job done for the betterment of the WordPress community and moves on to the next project.

There is an army of folks out there just like Evan who may not be looking for the spotlight, but I’d like to give them the attention they deserve anyway. I welcome you to listen to my conversation with Evan about his plugins, the future of plugin development and other interesting observations about the WordPress community as a whole.

Evan has created two really great plugins worth checking out:

Expand + Collapse Funk is a new accordion style plugin that allows you to embed any kind of content you want into an easy “click to reveal” hidden content area that expands to full view when clicked. Though Evan originally designed it to work as a contact and course display mechanism, I have used this plugin for a Frequently Asked Questions section on a client site. With unlimited “nesting” of these collapsed hidden areas, the possibilities are endless.

WordPress Icons – SVG is a beautiful set of over 500 relevant and modern vector icons that can be used on your WordPress installation within just a few clicks. These icons are derived from web fonts and are extremely scale-able. They do not degrade in quality with larger sizes. Another great feature of this plugin is the ability to use the same icons across all devices. No repetitive need to generate multiple Retina specific image versions for retina ready devices. By setting a maximum-width for the icon, it then becomes responsive.

This plugin is also great for developers who use icons on multiple sites and want to avoid the hassle of re-installing web fonts on to new servers. With this plugin it’s one click and you’re ready to begin working. You can use these anywhere in your themes.

So pull up a chair, grab a cold one and join us for Industry Night Episode #2 with Evan Herman.

Jetpack 2.6 is now available. This release introduces Monitor, a brand new module for monitoring the uptime of your website.

Do you flip your lid when you find out that your website has been down? Activating the Monitor module will help you to deal with downtime more expediently, because you’ll be instantly notified when your site is not available. Jetpack servers will check your site every five minutes and will shoot off an email to the connected WordPress.com account address when there is a problem.

Monitor emails are sent to you with one of the following subject lines:

[Jetpack Monitor] Bad news — your site http://jetpack.me is down!
[Jetpack Monitor] Bad news — your site http://jetpack.me is still down!
[Jetpack Monitor] Good news — your site http://jetpack.me is back up!

Refactored Single Sign On Module, New Widget, New CSS Code Editor and More

Also new in this release is support a completely refactored Single Sign On module, previously known as WordPress.com Connect. Improvements to this module make the setup process much smoother. It’s now just one click to activate and subsequent logins are streamlined with manual approval no longer required on sites where you’ve previously authenticated.

New “Display Posts” Widget

Display Posts is a new configurable widget will pull posts from any WordPress.com or Jetpack-enabled site and display them nicely via a widget. Options include the ability to add featured images and excerpts.

CSS Editor Now Uses Codemirror

The Custom CSS editor previously used Ace but that has now been replaced with Codemirror in Jetpack 2.6.

WP-CLI Support

Jetpack has added commands to allow you to disconnect a site and manage modules via WP-CLI.

Small Improvements Across Many Modules

Jetpack 2.6 also includes a number of smaller improvements not mentioned in detail in the release post. Browsing the changelog I found that it’s full of little gems:

• Contact Form: new filters, grunion_contact_form_field_html and grunion_should_send_email.
• Custom Post Types: new restaurant post type.
• Genericons: update to version 3.0.2.
• Infinite Scroll: many improvements and fixes.
• Likes: performance improvements.
• MP6: Jetpack icons are now compatible with WordPress 3.8.
• Open Graph: better descriptions, fallback images, and media extraction from video posts.
• Publicize: new background token tests for connected publicize services and display problems on settings sharing and add new post.
• Shortcodes: updated Bandcamp shortcode to support the tracklist and minimal attributes, as well as more artwork attribute values.
• Shortlinks: Added Custom Post Type support
• Subscriptions: add more ways to customize the subscriptions widget.
• Twitter Cards: better media management and card type detection, and better handling of conflicts with other Twitter Cards plugins.

Custom Post Type support for shortlinks is a pretty exciting enhancement if your site doesn’t use traditional posts. Jetpack 2.6 has also made strides to be ready for the upcoming WordPress 3.8 release. It’s difficult to summarize all that’s packed into Jetpack 2.6, but overall it seems that almost every feature in the plugin has received a nice update. Update your sites today to take advantage of all the new features and bug fixes.

Hopping back and forth between screens to edit and preview content will soon be a thing of the past. Many WordPress plugin developers have taken a shot at improving the editing experience and there’s even a team of core contributors working on a front-end editor for a future version of WordPress. The big news today is that the folks at Barley CMS are throwing their hat in the ring with the release of Barley for WordPress.

In a nutshell, Barley for WordPress allows you to edit content directly inline without ever needing to see the admin. The team decided to break the Barley Editor out of the Barley Content Management System, a CMS built on top of CodeIgniter. The Barley Editor can now be licensed by third parties to use in their apps. Barley CMS customers loved the editor so much that the team decided to port it over to WordPress, and here’s the result:

The Barley editor plugin lets you edit your titles and content and see a list of your drafts without ever leaving the frontend. It also includes easy access to images in the media library, a video embedding tool and the ability to categorize your post, add tags and set featured images without visiting the admin panel.

Barley for WordPress can be purchased directly from the Barley website for an introductory price of $12/year. They’ve also teamed up with the folks at Pagely to offer the Barley editor to customers on their managed WordPress hosting platform. Joshua Strebel, CEO Pagely®, said, “I am so impressed with what Barley adds to the WordPress user experience. We know our many hosting customers will love it.”

I interviewed Colin Devroe, co-founder of Plain, the company behind Barley, to get some more background information on why they decided to branch out with a WordPress product. I asked him what inspired the team to tackle the challenge of improving the WordPress publishing experience, since their core product is the Barley CMS. Devroe replied:

Our belief has always been that we wanted as many people as possible to begin creating content using an inline editor. This is a shift for many people familiar with form-based content management. A popular platform like WordPress could never switch to inline editing and ditch the admin interface all at once. They would leave too many people out in the cold. But that is exactly what we did with Barley CMS. We flipped everything on its head from templating using just HTML to having all content managed without an admin.

Over the past ten years, WordPress has been adapting and evolving to provide a better content creation experience but completely ditching the admin interface will be out of the question for quite some time. The decoupled Barley editor makes their modern, non-admin oriented content creation process available to WordPress.

The Challenges of Fitting Into the WordPress Ecosystem

Making the Barley editor compatible with the WordPress platform was no small feat for their team of developers. However, it makes sense as their first challenge, given that WordPress now powers more than 20% of the web. I asked Devroe about the challenges they encountered in bringing the editor into WordPress. It turns out that finding a place in the tightly-knit WordPress ecosystem was more of a challenge than the technical aspects of creating the plugin itself.

Porting to WordPress took us 40 days of really hard work. The editor itself was put into WordPress in a single night but then began the task of making Barley for WordPress really fit into the WordPress ecosystem. We spent an incredible amount of time making Barley work in every theme we could get our hands on. In addition we had a few things within WordPress that do not exist in Barley CMS that we had to work on such as WordPress’ Media Library, the specific way it handles tags and categories and featured images and more. We look forward to making Barley for WordPress work even better in the WordPress ecosystem as we release continual updates of our plugin.

Will the Barley Product Become Irrelevant When WordPress Adds Frontend Editing to the Core?

Given that there is a Frontend Editor feature currently being developed for the WordPress core via the features-as-plugins process, I asked Devroe how will Barley remain relevant once WordPress adds inline editing. Will they continue to sell a product for a feature that will soon be a default part of the WordPress publishing experience?

Inline editing is still very new to many people. And there is a lot to learn. Just as there isn’t any one email client or Twitter client that is right for everyone, surely there isn’t any one editor that will be just right for everyone. Barley is an editing experience that we hope to bring to many platforms and we hope people begin to expect a really great, simple, yet full featured editing experience wherever they see Barley pop up.

As far as keeping it relevant, we’re going to do our best as a team to keep Barley for WordPress working great with every WordPress update, popular plugin, and amazing theme. We want people to depend on Barley for their work every single day and we think if we manage to do that it will stay relevant.

If you like the way the Barley editor works, then the introductory price of $12/year really is quite reasonable. It ends up being $1/per month for a fancy new content editing UI with professional support included. Not bad for a totally transformed way of editing content.

Due to the massive number of websites running on WordPress, there is a marketplace for any product that aims to improve the publishing experience. It’s interesting to see new solutions pop up to improve content editing, especially when they originate in products outside of the WordPress community. This kind of cross-platform sharing of solutions can only stand to make the WordPress ecosystem more varied. It also serves to continually challenge our core design and user experience, both inside and outside the admin panel.

bbPress 2.5 is now available! This is a great release filled with a number of improvements. The most notable addition in bbPress 2.5 are forum subscriptions. Forum subscriptions allow users to subscribe to new topics created in specific forums. Other items that contain a new car smell are:

• A number of new importers
• BuddyPress Notifications integration
• Theme Compatibility
• Internationalization support
• A number of bug fixes

The roadmap for bbPress 2.6 has already been created. John James Jacoby says the release will focus on performance improvements and replacing the WordPress comment system with bbPress topics. I’m very interested to see the implementation of replacing WordPress comments with bbPress topics. I’ve personally had enthusiastic conversations with John at various WordCamps discussing this feature and what it would mean for bridging the gap between forums and blog comments. However, I think this one particular feature could help forums regain popularity as a means of discussion instead of relying on blog comments alone.

Jeffrey Zeldman founder of Happy Cog and co-founder of A List Apart has joined Automattic’s advisory board. The news was announced by Zeldman in a tweet on November 22nd. In that same tweet, Zeldman mentioned that his personal site Zeldman.com is now using WordPress. In a quote from Matt Mullenweg published on Post Status, Zeldman’s advice will come in handy as Automattic, WordPress.com, and Jetpack continue to grow.

While this is great news, I think it’s important to go back in time and review Happy Cog’s involvement with the development of WordPress 2.5. WordPress 2.5 was released on March 29th, 2008 during WordCamp Dallas. WordPress 2.5 was a major release as it contained a completely redesigned administrative interface developed by Happy Cog. Matt Mullenweg was so excited about this redesign that he created a screencast providing a tour of the new interface as well as the new features.

Lukewarm Reception For WordPress 2.5

Looking back at a number of posts announcing the release of WordPress 2.5, many of them were positive. However, shortly after its release, a number of users started to complain that the usability of the new design was a step back from previous versions. Most of these complaints originated from users of WordPress.com. This prompted Jen Mylo to conduct a usability testing report with 2.5 and a new interface that was codenamed Crazyhorse.

You can read the entire report in PDF form. The gist of the report is that the Crazyhorse design was far more usable than what Happy Cog developed in WordPress 2.5.

The second round of testing blew everyone away. The research team had never seen such consistent results. Tasks were completed faster, participant opinions rated it higher, understanding of how interface elements worked was greater, and it wasn’t even a fully functional application. Of the test participants, every single one said they would choose the prototype over their current administrative interface, and it wasn’t even pretty.

This was a disappointing discovery considering all of the work Happy Cog put into the redesign. The success of Crazyhorse meant that users had to endure another major change to the user interface. Users were not happy. However, the usability improvements in Crazyhorse which later became WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” were worth the struggle of going through another major change to the user interface.

Keeping Bad Advice Out Of WordPress

My hope is that Zeldman and Happy Cog both learned their lessons with WordPress 2.5. Despite their research and testing, the redesigned interface failed to deliver. It would be a shame to see that type of advice filter into Jetpack, WordPress.org, or other projects. Since WordPress 2.5, all major interface redesigns have taken place in house.

Attention WordPress plugin developers! Here’s an opportunity to sharpen your skills. Back in April, Jon Cave created a learning exercise, asking developers to review an intentionally vulnerable plugin that he created. Cave loaded this plugin up with a range of common security vulnerabilities that you might find out in the wild.

The plugin is located here: https://gist.github.com/joncave/5348689

If you want to attempt the challenge, make sure to read Cave’s original post. He warns, “Please remember not to run this plugin on any server that is accessible to the internet!” The idea is to look for the vulnerabilities, make notes of the problem and come up with patches to solve the problems.

When you’re ready, you can find the answers in Jon Cave’s follow-up post: How to Fix the Intentionally Vulnerable Plugin. He explains each vulnerability in detail and lets you know how it can be fixed.

The Intentionally Vulnerable Plugin is full of rotten code that will help you to learn about performing security reviews as well as how to fix vulnerabilities in your own plugins. If you’re coming up on some holiday free time, this might be a fun little challenge to take on.

We experienced a partial API outage between 09:35 and 12:05 UTC on November 25th.

There was a sudden surge in spam traffic, on top of spam volumes that were already unusually high. One of our data centers began dropping some API calls, and responding slowly to others. Our systems team routed all traffic to another data center, and after a few minutes the load was stabilised. We estimate availability was 50-60% for the first hour, then 70% and up.

Availability has been back to normal since 12:05 UTC, November 25th.

Clients with a re-try feature – including all recent versions of the Akismet plugin for WordPress – will have automatically re-checked any comments that were missed due to the disruption.

Our systems team has identified the components that failed under load, and we’re working on an improved architecture that will allow a quicker response to unusually heavy loads.

Spam levels remain unusually high. The API is handling it comfortably now.

The WordPress admin is arranged to suit the general needs of most people who will be using it to publish content. Depending on the volume of content you’re creating and your habits in the admin, you may find that you have unique needs.

Tom McFarlin released a plugin this weekend that adds page templates to the page listing screen in the admin. This plugin reminded me of others like it – plugins that do something small but bring a nice bit of convenience to your content management experience. I’ve put together a little collection of plugins that have made my life more convenient while working in the WordPress admin on a daily basis.

Display Page Templates on Page List

As referenced above, McFarlin’s new Page Template Info plugin makes it easy to see what page template is being utilized by each page in the listing screen.

This saves you from having to dip into each page edit screen to find out which template is set. You can see them all at a glance. Download the Page Template Info plugin on github.

Display Featured Images on Posts Listing Page

The Featured Image Column plugin will help you to easily determine which posts have featured images set. It also provides a visual association for each post beyond just the title. If you happen to be missing a featured image that is screwing up your layout, this plugin will help you to quickly find which post to edit.

Make Page, Post and User IDs More Accessible

Easy access to content IDs in WordPress really helps when featuring content in sliders, widgets, and plugin settings. Oftentimes, configuring plugins and themes will require IDs, whether it’s for featured members, featured categories, sliders based on tags, etc. There are a couple very solid plugins for putting those IDs at your fingertips.

The Catch IDs plugin displays IDs for posts, pages, media, links, categories, tags and users. This is probably the most basic solution.

The Reveal IDs plugin shows all of the same IDs as the Catch IDs plugin but also adds IDs for comments, custom taxonomies, and custom post types. Both are available from the WordPress plugin repository.

Add an AJAX-powered Star for Sticky Posts

If rotating sticky posts is a regular part of your content management routine, then you’ll appreciate the convenience of the Sticky Clicky Star plugin. It adds a star icon to the post listing page and uses AJAX to immediately update your post’s sticky status upon click.

Color Post Statuses

Color Post Status is plugin by Remi Corson that lets you add different styles for each of the following:

• Post Status
• Post Format
• Post ID
• Post Categories
• Post Types
• Post Tags
• Author
• Atom

This is particularly useful for sites that are actively producing content, especially in a multi-author scenario. It allows authors to quickly scan the posts list and easily find a post of a certain status, author, category, etc. The best part is that you can assign the colors that make sense for your requirements.

One Click Close Comments

The One Click Close Comments plugin adds an AJAX-powered color-coded indicator to the posts screen to show if comments are open/closed.

This plugin makes closing or opening comments as convenient as pushing the red or green button. You can quickly scroll through the post list and change the comment status for posts without having to dip into each page and navigate back out again.

Add and Assign Featured Images Using Drag and Drop

If you’re a fan of adding media to WordPress via drag-and-drop, then you may want to get the Drag & Drop Featured Image plugin. It replaces the default “Set Featured Image” metabox with a drop zone for faster uploading and automatic assigning of featured images.

Drag & Drop Featured Image includes options for setting which post types will have the drag-and-drop zone active. The plugin also compresses all sizes, just like the regular upload mechanism, and respects any custom image sizes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com has joined two lawsuits in federal court under Section 512(f) of the DMCA. Section 512(f) is the provision that allows users to hold people accountable when they make false infringement accusations.

Earlier this year, Automattic took some heat for their role in taking down Oliver Hotham’s website after the Straight Pride UK group filed a DMCA take down notice with WordPress.com. In the Guardian article, WordPress.com admitted that the take down notice was an abuse of the law.

We think this was a case of abuse of the DMCA and we don’t think that taking it down was the right result. It’s censorship using the DMCA. We can’t verify that the complainant actually owns the copyrighted information – we rely on the fact they sign their complaint and verify, under penalty of perjury, that they own the copyright

While the DMCA law has its place and has been effective in removing copyrighted material, it’s also been heavily abused. In this case, and many others I’ve read over the years, it’s an easy way to silence a voice. I applaud Automattic for finally stepping up and standing strong with their users that have been abused by the law. I hope that the outcome from these lawsuits sends a message to anyone thinking about using the DMCA as a way to censor people.

WordPress developers Dan Hefferan and Brian Workman have launched a brand new website aimed at helping youth ministries create and host websites called ymLaunch. In a blog post published by Dan Hefferan on his personal site, he tells the how and why ymLaunch was created.

Brian would often go to youth conferences and conferences for youth directors. He would browse through the vendor tables and always wish that there were people who were providing websites for youth directors but also that these websites would be separate from the main church websites. The vendors he was hoping to find, however, didn’t exist. While youth ministry afforded some more flexibility than a standard job, he didn’t have the time to fully learn how to code his own websites. So his ministry remained website-less.

ymLaunch only has one theme available but Dan tells me there are a couple of themes in development that will be available within the next few weeks. Pricing is straight forward with three different options depicted in the following graphic.

Dan has informed me that the site is powered by WordPress Multisite. When asked if ymLaunch would be open to other customers besides youth ministries and churches, Dan told me: “We’ll be limiting it to church related ministries. We could see some smaller churches interested in it as well as others.”

I’m Hoping To See Collaboration With Churchthemes

I asked Dan if they plan on cooperating with Churchthemes launched earlier this year for the same market segment. He was unaware that Churchthemes existed but told me that it would be great to collaborate with Steven Gliebe in the future. Since Churchthemes is a dedicated theme shop for churches and ymLaunch is a hosted service for youth ministries, I think the two would make great collaborators within the same niche.

Good luck to Dan and Brian on their new service.

Justin Tadlock, creator of Theme Hybrid, released his new Stargazer parent theme to the public today. Stargazer is what Tadlock calls a “design-specific parent theme.” It’s based on the latest, not-yet-released version 2.0 of the Hybrid Core framework.

Like many other WordPress parent themes, Stargzer houses all the functionality and the markup. However, the unusual thing about the theme is that it also contains the majority of the design. This unique relationship between parent and child themes is what sets Stargazer apart.

Perhaps it’s easier to understand Stargazer by what it’s not. Tadlock explains his intentions:

It is not meant as a base theme that you build intricate designs on top of. You wouldn’t want to make a restaurant or [insert specific niche] child theme. You wouldn’t use it as a starter for all your client projects unless all your clients had the specific needs that this theme addresses.

This theme won’t meet every user’s needs. It’s not supposed to.

You might be wondering, as I was at first: What’s the point of a design-specific parent theme? Most WordPress theme developers are used to super generic parent themes that are meant to be all-encompassing themes, suited for customizing to any specification via a child theme. However, Stargazer is meant to be just the opposite. It was created to provide limitations.

The purpose is that you’ll have a limited design window where you can make changes. Think of this theme as a beautifully-crafted box. It does everything a box of its size needs to do. It holds various things for various people (user content). However, some people want a blue box rather than a red box. That’s where child themes come in. Child themes can paint the box whatever color they want. However, they can’t change the purpose of the box.

The Stargazer Parent Theme Experiment

When Tadlock announced the Stargazer beta, he invited developers and designers to test out his new theme. He was surprised by how much interest it generated, because the concept is diametrically opposed to the complex WordPress themes that permeate the market today.

With Stargazer, Tadlock is aiming to keep the barrier for entry low so that DIY users/future theme developers are encouraged to experiment. All of the complex aspects of the theme are kept out of site in sub-folders of the parent theme. You don’t have to know a ton of PHP code to get started. Tadlock says that he hopes Stargazer child themes will provide a launching point for potential theme developers to learn the basics:

By creating complex code in our themes, we’re alienating those DIY users who like to tinker with code. DIY users are potential theme authors. If we make it hard to learn how themes work, we’re doing a disservice to the community.

When you create a child theme for Stargazer, the idea is to focus on colors, typography and images. A Stargazer child theme takes you straight to the “Fun Zone” of design, because you don’t have to bother with widths and margins and heavy markup. Child themes for Stargazer should focus on:

• Custom Background
• Custom Header
• Custom Primary Color

The challenge is to play within the constraints of the parent theme to create a totally unique child theme. Though Stargazer may seem like a rather limited theme upon first glance, if you look under the hood, you’ll find four different layout options built into the customizer, complete integration with Schema.org microdata, support for post formats, post layouts, threaded comments and seamless integration with other Theme Hybrid extensions.

My Impressions of the Stargazer Theme

When Justin announced the Stargazer beta, I was intrigued and decided to join in to check out this new parent/child theme creation process. I expected to feel too constrained by the parent theme design but was surprised by what I found.

Creating a child theme for Stargazer almost feels like cheating. Stargazer does all of the heavy lifting and provides a solid backbone for a beautifully responsive theme. Basic, minimalist styles are already set for menus, dropdowns, widgets, meta and anything else that is normally a beast to style.

Although it may at first feel like you’re only permitted a small design window, working within these constraints is actually quite liberating. With a few broad strokes of the brush, you can quickly create a unique child theme with all of the layout flexibility of the parent theme.

While beta testing, I created Intrepid, a blog-centric child theme that I’ll make available on github as soon as I tidy up the code. Putting this together took no time at all:

Tadlock estimates that most users will be able to put together child themes for Stargazer in under half an hour. There’s really not much to learn before jumping in. When creating a child theme, most of your time will be devoted to design decisions, rather than wrangling the nuts and bolts of the theme.

A New Approach to WordPress Parent/Child Themes:

Tadlock believes that this approach will provide for better parent theme upgrades. Since the child theme is limited to just the design basics, the parent theme can add in new functionality and make changes without breaking everything. This approach also offers a more consistent user experience. The child theme should work just like the parent theme, except it sports a different pair of clothes.

Stargazer is a blogging theme par excellence. It’s not going to be useful for every project and that’s okay. Tadlock plans to create more parent themes for other user cases in the future.

Now that Stargazer is out of beta, you can visit Theme Hybrid to view the demo and download it today. All plugins and themes offered at Theme Hybrid are free and open source. Have fun experimenting with this new style of parent/child themes and let us know what you think of the experience.

In this episode, we did something a little different. Instead of reviewing the headlines by ourselves, Tom McFarlin chimed in sharing his opinions on the headlines of the week. After going through the news, we spent some time getting to know Tom while finding out what happened at 8bit, what he’s doing with Pressware, updates on his boilerplate plugins, and his perspective on certain aspects of the WordPress community. Tom was a great guest and we really enjoyed our time with him.

Stories Discussed:

Crowd Favorite Acquired By VeloMedia
BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 1 Released and Ready For Testing
10up Sponsors Helen Hou-Sandi to Work Full-Time on WordPress Core
WordPress.com Adds Support For Markdown: Is TinyMCE On Its Way Out?
Industry Night #1 – Doug Karr From CircuPress
WordPress Twenty Fourteen Theme Is Out in the Wild
WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 Released: Break It If You Can

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For the second year in a row, WordPress advent calendar will be hosting their WordPress Snippets til Christmas campaign. Started in 2012, the WordPress Snippets til Christmas features a number of useful WordPress code snippets from members of the community. Submissions for 2013 are now open and don’t have to specifically deal with the Advent Calendar plugin.

When speaking to Elliot Richmond, the organizer of the event, he mentioned that he simply wanted to give back to a community that was so giving to him. This was not supposed to be an annual event. However, due to the success of the 2012 event, Elliot has decided to do it again for 2013. When asked what the main purpose of the event was, Elliot responded:

My main purpose was to give something to other WordPress creatives who aren’t necessarily into code development but know how to create a theme and would find short, easy to understand snippets useful for their own themes. It also goes to show how easy it is to get involved with the community and just by asking reputable developers to contribute shows how willing anyone from the community can be.

There are already a handful of developers ready to provide insightful snippets such as Tom McFarlin, Jason D. Moss, and Scott Sousa. Aside from the event, the theme used on the site is a great looking Christmas theme. It’s one of the few I’ve seen where the background images appear to be on three different layers. When you visit the site, scroll up or down to see what I’m talking about. According to WhatWPThemeIsThat.com, the site is running Underscores. It would be great to see their modifications available as a child theme of Underscores.

Let me introduce you to Flounder, a beautiful new blogging theme that landed in the WordPress Theme Directory this week. Created through the collaborative efforts of WordPress UI/UX designers Mel Choyce and Kelly Dwan, Flounder is a fully responsive theme with a colorful design for post formats.

The theme is based on Underscores, the popular ultra-minimal starter theme used by the WordPress.com Theme Team. Flounder has support for all standard post formats and includes colors and icons for each. The team designed it to work seamlessly with many of Jetpack’s popular features, such as infinite scroll and enhanced gallery support.

Flounder has already been downloaded nearly 2,000 times just a few days after its initial release. It’s easy to see why, given how beautifully the theme responds to various device sizes:

Check out a live demo and resize your browser screen to see how nicely Flounder responds.

The LESS source files for the theme are available on github. While Flounder already has a pleasant color scheme, the creators of the theme have made it insanely easy to change the colors using the LESS files.

If you’re looking for a new theme for your blog and you enjoy utilizing post formats, Flounder is a high quality option, designed and developed by a pair of consummate professionals. Since it’s hosted on WordPress.org, you also have the benefit of automatically being notified of any future theme updates. The most amazing thing about Flounder is that it’s available for free. Mel Choyce and Kelly Dwan have plans for more collaborative projects. If you like Flounder, make sure to follow them on their new theme site: themes.redradar.net.

The WordPress Theme Review team is welcoming Justin Tadlock as an admin. Justin is signing on to help with the final audits of new themes that have been approved during the review process.

Creator of Theme Hybrid and co-author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development, Tadlock knows WordPress theming inside and out. His expertise will be a valuable addition to the Theme Review admin team.

Join the Ranks of the WordPress Theme Review Team

Submissions to the WordPress Theme Directory are on the rise. Chip Bennett reports that over the past four months, the Theme Review Team has averaged over 80 new themes approved per month. Add that number to the 300 updates per month for existing themes in the directory and you can see that the team carries quite a load.

The Theme Review Team now has more than 100 reviewers, but they’re always looking for more. Wondering what theme reviewers do all day? Superstar reviewer Emil Uzelac gave us a behind-the-scenes look in A Day in the Life of a WordPress Theme Reviewer. These volunteers are serious about standards and stand as the gate keepers to the WordPress Theme Directory. They ensure that every theme listed at WordPress.org follows best practices and is safe for you to download. If you’d like to volunteer, check out the How To Join WPTRT page on WordPress.org for more information.

As written about by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt, Automattic is fighting back against two cases where we feel the DMCA has been used abusively for censorship and bullying. Read more about it here.

Automattic is making waves today in the fight against censorship, filing two lawsuits against those who are abusing the DMCA by misrepresenting copyright infringement. The company is taking a stand against the fraudulent misuse of copyright law in order to protect WordPress.com users from censorship.

Meanwhile, the other dark side of censorship – the one that simply turns the lights off and cuts off access to information – is still alive and well. State control over every form of media and communication outlet keeps citizens from coming in contact with new ideas. Policing access to websites deemed as subversive is fairly high on the state’s list of priorities. Sites like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are entirely blocked.

Unfortunately, the Great Firewall of China also intermittently blocks both WordPress.com and Gravatar. Automattic has a long history of dealing with censorship in China, Turkey and other parts of the world. The WordPress mission to democratize publishing is far more radical than many political movements. Those of us who enjoy freedom of speech often take it for granted. In addition to protesting and standing against censorship, another thing you can do is help out on the technical details for users in blocked countries.

How to Turn Off Gravatar Support

Here are a few practical tips for working with websites that will be viewed by users who intermittently have Gravatar and WordPress.com blocked. The other day I saw that @rarst jumped in on a conversation on wordpress.stackexchange.com where a user was experiencing a lag in page load times due to the Great Chinese Firewall blocking Gravatar. He suggested several solutions. The easiest one is to turn of Gravatar support in WordPress’ discussion settings:

Settings > Discussion > Avatar Display

Unfortunately, this setting removes support for avatars entirely. If you’d like to add that back in, you might consider using a plugin such as WP User Avatar or Simple Local Avatars.

Hacking WordPress to remove every trace of Gravatar is not a good idea. @rarst suggests overriding the get_avatar() function, which is pluggable. Ordinarily, it doesn’t make much sense to remove Gravatar, but if you have to for whatever reason, please do not attempt to hack the core.

Jetpack Modules to Avoid for the Chinese Firewall

If your site is being viewed behind the Chinese firewall, you’ll want to avoid any modules that directly interface with WordPress.com. Jeremy Herve, Happiness Engenieer for Jetpack, outlined a few in a recent support thread:

• Photon: Serves your images from the WordPress.com cloud preventing Chinese readers from seeing them.
• Tiled Galleries: Depends on Photon, so you won’t be able to use it.
• Jetpack Comments: Replaces your comment form by a custom form hosted at WordPress.com. Don’t activate this module if you want readers to be able to leave comments.
• Jetpack Subscriptions: While the Subscription widget would work, subscribers are required to click a confirmation link leading to a WordPress.com page.
• Gravatar Hovercards: Shows a pop-up business card of your users’ Gravatar profiles in comments.

Most of Jetpack functionality should work just fine. For the modules that interact with WordPress.com in your admin area, Jeremy suggests using a VPN to administrate your site. If you need alternatives to the WordPress.com and Gravatar-powered modules, check out Jeff’s recent post: 15+ Plugins To Get Jetpack Functionality Without Using Jetpack.

Hopefully, someday we won’t have to worry about oppressive regimes restricting WordPress.com, Gravatar and other sites that support freedom of speech. In the meantime, these practical tips should help you work around China’s firewall. Anyone else have anything to add for adjusting WordPress sites to prevent problems with firewalls?

photo credit: florian.b via photopin cc