It’s a real book, and not just files on my laptop!

The feature of Post Format UI is active on default, but there is the filter hook enable_post_format_ui to deactivate for all users in the system.
You can create a small Plugin, activate and the edit screen is without the UI of Post Format.

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Disable Post Format UI
 */

! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) and exit;

add_filter( 'enable_post_format_ui', '__return_false' );

The interface is surprisingly simple. In fact, I prefer what WordPress.com is using versus Widget Logic which requires me to know conditional tags. I’m wondering how did WordPress.com get this feature before stand-alone WordPress? When I asked this question on Twitter, Ian Stewart responded with:

@wptavern I’d look for it here http://jetpack.me/ :)

This makes sense and in fact would allow the Jetpack team to get valuable feedback before ever considering putting it into core. If you can’t wait that long, try out the Widget Context plugin. Widget Context provides a similar interface with a few more bells and whistles that the WordPress.com variety doesn’t have.

Post Formats UI In WordPress 3.6 Beta 3

If you would like to hide the new UI from showing up, there is an option within the screen options drop down tab where you can un-check the Post Formats box.

This only hides the UI from an individual.  For multi-author sites, you’ll need to install a plugin such as the one Justin Tadlock created. If you’re curious to see an idea of a post format UI before WordPress 3.6, read Alex Kings post on a plugin he released called Post Formats Admin UI.

Where Did Post Formats Come From And What Are They?

Post formats is a feature introduced in WordPress 3.1 as a way for themes to visually differentiate between types of content. Before the addition of post formats, users had to rely on CSS tricks to create specific styles for different kinds of content. A great example, is this post written by Lorelle Van Fossen from 2007 that explains how to use WordPress Categories combined with assigned CSS classes to style posts. Coincidentally, Tumblr launched in February 2007 and introduced a beautiful new way to publish content. This review by LifeHacker shows the layout for creating different types of content. I was part of the mob that hopped onto the Tumblr bandwagon coming away from that experience very impressed with how easy it was to publish content. I didn’t have to worry about tags, categories or any of that meta stuff. It was simply pick a type of content, provide content, publish. What a joy that was. The best feature of Tumblr was their bookmarklet. This bookmarklet I feel is one of the biggest reasons for Tumblrs success.

WordPress on the other hand has this bookmarklet called PressThis. It works in a similar fashion to the Tumblr bookmarklet but because of the publishing process on WordPress, it was never as elegant or convenient to use. Using PressThis, you have to select a category for the post, usually have to edit the title and most of the time had to edit the link text not to mention the addition of tags. In May of 2010, Mashable conducted an interview with Matt where one of the topics discussed was the PressThis bookmarklet. Around the 2:06 mark in that interview, Matt says that Tumblr did a beautiful job of removing that little bit of friction to publishing content which he hoped would be similarly achieved with PressThis.

Once post formats reached the masses with WordPress 3.1, the general community had the task of explaining what post formats were and to this day, it’s still a struggle without being able to visually show someone. People were so confused with the terminology, Mark Jaquith and Otto both published posts with explanations. At the time, I thought post formats would be awesome because of the Tumblr like inspiration but as users, we had to rely on Themes for how the formats were used and displayed.

My Thoughts On Post Formats

I used post formats for a few months on WPTavern.com and I’ve made a few conclusions. The first is that post formats encourage short form content. Not only is short form content easy to do, it also promotes creating a fire hose of content. The second, the majority of people were reading WPTavern.com via their favorite feedreader. Feedreaders don’t display content the same as a website. Third, some of the formats I selected displayed on the home page without a post title or an ability to comment. I think this had more to do with how my theme was displaying the formats more than anything else. Last but not least, I started treating post formats as categories.

Some of my frustrations with post formats came at the cost of not fully understanding the when and why of the feature. I’ve also discovered that depending upon how the formats are displayed, it’s very difficult to determine what’s content and what’s something else. I’m so used to seeing the Post Title, content, post meta layout on websites that when I see a posts that are quotes with little text, it sometimes becomes difficult to navigate. A good example of this is the 2013 Theme.

I no longer use post formats. Instead, I just write a normal (standard) blog post containing a quote, video, image or anything else I want. Creating different styles for different types of content was cool but now, it’s not a big deal anymore. I’d rather see a consistent style for the content I consume and create versus wildly different layouts, colors, and expectations.

Discussion Points

I want to hear from developers and consultants on how they teach post formats to clients. How do you make the distinction between the different kinds of posts that can be created? What do you think of the revamped UI for post formats in WordPress 3.6, will it get more people to use this feature?

I love that WordPress is all about the decisions over options mantra, but that sometimes means some users get stuck with stuff they don’t want. I figured there’s probably plenty of folks who aren’t that interested in post formats, so I made a quick plugin to disable the post format UI being introduced in WordPress 3.6.

You can grab a copy from the plugin page on Theme Hybrid or from WordPress.org.

What does the plugin do, exactly?

If you haven’t been keeping up with WordPress 3.6 development, you’re in for a treat. WordPress is finally doing something about those ambiguous post formats. From now on, all WordPress installs will support all post formats out of the box. They’ve done some cool UI work on the edit post screen in the admin to make post formats much more usable for the average user.

The following is a screenshot of what this looks like.

This plugin simply disables this new UI and its functionality for people who have no need for post formats.

Additionally, the drawbacks of the WordPress platform do not stop at its growing complexity. It’s also notoriously ugly. Now don’t get me wrong, if you know me then you know I’m a huge WordPress fanboy who makes the majority of his income each month from writing solely on and about the WordPress platform. So I have crazy amounts of love, respect and appreciation for this software. But with that said I’ve often wondered: who stole all the sexy? I mean, seriously! Why does the backend of this amazing tool have to look SO dull and boring?!

I agree with him to an extent. The WordPress back-end is grey, dull and boring although using the different color scheme of blue, things brighten up a bit. But then, the entire back-end becomes too blue. Other than the colored text in the Discussion area of the Right Now box, there is very little in the way of refreshment in the back-end of WordPress. What happened here?

If we rewind our calendars to October 2008, WordPress was undergoing a major UI change from 2.5 codenamed CrazyHorse. This new UI was described as sexy, awesome, Wow! out of the box, etc. It was definitely a large improvement over WordPress 2.5 both in usability and looks. While I can’t find the article which contained the screenshots, there was at least one instance where MovableType showcased a screenshot of a new UI that was designed that looked very similar to the back-end of WordPress which was flattering to say the least.

The back-end has gone through design tweaks since then and with WordPress 3.7, it appears that more user interface design changes are in the pipeline. In my opinion, for the better. Looking at the current iteration of the back-end UI, what would make it more delightful to the eyes or refreshing to use so that it wasn’t so boring?

One of other sticking points is the bit about Ghost being a true non-profit.

Ghost will be a true non-profit. There will be no commercial side to things as there currently is with Automattic and WordPress

What does it mean to be a non-profit but then be classified as not a true non-profit. The WordPress project is not aimed at making money, it’s free software. The only thing that is actually labeled as a non-profit is the WordPress Foundation. For those that don’t know what’s what in the world of WordPress, you should read this article by John Saddington on WPDaily.co which summarizes things nicely. Also, from what I’ve read, Ghost will have a hosting service similar to what WordPress.com provides. From the Ghost Kickstarter page.

Users hosting with us = revenue = development = better software = more users = more revenue = more development = well… you get the idea.

Sounds to me like there will be a commercial side to things.

I’m keeping a close eye on the progress of Ghost because not only are there a lot of people clamoring for a chance to use what’s been presented in the screenshots, but I’m interested in trying it out myself to see if it really does enhance the publishing process. However, comparisons between WordPress and Ghost should be reserved until an actual piece of software is released. I’m sure John is under a huge amount of pressure to deliver considering the amount of funding he will end up receiving.

When WordPress 2.5 was released in March 2008:

• I was 25 years old
• I attended my very first WordCamp
• I started the process of opening WPTavern

When I started using WordPress in June 2007

• I tried to use Joomla for WPTavern before WordPress but failed
• The first version of Joomla was still the most recent version available
• The term Web 2.0 was everywhere you looked
• AJaX was really starting to take off
• Everywhere you looked, there was some sort of generator (favicon, button, web 2.0 logo)
• Domain names with words missing vowels were popular e.g. Flickr
• TechCrunch was really becoming a behemoth of a blog
• Technorati was cool
• Chiclets began the process of nascaration of websites
• The first iPhone was released

Since I started using WordPress

• Got married
• Quit my job of 13 years to work on WPTavern full time
• Became a home owner
• Met a lot of wonderful people passionate about Open Source and WordPress
• Traveled to places I wouldn’t have otherwise thanks to WordCamps
• Have had to clean out my closet twice to make room for WordPress swag
• Facebook won the social networking wars
• Youtube became the worlds greatest time suck

These are just some notable moments in my life while I’ve used WordPress. You’re encouraged to participate in this project by publishing your own set of milestones or reflection points on WordPress and using the tag wp10 as well as the hashtag of #wp10 on Twitter. By the way, until May 27th, you can purchase a WordPress 10th Anniversary T-Shirt from the swag store at a discounted price of $10.00.

Adding Like Box using Official Facebook Plugin for WordPress

Perhaps the simplest way to add a facebook like box to your WordPress site is by using the official Facebook plugin for WordPress. First thing you need to do is install and activate the Facebook plugin. After activating the plugin, go to Appearance » Widgets. Simply drag and drop the Facebook like box widget to your sidebar. You will need to provide the URL of your facebook fan page in the widget configurations.

The widget has the same options as Facebook social plugins for websites. You can choose to show a stream, show faces, remove header, change border color. There are currently only two themes available light and dark.

Adding like Box Manually Without using any Plugin

It is possible to add Facebook like box manually without using any plugin. Go to Facebook Social Plugin’s Like Box page. Provide the URL of your Facebook page and configure the looks of the like box.

Press the Get Code button to get Like box code.

Facebook provides you multiple ways to add the like box code on your website. You can choose from HTML5, XFBML, and iframe. We will show you how to add each of them but you need to choose one. In our opinion HTML5 is a reasonably good option for most WordPress powered websites. XFBML is good for people using other Facebook plugins that use XFBML to display Facebook buttons. Use iframe if the first two options don’t work for you.

Adding HTML5 Facebook Like Box Code in WordPress

Click on the HTML5 tab from the code window and copy the first part of the code. They recommend that you paste it right after <body> tag which is usually found in your header.php file. However, it will work anywhere in the body. To make things easy on yourself, you can simply add it in the footer by using our Insert Headers and Footers plugin. The first part of the code would look like this:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
 var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
 if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
 js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=403924843027405";
  fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>

This javascript connects your website to the Facebook’s javascript library. Now copy the second part of the code, which would look something like this:

<div class="fb-like-box" data-href="http://www.facebook.com/wpbeginner" data-width="292" data-show-faces="true" data-stream="true" data-header="true"></div>

This part of the code tells the javascript that you loaded earlier to display the like box at this location and with these parameters. For the sake of this example, we will paste this code in the sidebar widgets. Go to Appearance » Widgets. Drag and drop a text widget to your sidebar and paste the code inside it. Save your widget and check your website.

This will work in any other area of your site as well. If you are savvy with code, then you can paste this in your footer, after post, etc.

Don’t forget to change the facebook fan page URL to your own page URL.

Adding XFBML Facebook Like Box Code in WordPress

Click on XFBML tab to get the code for XFBML Facebook like box. To add an XFBML Facebook Like Box you need to add three tiny pieces of code in WordPress.

Copy the first piece of code and paste it in your theme’s header.php file right after <body> tag. Similar to the last one, this code will work anywhere in the body. To make things easy on yourself, you can simply add it in the footer by using our Insert Headers and Footers plugin. This code would like something like this:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
  var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
  if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
  js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
  js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=403924843027405";
  fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>

This tiny javascript function connects your website to the Facebook’s javascript library.

The second line of code is an XML namespace declaration, and you need to add it in the <html>tag of your site. The easiest way would be to open your theme’s functions.php file, paste the following code:

//Adding the Open Graph in the Language Attributes
function add_opengraph_doctype( $output ) {
		return $output . ' xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#" xmlns:fb="http://ogp.me/ns/fb#"';
	}
add_filter('language_attributes', 'add_opengraph_doctype');

Lastly, copy the third line of code which would look something this:

<fb:like-box href="http://www.facebook.com/wpbeginner" width="292" show_faces="true" stream="true" header="true"></fb:like-box>

This code tells the javascript that you have loaded in the first step, to display the like box at this location and with these parameters. Go to Appearance » Widgets. Drag and drop a text widget to your sidebar and inside that text widget paste the third line of code. Save your changes and preview your website.

Adding Facebook Likebox iframe in WordPress

Click on the IFRAME tab to copy the iframe code. Go to Appearance » Widgets and drag and drop a Text widget to your sidebar. Paste the iframe code inside the text widget and save changes. Open your site to preview the facebook fan box.

We hope this article helped you add Facebook Like box / Fan box on your WordPress site. For questions and feedback please leave a comment. You can also follow us on Facebook.

How to Add the Facebook Like Box / Fan Box in WordPress is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to not only find out the fact that you’re using WordPress, but also find out the exact version number, regardless of any plugins or hacks changing or hiding the “generator” meta tag, the readme file and so on. A great post by my brother Gennady illustrates that.

Security

Most of these “hide my WP” solutions tend to market themselves from a security standpoint, especially with the recent botnet attack on WordPress sites. The truth is that these attacks don’t really care which version of WordPress you’re running. In fact, they don’t even care whether you’re running WordPress at all! How? Well that’s easy, they just take your domain and blindly fire POST requests to a file called wp-login.php, even if you’re running a non-CMS pure HTML website.

The same applies to known theme and plugin vulnerabilities. Go ahead and check your web server’s access logs, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find requests to timthumb.php even though none of your themes or plugins use the TimThumb library.

So from a security perspective, the secret sauce is to use a strong password, as well as keep your themes, plugins and especially WordPress core up to date. Plugins such as Google Authenticator and Limit Login Attempts can give you that little extra protection.

The Ferrari Analogy

Sometimes people try hide the fact that they’re running WordPress because they’re afraid other humans will spot that and think they’re “unprofessional” or cheap. Well WordPress is the most professional content management system known to human kind, trusted by some of the largest companies worldwide and although free and open source, certainly not cheap.

When you buy yourself a new Ferrari, do you remove the Ferrari logos before showing it to your friends? No. Although if you did, it would still be obvious.

To wrap that up — don’t hide the fact that you’re using WordPress. Use a strong password, keep it updated and drive it with pride. If you bought a premium “hide my WordPress” plugin, you should ask for a refund and buy something useful instead.

Click here to comment

More from Konstantin Kovshenin

• Using get_template_part within Shortcodes
• Attending WordCamp Austin 2013
• Columns for WordPress
• On $matches in preg_match functions
• Maintaining a Local WordPress Subversion Repository

It’s time to clear up the debate once and for all. Despite all the doubts (and some haters), WordPress core is without a doubt one of the most secure platforms you can choose to put a site on. Of course, a WordPress install is only as secure as the plugins it leverages — but that’s another post for another time.

That pretty much sums everything up but I highly encourage you to read the entire post as Jason Cosper brings up a number of good points that illustrate just how secure the core of WordPress is. Outside of the big brute force attacks on WordPress sites which really had nothing to do with the security of WordPress, I can’t remember the last time I updated due to a critical security vulnerability in the core. There are so many variables that are sometimes out of the control of the end-user. Unfortunately, all too often, webhosts put the blame on software such as WordPress when the real issue is their server setup.

Check out this comment from Mark Jaquith in 2011, in response to someone claiming that running WordPress was akin to running Windows 95 without patches, as comical as that sounds.

Speaking of styling comments, how many of you remember a service called CommentBits? CommentBits was an entire business built around the styling of comments in 2009 by Ryan Imel. In an interview I conducted with him, my thought was at the time that he would be able to create a nice niche for himself within a big market. However, things stagnated very quickly with a lack of new designs released. Even though the purchase link still appears to work, I’d be hesitant of purchasing anything through the site. I wonder though if something like CommentBits would be successful in today’s WordPress theme market?

Note: If you install WordPress locally on your computer, then the only person who can see that site is you. If you want to have a live WordPress site available to the public, then you need to have a Domain and WordPress Web hosting. We recommend that you follow this guide on how to install WordPress.

What is WAMP?

WAMP or WampServer is a compilation of Apache web server, PHP and MySQL bundled for Windows computers. Basically, you need WAMP to setup your own local server environment and install WordPress on Windows. There are other clients for Windows such as XAMPP, but we use and recommend WAMP. It is free and easy to use.

Installing Wampserver on your PC

First thing you need to do is go to WampServer website and download the latest WampServer. You will be presented with various options on their download page. Simply choose the one that applies to your Windows (64-bit or 32-bit). When in doubt, select the 32-bit version because it will work on 64-bit versions of Windows.

Once you have downloaded WampServer, run the installation program and follow on-screen instructions. At one point during the installation, WampServer will ask for the location of the default web browser. By default it will use Internet Explorer, but you can change that to Google Chrome or Firefox by locating the browser in Program Files.

Once you are done with the installation, launch WampServer.

Setting Up a Database for WordPress

WampServer comes with phpMyAdmin, a web based application to manage MySQL databases. Click on the Wampserver icon in windows taskbar and then click on phpmyadmin.

phpMyAdmin will open in a new browser window. Click on Databases in phpmMyAdmin to create a new database for WordPress. Choose a name for your database and click on Create button.

Installing WordPress on Windows with WAMP

Download a copy of WordPress from WordPress.org. Extract the zip file and copy the wordpress folder. Go to C:\wamp\www\ and paste wordpress folder there. You can rename the wordpress folder to anything you want for example mysite, wpbeginner, etc. For the sake of this tutorial, we renamed our wordpress directory to mysite. Now open a web browser and go to:

http://localhost/mysite/

WordPress will inform you that it can not find a wp-config.php file. Click on the Create a Configuration File button to create it.

On the next screen, you need to provide your database information. The database name will be the one that you selected. In our case, we called it test_db. By default your database username will be root, and there is no password, so you can leave it blank. Click on the submit button and WordPress will create a configuration file for you.

After this you will see a screen informing you that WordPress has successfully created the configuration file, and you can proceed with the installation. Click on Run Install button.

On the next screen, fill out the installation form. You need to provide a title for your website, choose an admin username and password, and provide admin email address. Finally press the Install WordPress button.

WordPress will quickly run the installation and create database tables. Once done, you will see a success message after the installation. You can then proceed to your WordPress by clicking on the Log in button.

Troubleshooting WAMP Skype Error

If you have Skype installed and running then WampServer may not be able to work properly due to a conflict with Skype. The conflict is caused by both Apache and Skype using the same port 80. There is a simple fix for this problem. Open Skype and go to Tools &raquo Options. Click on Advanced and then Connections. Uncheck the box that says Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections. Save options and restart Skype.

Enabling Pretty Permalinks in WAMP

Pretty permalinks will not work by default on your local server environment. All your URLs will look like localhost/mysite/?p=18. If you go to Settings » Permalinks and use one of the other opttions, then it will show you “page not found” errors. We have already written about a solution here that will show you how to enable custom permalinks in WAMP.

We hope that this article helped you install WordPress on your Windows computer using WAMP. Having a local server environment is great for learning and testing purposes. Remember, if you want to run a blog for other people to see, then you do not need to install WordPress on your computer. You need to install WordPress on a web hosting provider. If you have any questions, then please feel free to ask in the comments below.

How to Install WordPress on your Windows Computer Using WAMP is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

New developer

Recently there were some unfortunate events in the US which caused BlueGlass, a company lots of my friends worked at, to go bust. As with all negatives, there was a good thing that came out of this, as I was able to hire Linh Pham, one of their incredible developers. He’s now come on board full time as a remote worker to fix bugs and develop new functionality across all our free and premium plugins. You’ll probably see him on github if you decide to become active there.

Roadmap

I have many, many ideas for WordPress SEO. I’m slowly speccing these ideas as Issues in github, where you will currently find an 1.6 milestone and a 2.0 milestone. WordPress SEO 1.6 will contain a lot of bugfixes and some smaller enhancements, combined with one bigger new feature: a wpseo_sitemap shortcode that generates an HTML sitemap.

The 2.0 branch already contains a first stab at Google Webmaster Tools integration, allowing for:

• Easy website verification.
• Verified submission of the XML index sitemap.
• Retrieval of crawl errors.

I’m very excited about the potential of that new feature.

Internationalization

This is probably a good time to remind you that if you want to become active in the internationalization of the WordPress SEO plugin, we have a fully functioning GlotPress install on translate.yoast.com. You can register here if you want to help translate. The internationalization for all our plugins, both free and premium is managed by the awesome Remkus de Vries. We currently have 382 registered translators, of which more than half have actually been active in translating, but we can always use more active translators.

As a thank you, for our premium plugins you can get a free single license of a plugin if you translate the plugin into a new language.

Patches welcome!

I have taken the freedom to look at how the Easy Digital Downloads github community is set up and basically copied, pasted and modified some of what they did, resulting in most notably our new contribution guide. But what I really want to say is, we really welcome your pull requests!

I’m very excited about this change and hope it means more people will dive in and help us improve what’s already the most advanced WordPress SEO plugin available today!

WordPress SEO Community & Roadmap is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

// Remove the wp_title filter
add_action( 'init', 'remove_wpseo_title_rewrite' );

function remove_wpseo_title_rewrite() {
        global $wpseo_front;

	remove_filter( 'wp_title', array( $wpseo_front, 'title' ), 15 );
}

// Remove the title metabox from backend UI
add_filter( 'init', 'remove_wpseo_title_rewrite_metabox' );

function remove_wpseo_title_rewrite_metabox( $metaboxes ) {
	if ( isset( $metaboxes['title'] ) )
		unset( $metaboxes['title'] );

	return $metaboxes;
}

When using get_template_part with the Shortcode API, there are two things you should always keep in mind:

• get_template_part executes .php files which (most likely) generates output
• shortcode callback functions are expected to return a string and not generate any output

So when calling get_template_part within a shortcode callback function, you’ll see that all the output generated by get_template_part is output before the post content, and not replaced inline.

The solution is to use PHP’s output buffering. Create a buffer in your shortcode callback before running get_template_part, clear the buffer and return the content right after. Here’s a quick example with an ads shortcode, which can insert your theme’s ads.php file contents anywhere within a post or page:

function my_ads_shortcode( $attr ) {
    ob_start();
    get_template_part( 'ads' );
    return ob_get_clean();
}
add_shortcode( 'ads', 'my_ads_shortcode' );

The ob_get_clean() function stops buffering and returns whatever was output to the buffer after ob_start(). The same approach could be used with other functions and statement that generate output, such as include and require.

Click here to comment

More from Konstantin Kovshenin

• Don’t Hide the Fact That You’re Using WordPress
• Attending WordCamp Austin 2013
• Columns for WordPress
• On $matches in preg_match functions
• Maintaining a Local WordPress Subversion Repository

The first is that WPTavern has a world-wide audience. Having articles linked within the Dashboard is not only a big responsibility, but it has opened the flood gates to the different types of people accessing the content presented on this site from across the world. Through referrer links, I’ve been able to discover so many different websites thanks to people clinking the links from within their dashboard. WPTavern.com is like a giant megaphone that when used correctly, becomes a wonderful thing.

In the near future, WPTavern will become an authoritative website. It’s not about publishing 100 articles a day, but publishing content that is interesting and, providing research/back story to that content. I like to think of WPTavern as an ongoing diary as to what is happening within the world of WordPress. However I’m opening up this diary/platform to the community. There will be caveats of course such as all content passes before me before it’s published. Guest authors will receive a Contributor level account to make things easier for the author to manage their posts.

If you look around, you’ll notice that there are no ads on this site. WPTavern.com is not about generating revenue. It’s about becoming the second largest WordPress community of users and enthusiasts on the web. Of course, the first is WordPress.org itself but the long-term goal for this site is to become an alternative community with an integral bridge to the WordPress project. WordPress.org is not right for everyone whether it be the attitude of people, the atmosphere, or any number of reasons which is why having another place to go is beneficial. In the early days of WPTavern, this website was on pace to become one of the largest parts of the WordPress community with a bustling commenting section, an active forum, and all sorts of different interactions taking place that at times, influenced some of the decisions that were made with the core of WordPress.

There were plenty of times in the past where members of the WPTavern community tried to nominate me to become some sort of WordPress.org community liaison or an employee of Automattic. With the relaunch of WPTavern, I am now in the position at least with this domain to become that community liaison. In the near future, this site will be sporting a new design, bbPress and finally, run BuddyPress. A tavern is a place where people gather to talk and have a good time which is exactly the kind of atmosphere I’ll be promoting here.

If you’re interested in contributing an article to this site, please get in touch with me via the contact form or through twitter @WPTavern.

Q: First off, can you explain what ExperimentWith is?

ExperimentWith.com was started as a testing site for our clients sites while we develop them. It had a nice ring to it and it allowed us to host testing on a separate but not local server. It also allowed for testing in an MU environment. But as we ran into more and more issues with plugins that were never tested on an MU environment so we allowed some authors to test and helped debug a few plugins so we can use them for client projects. After a few projects, we discussed it would be nice to open up our MU based site to who ever wants to use it for testing, debugging or whatever for projects for the community. That was two months ago.

Q: What is going on behind the scenes of ExperimentWith.com and what software or hardware are you using to offer this service?

Behind the scenes its a WordPress MU site running on one of our business class hosting accounts with access to ruby and sass for testing WordPress plugins and themes. Its hosted off our MidPhase account although we have moved most of our site to BlueHost, RackSpace, or ZippyKid. We purchased five years of hosting from MidPhase and said what the hell, lets make it useful and if it becomes popular then we can keep it running.

Q: Is ExperimentWith exclusively tailored for WordPress testing?

We are tailored for WordPress testing but our server has elements running on it to allow for other WordPress integrations like Ruby, SASS, node.js, ect. We like experimenting with other projects out there to see how they can improve, on client specific projects.

Q: It looks like the site is not yet open to the public, do you have a firm date in mind as to when that will happen?

As for going public, we decided to initially start it up as an email us for about your project and if we like it and it won’t cause the end of the world or WordPress as we know it we will give you access. We never thought that more than a few people may take interest in it or would need the resources. So not to dance around your question but Experiment With is a very dynamic project and we are open to help develop it to whatever the community needs.

Here are a couple of comparison screenshots between MP6 and Fluency.

Personally, I like MP6 better than Fluency but I wanted to bring all of this up because back in 2007, WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” was released and its major feature was the user interface overhaul. In April of 2009, a poll was conducted on WordPress.org where users voted for which design tweak they liked most. While the dark Fluency style contained the most votes, the conclusion of the poll was that overall, a darker color scheme was preferred.

Poll Results From 2009

I reached out to Matt Thomas, one of the driving forces behind the MP6 plugin to ask him about these similarities between MP6 and Fluency as well as what the future might hold for MP6 items reaching the core of WordPress.

Q: Regarding the style and design of MP6. Were there any inspirations taken from the Fluency admin theme? Back in 2009, there was a poll conducted on possible design Tweaks and the dark Fluency theme beat every other alternative in the poll http://wordpress.org/news/2009/04/poll-results/ and when I checked out MP6 today, it looked similar in ways, in others not so much.

Also, MP6 is an ongoing experiment but is its links tied back to that poll, knowing full well that there was definitely an audience that would love to see a darker back-end?

There’s almost nothing we haven’t looked at in finding inspiration for MP6. Medium, Readmill, Twitter, Squarespace, Simple.com, we’ve got a vast collection of bits and pieces of UI that have inspired pieces of what you see in MP6. We didn’t directly rely on that survey or the comments from that development cycle, considering how much has changed since that time. But I’ve always been a fan of the Fluency plugin, though I never used it much since I blog on WordPress.com. It inspired my submissions to that 2.8 redesign discussion you mentioned, as well. And we were very glad to see that Dean is following the progress of MP6 and likes where it’s headed. http://make.wordpress.org/ui/2013/03/15/mp6-version-0-3/#comment-22786

Q: While testing Fluency, it’s only compatible with WordPress 3.2. Keeping up with WordPress through the administration theme has to be tough work. Are there plans to keep this plugin updated along side WordPress for the foreseeable future or even perhaps add it to core as an option people could choose within their profile?

Definitely, it’s difficult to keep our development coördinated with trunk just in the course of a single development cycle. Based on my preliminary conversations with Mark J and Nacin, I expect we’ll hand over MP6 to the core team around the beginning of the 3.7 development cycle to begin its implementation into core.

Q: Last but not least did Dean J. Robinson contribute to anything in MP6?

Didn’t contribute directly, but see above for the generous feedback he gave us.

Four years ago, users showed their support of a darker toned WordPress administration area. Is it no surprise then that so many people are loving the way the back-end looks with MP6 installed? After going through major interface design changes in WordPress 2.3, 2.5, 2.7, and witnessing the frustration by fellow users, I commend the WordPress team on their new approach to design changes through a plugin versus outright putting it on our plates with a new release. In this way, we can avoid drastic interface changes from one release to the next and instead, use the plugin as a continual testing ground for enhancements.

To those who are using MP6, what are your thoughts? Would you like to see what’s presented within MP6 to be the next design iteration of the WordPress back-end or are you content with the current grey-blue color scheme?

Also, don’t hesitate, go ahead and send us a link to your child theme if it’s also on GitHub as well and I’ll add it to the Shell Lite family list being compiled right now together with the showcase.

The post Shell Lite now on GitHub! appeared first on Mario Peshev on WordPress Development.

“Don’t ever feel that just because you don’t know how to code like Nacin and Otto that you’re not just as valuable as they are. Because without us, too, WordPress would fall apart. A healthy community is healthy on all levels, and everybody does know that.”

I love that quote by Mika Epstein. As for my own contributions, I’ve never written any code for WordPress or contributed any patches. However, through the WPTavern website as well as the forum, I’ve been able to contribute in various ways such as publishing information about a bug I’ve run into, thoughts and opinions on how certain things should work, addition and subtraction of features in the core, etc. In at least one instance, I published an article that complained about the fact that within the WordPress back-end, users were limited to only seeing 20 posts, comments, pages, at a time. I wanted an easy way to change that. Thanks to Peter Westwood, one of the later versions of WordPress introduced that enhancement to the Screen Options drop down tab.

So at the end of the day, folks are running out of excuses as to why they can’t contribute to WordPress.

VaultPress Lite

While I used to pay $15/month for the basic plan, I am now considering shifting to the cheaper $5/month Lite plan. The main difference now will be

Daily backups – right now Vaultpress does real time backups for our site and it is interesting to see activity logged into the database in realtime. But the site is not so busy to need realtime backups, and daily WordPress backup seems reasonable for our site.

30 Days Backup – Right now Vaultpress stores all the hourly backups since we subscribed to the service in 2011. I am sure there will never be a need to restore the database to 2011 or even a few months back. So again a 30 days backup seems reasonable for our site. It is enough to restore the site to a previous time in case it gets hacked, as most popular sites are at risk for hacking.

The rest of the features like the amazing automated site restore and the archives, stats and logs remain the same. Its great that Vaultpress Lite has made the plans more practical and affordable for most bloggers. Of course there are higher pricing plans which also provide security scanning, security fixes and priority support, which may be more useful for busy sites.

Though there are many WordPress backup tools out there, I prefer Vaultpress because it is run by Automattic, the makers of WordPress and who understands WP better than them. If WordPress is your major income stream, its a good idea to get an automated backup service …  those few dollars might save a much bigger investment some day.

Original article: Get VaultPress Lite: Cheaper WordPress Backup

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On paper, I like the idea of a lean WordPress with modules that I enable or disable based on the functionality I need. Several years ago, I used a CMS called e107 that behaved in this manner. It was pretty cool at the time because if I wanted forums, I just enabled the forums module. If not, I left it disabled and the forums never loaded. Back in 2009, a lengthy discussion took place around the very topic of making WordPress more modular, Less than Core, More than Plugins/Themes: Proposing Optional Modules. Unlike creating different packages or branches of WordPress to fulfill specific needs, optional plugins could offer that functionality so that it wouldn’t be stuck in core.

What I’d like to propose is the creation of a new concept for WordPress, the “Optional module.” Optional modules would be singular like the core and would be versioned with the core but they would not be included in the default installation. Optional modules would be “installed-on-demand” based on a plugin’s request and admin’s approval to install, and the version of the optional module installed would be determined by the version of the WordPress core that is installing it.

Having “Optional Modules” for WordPress such as I propose would allow progress in the direction of common infrastructure without bloating the core. And one of the first such optional modules could be a basic theming framework

One of the biggest arguments against the idea is that the mostly volunteer based team that works on the core of WordPress is already pressed for time, (pardon the pun) and by creating these optional modules or plugins, it would significantly raise their work load to the point where it negatively affects their ability to work on WordPress core. That discussion took place around February of 2009. In late 2009, early 2010 the term Canonical Plugin was created to differentiate these plugins from a normal WordPress plugin. A poll was conducted with different name choices with Core Plugins winning the top spot. At the time, a core plugin was defined as follows:

Core plugins are community developed and encourage collaboration with multiple developers to satisfy the most popular functionality requests that would not make it into the Core of WordPress. These plugins would be developed alongside the core of WordPress to ensure compatibility, coding standards are met, secure code, etc. To highlight these plugins, a screen would be added to the plugins page in the back-end of WordPress to highlight these special plugins. Everything sounds great right? Let’s take a look at some of the possible unintended consequences this could have on the community.

One of the only plugins that I know of that ended up with this Core Plugin status was called Health Check by Peter Westwood. This plugin was used as a test bed for the idea of creating core plugins through collaboration.

I reached out to Aaron D. Campbell as he was one of the volunteers to generate effort and focus towards the Core Plugin project and asked him a few questions about the work that’s been completed since 2010 for Core Plugins.

Jeff - On January 11th, 2010 you published on the Make.WordPress.core blog on creating a Core Plugin Infrastructure. The only core plugin that I know up which was an experiment was Health Check by Peter Westwood. Do you know of any others that have been created since 2010? Has there been much progress or work done towards the idea of Core Plugins since?

Aaron -No. Post by E-Mail never really got off the ground. I’m hoping to get it kicked off at some point, possibly with a GSoC student this year (it was one of the ideas). Honestly, the best example of the CONCEPT of community driven development AROUND WordPress is probably _s. It’s a theme not a plugin, but it accomplished what we were envisioning

Jeff - Well, Jetpack has sort of taken the Post by email feature and put it into a plugin. My guess would be that eventually that feature will be removed in WordPress like Links in favor of the Jetpack version.

Aaron - I don’t think so. I don’t think any feature will ever be removed in favor of Jetpack.

Jeff - I was under the impression that core plugins would enable WordPress to be able to take things that became not so widely used anymore and be able to put stuff like that into a plugin enabling a light nimble core. Therefor, decreasing the need to argue that WordPress is bloated and we need to fork it.

Aaron - That’s certainly one of the goals of core plugins. However, Jetpack is not a core plugin.

Jeff - So since 2010, not much work has been accomplished around the idea of Core Plugins but it’s still an idea that’s being kicked around and will possibly make headway in the future?

Aaron - Yep. I think almost everyone agrees it’s a good idea, but having the hours needed to actually make it happen is a whole different thing.

Jeff - Agreed. It was one of the issues immediately brought up in the hackers mailing list article first proposing the idea of these core modules. Time and effort which wouldn’t detract from the time and effort of Core itself

The issues that Morten has raised such as being stuck with old backwards compatibility code and future development of WordPress are justified but I don’t like the idea of different WordPress branches or cores. I don’t want to go through a process of figuring out which specific type of WordPress I need and I doubt new users will be able to easily grasp which one is best for them. We’ll end up needing flow charts, bar graphs and such to explain the differences. At the same time, I have noticed how much stuff WordPress has added over the years that I simply don’t use. Yet, the features I don’t use are the ones my neighbor does. It seems counter-productive to install plugins that remove unused functionality just so it’s completely out of my way. It also bothers me that so much of the unused portions of WordPress are loaded or even processed when they shouldn’t. This is why I’m for the idea of compartmentalizing WordPress to the point of simply being able to turn things on or off. Then again, I can see how having a module for the simple task of disabling or enabling image editing in WordPress could be cumbersome.

I want to see WordPress continue on for another 10 years but at the same time, I don’t want it to bring everything from the previous 10 years with it. Although I haven’t mentioned the word bloat, this post from 2009 is relevant in that it discusses the question, What is WordPress bloat?

I’d be re missed if I didn’t mention Ghost somewhere in this conversation. Ghost is a vision proposed by John O’Nolan that aims to get back to the roots of simple, easy, publishing. I’m excited about Ghost and joined in with the crowd of wanting to see it in action. At this point, Ghost is just a bunch of pretty screenshots but I like what I see. John started a Kickstarter campaign to acquire 25,000 Great British Pounds to get the project off the ground. Not only did he reach that goal within hours of starting the campaign, he has since quadrupled the goal amount with 19 days left to go. What this tells me is that there is pent-up interest in seeing a platform that gets back to the basics of publishing. Many of the names on the backers list are long-time WordPress users.

There are techniques and methods to get WordPress back to its roots of being the easiest software to use to publish words to the web. Forking is not one of those methods. Are you willing to stick with WordPress through the long haul or are you ready to pack your bags and jump ship the minute something easier and better looking is released?