WordPress.org

PropsPress is an inspirational WordPress site that publishes posts, recognizing code contributed to the WordPress core. The site uses IFTTT to monitor the changesets from the wordpress.org trac system and re-publishes the commit messages with “props” to recognize the folks who worked on the code.

WordPress developer Kurt Payne created the site with a desire to illustrate how WordPress is built through the combined efforts of many people. “PropsPress was a fun pet project I started a long time ago when I first got involved in WordPress contributions,” he said. “I thought it would be fun to have a central place to have a call-out whenever a piece of code was contributed.”

Why PropsPress?

When Payne first set up PropsPress, he wanted to highlight contributions in order to inspire more people to get involved in core contributions:

When I first started contributing (July 2011 or so), the core group felt pretty small and it was difficult to get people contributing. I perceived a problem of too much work (too many trac tickets, too many things needed testing), and too little knowledge (too few core members had the right knowledge of how to use trac / WordPress).

Since that time, however, WordPress has added several new committers and has made great strides in making contribution more accessible vai the Core Contributors Handbook.

“Overall, WordPress is a much friendlier place for contributors,” Payne said, which he attributed to the recent trac re-organization and refresh, as well as the addition of new group leads to help facilitate communication and representation.

Meanwhile, PropsPress has been quietly tweeting out props and publishing commit messages. “I was hoping to augment what WordPress was already doing with ‘recent rockstars’ but on a more regular basis,” Payne said. “I didn’t know where it would go, so I kinda let it bake.”

A New Direction for PropsPress

Payne is unsure as to whether PropsPress actually moved the needle to inspire more contributions to WordPress but he’s looking to use the website as a way to give back to the community. He’s got a few ideas to add stats tracking for all forms of WordPress contribution:

Codex contributions, support in irc / forums, ticket contributions (gardening, testing), translations, monetary donations, etc. This is all in addition to the code contributions. I think these would be fantastic to track.

Ideally, Payne would like to be able to show a range of individual stats, including:

• Number of submitted patches
• Number of accepted contributions
• Number of ticket touches
• Pie chart of JS / PHP / HTML
• Pie chart of unit tests vs. core code

Payne says the idea is more for recognition and encouragement than for competition. He has reservations about adding too much gamification. “It can be dangerous to gamify it too much because then it can become less about the altruism and more about the game.”

He hopes to backfill PropsPress to put each post in a tag for the users who are props’d so that the props would be queryable using WordPress taxonomies. Another interesting addition that he’d like to bring is a per-release total of “core committer code” vs “props code” in a stacked graph. “The hope is that the props code, in aggregate, is trending up!” he said.

One fun idea he has is to see WordPress identify “commit-anniversaries” and celebrate them, too.

This is easy to automate and is already celebrated on Twitter manually. Imagine if you woke up to ’1 year ago, your code was pulled into WordPress 3.6. Thank you!’ with a link to the ticket. That’s something you can retweet and that’s something that people can get excited about.

Some of these ideas have been included in past WordPress community discussions on WordPress stats, though it may not be possible to easily access this information at this point in time.

Payne said that he would love to work on this project again but he needs help. “As you can tell, I have big vision and little time. Some suggestions from the leaders in the community would help set the direction.”

The Value of Knowing Where Contributions Come From

Payne believes that changes to PropsPress can help provide more information on where WordPress contributions come from, with the ultimate goal of improving the contribution experience. He poses a few examples:

What if WP knew that 90% of its code came from 10 people, and the other 10% came from 100 people … that’s good to know. Or what if I told you that 80% of contributors were one-time contributors only? That’s a totally made up number, but that type of metric is actionable. You can go find those one time contributors and do deep dives into their contribution experiences to find out why they aren’t contributing again.

Payne is open to ideas and suggestions from the community to improve PropsPress. What do you think about the concept of the site? Does it serve a valuable purpose?

Ohloh is an excellent resource for tracking open source projects and their contributions. The site allows you to search 10 billion lines of code and provides some fascinating data sets for OS projects, including WordPress and many of its popular plugins.

Ohloh’s analysis of “WordPress in a Nutshell” is based on the stats it was able to mine from the code and some in-house estimates. It provides an interesting perspective on the project:

• WordPress has had 25,085 commits made by 52 contributors representing 248,090 lines of code
• WordPress is mostly written in PHP with an average number of source code comments (as compared to other PHP projects in Ohloh)
• WordPress has a well established, mature codebase, maintained by a large development team with stable Y-O-Y commits
• WordPress took an estimated 64 years of effort (COCOMO model) starting with its first commit in April, 2003, ending with its most recent commit about 4 hours ago

In addition to the historical data provided about commits to the project, the assessment of the trends in recent activity is quite valuable to those working within the WordPress ecosystem.

Communicating “Free, Yet Priceless” Is Not Easy

If you’ve built a business around providing WordPress development services, the insight provided here can help you articulate your confidence in the stability of the project for clients who are new to OS software. The notion of using software that is free to download may be off-putting to business owners who are used to judging value by dollars and time invested.

Ohlo’s estimated cost of WordPress is $3,488,557 with 63 person-years of effort, using the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO). While software cost estimation isn’t an exact science, especially for distributed open-source projects, a basic understanding of the COCOMO calculations provides an interesting perspective on WordPress’ value. It also reveals the power of like-minded contributors working together toward a common goal.

When you take into account the combined personnel attributes required to engineer and maintain a project of this size, there are few corporate entities that would have the budget to produce a project like WordPress in-house for their own development needs. That’s the beauty of open source software. Developers are happy to contribute to projects they believe in, and you can bank on people believing in the philosophy behind WordPress.

Visualize WordPress Lines of Code By Language

The languages summary of the code base is of particular interest during a time when the WordPress community has been enthusiastically embracing dialogues about its future. Ohloh offers a visual representation of WordPress lines of code by language:

It’s interesting to note that CSS and Javascript seem to parallel each other in terms of moderate growth over the years. PHP is still the fastest growing language in the code base, although WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg predicts that Javascript will someday make up the better part of its code. When speaking at WordCamp Europe 2013, Mullenweg’s advice to attendees was: “If you’re a developer today, learn as much JavaScript as possible.”

Ohloh’s graphs make it easy to visualize composite languages used in WordPress code and lets you toggle by year in order to further explore the data and follow the resulting trends.

Even with Ohloh’s limited access to the project’s public data, it’s fascinating to see how it has been able to provide visuals for stats such as commits per month and contributors per month.

It would be awesome if some day WordPress.org could display more stats related to its code and contributions, which would undoubtedly provide some more meaningful data on other aspects of the project as a whole. In the meantime, Ohloh is an excellent resource to bookmark for an interesting perspective on what’s happening with the WordPress code base.

I’ve had a special place in my heart for comments in WordPress ever since I started using the platform. I hold comments in high regard because they often provide more insight into the topic being discussed. Comments are a validation someone’s reading my content and I look forward to reading every one of them.

WordPress comments haven’t changed much in the past few years. Brian Krogsgard over at Postat.us has published a list of ideas he has to improve the way comments function in WordPress. His ideas are solid and I agree with them, especially the idea to remove what one of his clients considered to be computer code from the bottom of the comment form.

This code should be removed as suggested by Brian but I’d extend the idea to replace the text with WYSIWYG buttons people are familiar with to style text. They’re called Quicktags and WordPress supports them out of the box via the Quicktags API. Quicktags provide the same type of buttons you’d see when writing a post in the Text editor of WordPress. Bonus points to theme authors who style the tags to match the rest of the theme.

Comments Of The Third Party Kind

The first thing I do after I read an article is read the comments if they’re available. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly rare to see popular sites powered by WordPress using the native comment system. Most of the comment forms I see look like this.

Personally, I don’t like seeing two columns of related content underneath the current conversation. I find it confusing to figure out where a conversation ends. The bottom line is more and more sites are turning to third party comment systems because of the features they have out of the box.

Automattic Tried With IntenseDebate

Acquired in September of 2008 by Automattic, IntenseDebate was one of many commenting services launched that year including Disqus, SezWho, and JS-Kit. IntenseDebate had some cool features for comments at the time such as threaded comments and reply by email. Fast forward six years later and IntenseDebate is now on hiatus. This was confirmed by Matt Mullenweg when we interviewed him on episode 130 of WordPress Weekly.

When I asked him about the status of IntenseDebate, he replied “IntenseDebate is currently on hold. It’s not actively being worked on inside Automattic. But there has been a lot of work on the Jetpack comment features such as subscriptions and interactions with social networks.”

He also mentioned WordPress hasn’t done a lot of things to improve areas that are user facing such as comments. The last major improvement to comments was the addition of threaded comments in WordPress 2.7 ‘Coltrane’. He explained, “It’s very difficult to iterate comments as it’s hard to get those changes to be compatible with every WordPress theme in the world.” He mentioned the possible use of API’s and ended his answer with “the most interesting things happening with comments are services and Automattic’s work with Jetpack Comments.”

Jetpack Powered Comments

I think it’s quite telling that WordPress.com doesn’t use IntenseDebate. Instead, it uses a custom comment system that supports using credentials from four major social media services. WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If you use Jetpack, you can use the same comment system by activating the Jetpack Comments module.

The biggest problem I have with Jetpack Comments is it’s not easily extendable using various comment plugins. Or, not many plugins are compatible with Jetpack Comments. At least with IntenseDebate, there is a library of plugins to add features on top of what the service already offers. Since Jetpack Comments is tied to a plugin, it’s not platform agnostic like IntenseDebate.

The Future Of Comments In WordPress Is Unclear

Between Jetpack comments and IntenseDebate, it’s unclear what the future holds for the native comment system in WordPress. There have been multiple discussions around the topic of removing comments from core and putting them into a plugin but the idea hasn’t gained traction.

My hope is that native WordPress comments will continue to improve to the point where using a third party is counter-productive. I want to see WordPress make it as easy as possible to contribute to conversations on the web. When Matt Mullenweg published the announcement of acquiring IntenseDebate on his blog in 2008, he said the following:

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation.

I hope he still feels that way about comments and will strive to improve that area of WordPress sooner, rather than later.

Further Reading

I encourage everyone to read this blog post from July 2, 2013 where Erlend Sogge Heggen wrote a post on how Automattic is losing the debate. It’s a detailed article that talks about IntenseDebate, Automattic, and commenting in WordPress in general. Also worth reading is the discussion that followed in the comments.

The code that powers the BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org websites is now open source. John James Jacoby, the lead developer for the projects, announced that all of the custom code used on these sites is now available in the Meta Subversion repository.

If you browse the repository, you’ll notice that the trunk has a BuddyPress.org directory but no bbPress directory. In Jacoby’s announcement on bbPress.org, he explained that the bbPress website is actually part of BuddyPress.org’s WordPress installation and they share some of the same code.

Open sourcing the code for these sites makes it possible for the community to take a more active role in contributing to improvements. Jacoby hopes that contributors will be enthusiastic about working together to bring new design, features, and direction to the websites:

You’re now able to checkout, review, and patch the code that makes BuddyPress.org happily hum along. This is exciting for a few obvious reasons (like security, and really putting our open source philosophies where our code is) but the one I’m most excited about is it takes enhancements to the site out of our hands, and potentially puts them into yours.

His post was essentially an open invitation to the bbPress and BuddyPress communities. Now it’s possible for anyone to jump in and contribute using the same workflow that you’ve used for contributing to bbPress and BuddyPress software in the past. What would you like to change or add to the project sites?

I have a few quotes and thoughts in the WSJD article At Lavish SXSW Festival, Some Avoid Marketing Circus.

Are you passionate about mobile development? Do you want to work on projects that actively improve the mobile experiences of millions of users around the world?

Automattic, the company that contributes to mobile projects like WordPress for BlackBerry, is hiring. If you have strong programming skills, a background in mobile development, and a passion for working on and enhancing the user experience on small-screen portable devices, check out our Mobile Developer job description.

Be sure to check out the Mobile Handbook, visit the development blog for WordPress apps, and take a look at the GitHub repository for the WordPress for Legacy BlackBerry app, too.

WordPress core contributors are aiming to address an issue with multisite new user emails in the upcoming 4.0 release. Two weeks ago, Daniel Bachhuber opened a ticket proposing that WordPress instruct users to change their passwords when sending new account emails.

When a user is added to a multisite network and has activated his account, WordPress sends out an email that includes the new password:

Several text changes were proposed for the email to urge users to change their passwords after logging in. After a brief discussion during yesterday’s core development meeting, Andrew Nacin moved the issue to the Login and Registration component.

“We’re going to skip this entirely for 3.9,” Nacin said. He highlighted the reasons why the incremental improvements in the proposed patches don’t solve the issue, given that they:

• Only apply to multisite (emails are sent in plain text for new user registrations in single-site too)
• Only apply for the fallback email template (these are editable in multisite)
• Don’t do anything in the dashboard to nag the user

Nacin proposed that the core team tackle the issue for WordPress 4.0 in a way that will clearly improve the user experience. He also suggested that this issue might be combined with work on another enhancement that would allow admins to generate and send new passwords for users.

This is a much larger task than simply changing the email text. “It’ll probably require a group of contributors to storyboard out exactly how all of this should work in an ideal situation, and then we can go about coding it,” Nacin said in response to the ticket. Aaron Jorbin proposed putting together a “Password Process” group to “identify some more concrete changes that we can make in 4.0 (including eliminating sending passwords via email).”

If the team can find some momentum, this issue will be getting attention in WordPress 4.0. If anyone is interested to contribute to this effort, join in on the next dev meeting and make sure to watch the related tickets for notifications.

Here’s a handy trick for WordPress theme developers. As of WordPress 3.8, theme authors have the ability to customize defaults when adding custom background support. For example, you can set a default for any of the following CSS background properties:

• background-color
• background-image
• background-repeat
• background-attachment
• background-position

Oftentimes users want their sites to look similar to the demo, but they may be unaware of how to adjust the background properties to achieve that. It’s nice to have some defaults in place so that the theme looks similar to the demo right out of the box, without any adjustments.

Depending on the background image that you select, it can be advantageous to set its defaults to the most sensible display for that image. For example, if your default background is an image that’s meant to tile, you want it displayed like that after the user activates the theme.

Adding custom background support to the customizer is done through your theme’s functions.php file:

add_theme_support( 'custom-background' );

From here you can further customize the background properties by adding default arguments. Usually themes add custom background support to a setup function with other customizer options. Here’s a quick example of setting a default background to no-repeat, centered position with fixed attachment.

function yourtheme_setup() {
	add_theme_support(
		'custom-background',
		array(
			'default-color' => '2d2d2d',
			'default-image' => get_template_directory_uri() . '/images/background.jpg',
			'default-repeat'     => 'no-repeat',
			'default-position-x' => 'center',
			'default-attachment' => 'fixed',

		)
	);
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'yourtheme_setup' );

Here’s what that looks like in the customizer by default after the user installs the new theme:

Of course, the user can still adjust these properties through the customizer to suit their own custom background images. The defaults simply ensure that the packaged background image looks nice when the theme is activated for the first time.

Pssst… want to know a secret? Every day when you’re accessing bbPress.org, you’re actually looking at code that’s part of BuddyPress.org’s WordPress installation. (Pretty neat, eh?) Because of this, a recent announcement over at the BuddyPress.org blog also applies here, that after some clean-up and simplification, we’ve open sourced the custom code that’s running on bbPress.org.

This means you’re free to help shape the design, features, and direction that both BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org take in the future. It’s really exciting (for me) since what’s been running here for the past few years is largely made from bits of my (increasingly fragmented) imagination to provide a clean slate & solid foundation for everyone to build on top of.

I’m really excited to see what the future of both BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org look like, now that you’re able to help us out!

When we first launched BuddyPress.org, the BuddyPress software hadn’t even been officially launched yet. By the time it had, requests for what software the website was running on were already coming into the forums. It wasn’t just BuddyPress people were asking for, it was the theme powering the site, the extra little plugins we were running to trick it out, and just general curiosity about what we were doing to make things go.

In October of 2012, the core teams started the Meta Blog which lead us towards releasing bits of WordPress.org code for peer review over on the Meta Trac. Since then, we’ve simplified BuddyPress.org’s codebase to make reviewing it and extending it really easy, and we are excited to announce today that all of the custom code is now publicly available in the Meta Subversion repository.

You’re now able to checkout, review, and patch the code that makes BuddyPress.org happily hum along. This is exciting for a few obvious reasons (like security, and really putting our open source philosophies where our code is) but the one I’m most excited about is it takes enhancements to the site out of our hands, and potentially puts them into yours.

Building software that powers millions of websites is one job (a heck of a fun one, too) and building and maintaining your own support site is actually quite another (like a self portrait; it’s a fun challenge.) Now, anyone can help improve not just BuddyPress, but also the site that supports it — that’s huge — and we can’t wait to see how BuddyPress.org evolves now that it’s in your hands!

I recently ran across an issue that I was previously unaware of, so other developers could run into it as well. I was having problems with a plugin, which started misbehaving. The plugin had previously worked fine (it generates a sidebar widget), and I wasn’t actively working on my site, so I wasn’t really sure when it had quit working.

In the course of debugging the problem, I discovered that the plugin was throwing warnings in my PHP error log regarding the mysql_real_escape_string() function. As a quick fix, I simply replaced all of those calls with WordPress’ esc_sql() function. Voila, problem fixed.

Curious, I took a peek into wp-db.php, and found this block of code:

/* Use ext/mysqli if it exists and:
 *  - USE_EXT_MYSQL is defined as false, or
 *  - We are a development version of WordPress, or
 *  - We are running PHP 5.5 or greater, or
 *  - ext/mysql is not loaded.
 */
if ( function_exists( 'mysqli_connect' ) ) {
        if ( defined( 'USE_EXT_MYSQL' ) ) {
                $this->use_mysqli = ! USE_EXT_MYSQL;
        } elseif ( version_compare( phpversion(), '5.5', '>=' ) || ! function_exists( 'mysql_connect' ) ) {
                $this->use_mysqli = true;
        } elseif ( false !== strpos( $GLOBALS['wp_version'], '-' ) ) {
                $this->use_mysqli = true;
        }
}

Note the bit about using a development version of WordPress. In my case, I’m running out of svn trunk, and my server has the mysqli extension installed, so wpdb chose to use it. That’s fine.

But this exposes the fact that some plugins use functions like mysql_real_escape_string() “in the raw”, so to speak, which depends on using PHP’s mysql extension, and not mysqli. WordPress provides convenience functions like esc_sql() and $wpdb->prepare() to help abstract details like this away and protect developers against environmental differences between servers.

Hopefully this will save somebody else out there some debugging time.

Original Article: mysql vs mysqli in WordPress Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings - WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Toni Schneider, who recently switched positions with Matt Mullenweg inside Automattic has asked on the Gravatar blog, Which platform should a Gravatar app be released for first?. The choices are iOS, Android, or other. At the time of writing, Android was leading the poll with 80 votes while iOS is in second with 67 votes.

Details on the mobile app are nonexistent. When asked what a Gravatar mobile app would entail, Schneider replied: “No details, yet. Stay tuned.” A quick Google search shows at least one existing Gravatar app called iGravatar. With iGravatar, users can manage their Gravatar account from their mobile device.

What the official app will do is anyone’s guess and is ripe for speculation. With that said, I want to hear from you in the comments on what functionality do you think will be part of the official Gravatar app? Or, what would you like to see in the Gravatar app?

SellWP is a brand new service created by John Turner, who is also the developer of SeedProd. The goal of the service is to eliminate the stress and hassles of selling WordPress products allowing the developer to concentrate on the product itself. Some of the most difficult aspects of running a business such as licensing, memberships, refunds, secure download links, and refunds are handled through SellWP.

SellWP Is Not A Marketplace, But A Managed Solution For Selling Products

While I initially thought it would be a marketplace to sell themes and plugins, Turner informed me it’s not a marketplace at all. “The user markets the theme or plugin on their site and when the customer clicks buy now, it takes them to the hosted solution. The customer and license is then managed through SellWP.” While marketplaces can take anywhere between 20-50% of a sale, SellWP only takes 1.9% + 15¢ per charge in addition to the Stripe Fee.

By outsourcing the product management side of the business, you’re counting on the fact the site will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If SellWP experiences downtime, it could result in lost sales. The site is hosted through Fortrabbit, a service dedicated to providing developers great PHP hosting environments. SellWP is transparent about the fact that their uptime is dependent upon the uptime of Fortrabbit.

SellWP Takes Most Of The Worry Out Of Selling Products

Sellers don’t have to worry about being locked into the service since they can obtain CSV files containing customers, orders, licenses, products and coupons. The service also creates daily, weekly, and monthly backups hosted at an offsite location. SellWP takes care of SSL certificates by using CloudFlare’s flexible SSL certificate. This certificate is used to secure the seller’s shopping cart and membership areas. Back filling of customer data is not currently supported but will be available in an upcoming update.

Turner compares SellWP to VaultPress in that both are managed solutions to a problem:

If you want WordPress backups you can use BackupBuddy, a self managed solution, or VaultPress a managed solution. SellWP is a managed solution for selling WordPress products.

I asked Turner if he will only allow GPLv2 or compatible licensed products to be sold through the site. His response: “Yes, I believe in the GPL and intend to enforce it in the system.  The terms are actually from WordPress’ boiler plate terms but this will be added once I get some time.”

If you want to see what the service looks like behind the scenes, watch the following video.

Try It Free Until April 1st

SellWP is another service in a long line of managed solutions for WordPress. I think what the service has to offer will appeal to a lot of developers, especially those who don’t already have an established system in place to sell their products. The service is free to try til April 1st, 2014. Once the beta ends, sellers will be charged the standard fees per transaction.

Does SellWP look like something you would use? Will existing sellers outsource this area of their business to a third party? Place any feedback you have in the comments as John Turner will be monitoring them to answer any questions you have.

Last December, Jeff Chandler and I updated WP Tavern with a new design based on Theme Hybrid’s Stargazer theme. Stargazer takes a new approach to parent/child themes in that it houses the majority of both the design and functionality within the parent theme. The challenge is to make design changes in the child theme, without breaking the purpose of the parent theme.

During the process of learning more about Stargazer, I created a child theme, which has now been approved for the WordPress Themes Directory. Ex Astris was designed with bloggers in mind, since blogging is what made me fall in love with WordPress in the first place.

You can customize the theme with your own header and background, if desired, but the example shown here does not utilize a custom header. The theme supports all of the site layouts found in the Stargazer parent theme and can also render them on a per-post basis:

• 1 Column Wide
• 1 Column Narrow
• 2 Columns: Content / Sidebar
• 2 Columns: Sidebar / Content

Ex Astris is packaged with editor styles to help match the visual editor’s preview to the fonts and styles used within the theme. It supports all post formats and is translation-ready. By nature of being a child theme, it automatically includes all the features found in the Stargazer parent theme, ie. sticky posts, breadcrumbs, threaded comments, etc.

Check out a live demo of Ex Astris to see it in action.

Originally, the theme was called Intrepid, but when I submitted it to WordPress.org, I found that there was already a theme with that name. Sidenote: Always check themes.svn.wordpress.org before selecting a theme name if you intend to submit to the directory. Given that the directory now contains 2,366 themes, a name with two words in it is less likely to be taken.

This was my first time going through the WordPress Theme Review process and I found that it’s actually fairly quick and easy for child themes. I’ve learned quite a bit along the way, thanks to the Theme Review Team and Justin Tadlock, all of whom are passionate about helping developers create themes that adhere to WordPress best practices.

Download Ex Astris from WordPress.org and feel free to drop me a note on github if you find any bugs.

In early February we reported that the Widget Customizer plugin had received the green light to be merged into the WordPress core for 3.9. At that time Andrew Nacin opened a ticket to help precipitate any necessary improvements and guide the details of how the files should be merged.

After three weeks of polishing, the Widget Customizer feature was officially merged into core today. Props go out to Weston Ruter and his team of dedicated developers who helped make this feature a reality.

For those adventurous souls who have been testing the feature using the Widget Customizer plugin, you can now remove it and start testing it within the trunk.

No Changes Required From Theme Developers

Theme developers will not need to add theme support for the customizer to indicate a widget’s support for live previews, as this was stripped from the version of the plugin that was merged. Instead, the team opted to generalize this functionality so that any feature utilizing the customizer controls can do partial preview updates. Widgets still get live previews, but the window will refresh in an unobtrustve way as you make changes. Now that the widget customizer will soon be a native part of the WordPress publishing experience, WordPress users should be sure to read up on all the capabilities it will add.

We are working on a Gravatar mobile app and would like to ask our users:

Take Our Poll

The “Uncategorized” category is a generic bin where WordPress posts go when you forget to assign a category. It’s rather irksome to discover that you’ve published a post as “Uncategorized,” since it doesn’t do much to connect your readers with more useful information on your blog.

One easy solution to this problem is to edit the “Uncategorized” category slug in the admin at Posts > Categories. This is a decent option if you haven’t yet created any content. Another option is to set the default category at Settings > Writing. But what if you want to use multiple categories?

WordPress Default Category is a simple plugin that lets you select category defaults for new posts. It allows you to select multiple categories to assign to uncategorized posts. With your selections in place, forgetting to categorize your post isn’t such a big deal because you can default it to be placed in one of your more general categories, such as “News” and “Tutorial”.

Check out a live demo:

Multisite Compatible

This plugin was actually created for a multisite environment, though it works just fine on single WordPress installs as well. When network activated, it allows site administrators to select default categories for their own sites.

The WordPress Default Category plugin was created by Jason Kalawe. When I asked him why he made the plugin, he said that it was originally part of a custom project. “This plug-in is an offshoot of a much larger custom plugin that auto-assigns categories based on the users’ location in the world,” he said. Although he can’t share the original plugin due to its use of proprietary data, he thought the basic version would be useful to others using WordPress.

Setting up a default category can help to enforce editorial standards for posts so that none get lost in the generic bin of uncategorized content. It can also be useful as a quick reference for content editors who aren’t regular contributors to a site.

I tested the plugin and it works exactly as advertised. WordPress Default Category is available for free from WordPress.org. This is one of those rare plugins that is potentially useful to the vast majority of WordPress websites that make use of categories.

UserPress is a new free plugin that aims to be the ultimate wiki solution for WordPress. It provides a comprehensive set of user-friendly features that will transform your site into a collaborative hub for creating wiki content.

Richard Smith, the plugin’s author, created UserPress to provide functionality that he believes is often missing from existing wiki plugins. “Over the years, I have been frustrated by the lack of a proper wiki plugin for WordPress,” he said. “So I decided to build one.”

Front-end Editing for Wiki Content

UserPress allows wiki users to create and edit content on the frontend of the site. Wiki participation privileges are based on user capabilities and can be manually set for each wiki.

When creating new content, users will see a list of similar existing pages, which helps to prevent collaborators from overlapping on content. If a user accesses a non-existent wiki page, the plugin will prompt him to create a new page.

UserPress includes multiple options for sorting and managing wiki articles, including recently added, recently edited, recently discussed and alphabetical order. The plugin also offers an array of wiki-related widgets: search, new wikis, popular wikis, recent wikis, categories and tags, a tag cloud, and a subscription button.

Wiki Version Control and Moderation

One of UserPress’ more useful features is the built-in basic version control. The plugin allows users to compare changes to documents (diff) and gives the option for editors to attach a note with each revision.

UserPress allows wiki participants to moderate content using a set of customizable flags. For example, one might flag an article for poor attribution, readability or spam.

Subscription for bbPress and BuddyPress

The subscription feature allows users to monitor articles to keep track of comments and updates. However, subscription is only available for users on sites where bbPress and/or BuddyPress are activated. It fits in seamlessly with the user profile menu.

Members can navigate to the subscriptions panel to find out what’s new and to manage current active subscriptions.

Default Wiki Theme

The design for the default wiki theme is based on Zurb’s Foundation Framework. UserPress includes a responsive default theme (“UserTheme”) that is automatically installed and activated once the plugin has been activated. However, the plugin will work with any WordPress theme. The automatic activation of the theme upon installation of the plugin helps users to discover that there is a theme available, but it might be disturbing if the administrator is not expecting it.

If you’re looking for a wiki plugin that works well on its own and integrates nicely with bbPress and BuddyPress, UserPress is a solid option. Its feature set is geared towards making collaboration more efficient and productive for wiki participants. Download the plugin from WordPress.org or grab the latest from the UserPress homepage.

Managed WordPress hosts are popping up all over the web. The platform is now so widely used that mammoth hosting providers such as GoDaddy and MediaTemple have added specialized hosting packages dedicated to WordPress customers. WordPress hosting providers that cater to a specific niche are the latest trend.

CampusPress is a newly branded managed host that specializes in WordPress multisite networks for educational organzations. It’s actually an offshoot of Edublogs, the largest educational blogging host that has been providing multisite hosting since 2005. Due to the high demand for more CMS features, the Edublogs team decided to differentiate the services with CampusPress focused on providing multisite network hosting for schools and universities.

I spoke with Edublogs Director of Operations, Ronnie Burt, to discuss the reasons for launching CampusPress as a separate entity into the managed hosting market. He said that many of the existing Edublogs customers wanted to use the service for more than blogs but were hesitant due to “blogs” within the name. “Since WordPress is all grown up and used for way more than blogging,” he said. “We’re re-branding our Edublogs Campus service and really improving the network infrastructure and features to better support all types of sites.”

How Multisite Hosting Works at CampusPress

In addition to providing a hosting environment optimized for multisite networks, CampusPress accounts also include many built-in features specific to white labeling and managing a multisite network for education. A few examples include:

• Domain mapping
• Class and student management tools
• Content filtering and moderation
• Native apps for iOS and Android
• LDAP, Google Apps, Shibboleth and LTI authentication options

I asked Burt if CampusPress is one giant network that manages all the multisite installations. “It isn’t technically networks within a network,” he said. “Each school has their own totally separate multisite install. We use SVN to manage WordPress core and our default plugins and themes across all of the networks.” CampusPress also provides a custom SVN folder for customers to submit and manage custom themes.

The multisite hosting is truly managed in that the maintenance is handled professionally behind the scenes and customers do not have any server-level access such as FTP or the database. “This is how we can guarantee reliability and security,” Burt said. “While traditional managed hosting providers may have automated scans and a blacklist of plugins, we manually review line by line each line of code of every plugin and theme added to our networks.”

The Challenge of Keeping Pace With WordPress

Burt says that one of the biggest challenges of hosting multisite networks is performing upgrades. “Universities and schools often also have their own change management and branding policies and regulations,” he said. “They tend to not like upgrades or major changes in the middle of the school year, and they all seam to require different things when it comes to testing, timelines, and rolling out new plugins/tools.”

For example, WordPress 3.8 introduced major changes to WordPress and many organizations didn’t want to have to re-educate their users in the middle of the school year. “This is especially a challenge when they get on different versions of WordPress core,” Burt explained. “It seems like as soon as we finally get everyone happily upgraded, another version will roll out and we’ll start the process all over again. We’d upgrade them all at the same time if they’d let us.”

CampusPress Expands Beyond Educational Blogs

With the new CampusPress branding in place, Burt and his team are able to expand beyond providing educational blogs. One of the largest categories includes news/magazine sites like, such as the University of Denver Magazine. The other category they serve is faculty/department websites in need of CMS capabilities, such as the University of Oregon Political Science Department and Cornell’s Media Relations Office.

A few interesting examples of multisite networks already hosted with CampusPress include:

• Bill and Melinda Gates Hall
• Cornell’s Emergency Site
• University of Delaware Student Newspaper
• San Jose State’s Alumni Magazine
• University of Oregon Department Sites
• Ohio State’s Drumline

WordPress use is on the rise in the education sector. “The buzz around WordPress at the conferences we attend and the WP in Education mailing list suggests a growth that parallels WordPress in business and other arenas,” Burt said. With the re-branded CampusPress website launched this week, Edublogs is officially entering the managed WordPress hosting market. The company joins Cart66 as one of the first managed WordPress hosts catering to a specific niche.

MediaTemple has announced they have a new managed WordPress hosting package available dubbed Premium WordPress Hosting. The package has a cost of $29 per month which places it near the top of my price comparison chart. I created this chart a few months ago when GoDaddy announced their managed WordPress hosting package.

• GoDaddy – $6.99 / month
• Siteground – $9.95 / month
• Flywheel – $15.00 / month
• DreamPress – $19.95 / month
• Page.ly – $24.00 / month
• Pressable – $25.00 / month
• Synthesis – $27.00 / month
• WP Engine – $29.00 / month
• MediaTemple 3 WordPress Installs For $29.00 / month

MediaTemple is owned by GoDaddy but both companies operate independently of each other. While I initially thought it was a bad idea for both GoDaddy and MediaTemple to offer managed WordPress hosting since they are in a way, the same company, I’ve come to the understanding that each one serves a different customer base.

What MediaTemple Offers

As is customary with other managed hosting providers, MediaTemple offers a staging environment to work on sites before they go live. Other notable features include:

• Easy-to-use site templating
• Automatic updates
• Mobile Optimized
• Automatic security
• Automatic backups
• Next-gen cloud infrastructure

Perhaps one of the most important features offered is email, something not offered by WP Engine.

MediaTemple Launches Invite Only WordPress Theme Market

The market only contains one theme created by their creative directory but the company plans on adding more from talented designers in the future. I asked MediaTemple if there was any additional information they could give me regarding their theme marketplace. Their response:

As it is now, the market place is “invite only” with specific designers and organizations building custom themes for (mt) Premium WordPress Hosting customers. The theme market place is an area of this product we’re really excited about. We have very strong partnerships in the creative and development worlds, so this model is likely to change/grow with opportunities and there will definitely be one-off scenarios here. Essentially, the sky is the limit with the market place.

Customers are limited to three WordPress installations per account. If you need more, you’ll need to pay $9/month for each additional site. WordPress Multisite is currently not supported.

MediaTemple states they are aiming to push out WordPress updates within 48 hours of their release. Other leading WordPress managed hosting providers can sometimes take up to a week or more to test major versions of WordPress before applying the updates to their customer’s sites. However, security and or maintenance releases are usually applied the same day. The automatic updates only apply to WordPress, not plugins and themes.

When asked whether customers can initiate updates for WordPress, MediaTemple responded: “Only (mt) can initiate WordPress updates for sites running on Premium WordPress Hosting“. As we’ve mentioned on WPTavern before, this has become standard procedure.

Speaking of plugins, they have their own list of plugins not allowed to be used on their managed hosting infrastructure. It’s important for customers to read through the list in case you’ve purchased a commercial version of any of the plugins listed. For example, BackupBuddy is not allowed because it duplicates existing functionality provided by MediaTemple.

Are Managed WordPress Hosting Companies The Unseen Competition For WordPress.com?

While putting this post together, I thought about how many companies within the past three years have created specially crafted hosting environments to cater to customers using WordPress. Most of the WordPress managed hosting services I know of are extensions of established companies.

I look at managed WordPress hosting as providing the luxuries of WordPress.com but also allowing customers most of the freedoms associated with self-hosting WordPress. Customers can upload plugins, change themes, edit their themes, and perform tasks that are locked down on WordPress.com or require you to pay an upgrade fee. Plus, they have a team of people ready to help at a moments notice which places them a step above most shared webhosting services.

Tough To Compete Against Free

I think the one aspect preventing more WordPress.com users from purchasing a managed hosting account is the price. $29 per month, is $348 per year. That’s a lot of money for someone to spend if they just want to publish their thoughts to the web. If you want most of the freedoms self-hosting WordPress provides without having to pay a large sum of money, GoDaddy is a nice option.

The price of free is hard to compete against which is why I think WordPress.com has nothing to worry about. They cater to customers who just need a quick and easy way to publish content online. I see managed WordPress hosting companies as the next step for users when they outgrow the constraints of WordPress.com or the total price of upgrades is more than the annual cost of a managed hosting account.

Ask MediaTemple Anything

The company is hosting a live Google+ Hangout on March 5th, 2014 at 9AM Pacific or Noon Eastern to answer any questions brought forth by the audience. No question appears to be off-limits.

Are you happy to see MediaTemple enter the WordPress managed hosting space? Is their anything in particular you’d like to know about their offering before you’d consider doing business with them?

Jeopardy, an American television game show, recently had a category dedicated to dot-com. Among the five answers within the category was WordPress.com. WordPress.com bills itself as “a better way to” keep one of these Internet diaries.

#WordPress on Jeopardy, category “Dot Com”. pic.twitter.com/xXVyKTRvzF

— Dougal Campbell (@dougal) March 4, 2014

The correct response is: What is a blog?

If you’d like to play a version of Jeopardy dedicated to WordPress, check out WPGameshow.com created by the organizers of WordCamp Detroit, 2011.

Every year for Lent I try to give something up that I would otherwise find unimaginable or consider myself particularly dependent on. Last year I gave up meat, which isn’t that unusual but you have to remember I’m from Texas.

This year as I surveyed my life there was one thing I kept coming back to as being completely dependent on: my smartphone(s). It’s only been a few years since the iPhone came out, but it’s inconceivable to imagine my life today without my calendar, email, Foursquare, Path, Chrome, Tripit, Simplenote, WordPress, Tweetbot, Sonos, Uber, Spotify and my iTunes library, and most importantly Google Maps. (On my second screen: SmartThings, Nest, Lociktron, Lutron, 1Password, Calm, Authy, NextDraft, Withings, Circa…) These apps and everything they represent weave into every aspect of my life, I’m sure I’m one of those people who looks at their phone at least 150 times a day. My smartphone is my camera, my flashlight, my connection to the world, and my crutch.

And now it’s what I’m giving up for Lent in 2014, from March 5th until April 17th. (Yes, that includes SxSW.) For safety and business reasons I’m going to have a makes-phone-calls-only phone, and might hop in a friend’s Uber, but the idea is there will not be a device on me 24/7 that I’m tethered to, constantly looking at, and lost and hopeless without. You obviously can’t turn back the clock on progress, so I don’t expect this to be a permanent thing, but I’m curious what I miss the most, how it affects my ability to focus throughout the day, and how it changes my relationships with other people, especially the lack of messaging.

I am in the market for a cool feature phone though, maybe a small one like Zoolander had or a slidey one like in the Matrix. Any suggestions?

I’ll leave you with the “I forgot my phone” video from last year:

DW Timeline is a beautiful free theme created by the folks at DesignWall. It is based on the Roots framework and features a unique timeline display for posts, inspired by Facebook’s timeline layout. DW Timeline was designed to showcase your blog or portfolio site.

Customizable Header

The homepage design supports a large customizable header image:

After you upload your own header image, DW Timeline has a few extra options built into WordPress’ native customizer that will help you to achieve an effect similar to what you see in the demo. The theme lets you define two colors for the header mask, as well as a background color for the site title.

Timeline Layout for Posts

Posts are arranged in a timeline format with pagination controls on the right side of the page. Clicking these will scroll you further down to the next set of posts. The number of pages is controlled by the number of posts you select in the Settings > Reading panel.

Single Post Design

Featured images are shown as the header on individual posts. If the image is not large enough, it will be stretched. Therefore, if you’re using this theme, you’ll want to select featured images that are large enough to make this work nicely.

In addition to its unique homepage design, the DW Timeline theme has some nice details baked in that make your site responsive and readable:

• Post grid option by Meta-box
• Customize panel for: Header image and background, call to action button
• Support for 6 post formats: Standard, Gallery, Video, Image, Quote and Status
• Clean code using Theme Wrappers
• HTML5 Boilerplate
• Micro-format
• Relative URL
• Multilingual ready

Of course, it’s not easy to know what this theme looks like until you try out the live demo and test the timeline/pagination controls.

A Pro version of the theme is available from DesignWall, which includes a more intuitive treatment of navigation on mobile devices, a front-end posting form and an alternative mint green flat design.

If you want to make a big splash on your hompage and arrange your posts in a timeline format, this theme might be just the ticket. DW Timeline is available for free from WordPress.org.

Sometimes, after moving a site from a development environment into a live production environment, users and developers can forget to uncheck the “Discourage Search Engines From Indexing Your Site” box located within the Reading Settings. It’s a terrible feeling to realize months after a site has gone live, that search engines failed to index the site because you forgot to change a setting. This is easily preventable using the Check Search Engine Visibility on Migration plugin.

Developed by Rhys Wynne, this fairly new plugin prevents users from forgetting to turn on search engines after migrating their site or changing the blog URL. When the warning is displayed, it won’t go away until you visit the Check/Set domain visibility settings page. There are other plugins that have similar functionality but this plugin forces the user to check the search engine visibility settings with no alternative way to dismiss the warning box.

As long as you don’t forget to activate this plugin on the live site, it will remind you to double-check the search engine settings when it detects the URL has changed.

Have you ever transferred a website from a development server to a production environment and forgot to enable search engines? If so, how long did it take before you discovered the error?

The BuddyPress 2014 Survey results are in and are now posted on github with graphs to visually represent the data collected from 338 developers in 52 countries. The survey provided an opportunity for participants to post feature requests as well as identify important areas for improvement.

When prioritizing new development for 2014, the team will be looking at the top 10 categories of BuddyPress feature requests discovered through the survey:

• Group enhancements
• New Media component
• Activity Stream improvements
• A BuddyPress theme
• Membership add-ons
• xProfiles additions
• Improved Documentation
• Easy configuration of Profile/Group navigations
• Performance improvements
• More Privacy options

When reporting the survey results, @mercime confirmed that BuddyPress will be adopting the WordPress features-as-plugins model in order to get more people involved in the frontend and backend requirements.

BuddyPress Media Component and Attachment API

The first new feature to be developed as a plugin will be the Media Component. BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet, better known as @imath, has begun work on the enhancement and plans to set it up on the BuddyPress github account soon.

“The idea is also to build a BuddyPress attachment API so that plugins can use it for their components,” Viet said during a recent BuddyPress development meeting. Further down the road, the media component may be used to manage all attachments for other components, i.e. avatars for profiles and groups, files for messages, albums for members, etc. In this case attachments would refer to uploads that have BP metadata attached.

Both John James Jacoby and Boone Gorges agreed that @imath’s implementation ideas for the component are quite promising and worth moving forward. “The basic idea is awesome and could be pretty transformative for BuddyPress,” Gorges commented.

Gorges suggested that this feature would be an ideal candidate for developing a core component as a plugin for the purpose of increasing collaboration. “Then we could get it in people’s hands, get them testing in different environments, and we could iterate quickly,” Gorges said. “If it looks like it’ll be a fairly long dev period, we can even do like MP6 and release it as a wordpress.org plugin to get lots of testers.”

The WordPress core has greatly benefited from using the features-as-plugins development model, which helped four major features land in the 3.8 release. We’ll be tracking BuddyPress feature plugins as they emerge throughout 2014. The development survey indicated that 65 respondents from 31 countries are eager to contribute to BuddyPress in some way. Hopefully, the core team will be able to successfully use the features-as-plugins model to make it easier for new testers and contributors to get involved.