Here at WebDevStudios we are more than joyful that WordPress has evolved the way it did because, well.. WordPress is what we do!  All of our owners at WDS have been using WordPress for quite some time. Brian Messenlehner and Brad Williams have been using the platform since early 2006, whereas, Lisa Sabin-Wilson has been using WordPress since it’s release in 2003.

In celebration of the 10th anniversary, WordPress.org has decided to have a little fun. They would like all of us – users, developers, designers.. everyone – to throw a party! Using Meetup Everywhere, we can plan a party and invite people from all over. The process for setting up these parties is easy -

1. Pick a place to go where a bunch of people can be merry — a park, a bar, a backyard, whatever
2. Spread the word to local meetups, tech groups, press, etc and get people to say they’ll come to your party
3. If 50 or more people RSVP to your party, we’ll try to send you some WordPress stickers and buttons
4. Have party attendees post photos, videos, and the like with the #wp10 hashtag

You can register your city and party on the official Meetup Everywhere 10th anniversary site. You can also view full details on the party-a-thon on the WordPress.org blog.

If you want to attend the Philly WP 10th anniversary party, sign up here! – http://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-WordPress-Meetup-Group/events/118581782/ 

WP Engine is a WordPress-focused hosting company headquartered in Austin, Texas. WebDevStudios loves working with WP Engine and has a number of clients who are using their hosting services. We even host our own sites, including WebDevStudios.com on WP Engine!

Why do we love WP Engine so much? There are TONS of reasons!

• Easy to migrate your WordPress website to WP Engine.
• Easy to maintain whether you are a developer or an individual.
• Speed & Caching
• One-click staging with GIT integration
• Great customer support
• Dedication to the WordPress Community

WP Engine has a number of different plans to fit your WordPress website needs. Every plan includes amazing support that starts with website migration and continues through out the life of your website. As I have mentioned many times before, I am in no way a technical person, but with the help of WP Engine’s documentation and support team I was able to migrate my own WordPress website all by myself! They were also able to help me with a few small plugin issues post-migration in a very timely manner.

WP Engine is great to work with as a developer too! Brad has worked with the WP Engine team for a variety of projects from a simple blog to a complicated Multisite install. We can certainly say that due to unforeseen, random issues not every migration has gone super smoothly, but working with the WP Engine team is always a pleasure.

One of the biggest things we notice about sites that are migrated to WP Engine is the instant speed increase. If you are looking for a hosting company that is implementing all the best practices when it comes to site speed, this is it. WP Engine does a great job managing traffic spurts and site loading times. They also manage page-caching, database-caching and object-caching.and have a CDN upgrade to account for sites with a large amount of media.

As a WordPress development company one of our favorite features is the one click staging site. We really appreciate how WP Engine makes it easy to stage and test your site before pushing it live. WP Engine also provides Git integration available to all of their clients.  The Git-push-to-deploy setup adds the ability to deploy your applications using the open-source Git version control system. These features are great for us as a development company, but are also ideal for anyone who is looking to update a live site or learn WordPress development as they go.

We also can’t say enough great stuff about all the things WP Engine does beyond providing great hosting! WP Engine is a HUGE supporter of the WordPress community. They have been a sponsor for our local WordCamp Philly for the last three years and have sponsored a number of other WordCamps all over the country as well. They take their community role seriously and try to do their best to both promote their product and help WordPress improve the WordPress community.

If you haven’t already, check out WP Engine today. You won’t be sorry!

Image-Sizing Updates

Prior to 2.7 Startbox was using TimThumb for image resizing. We have now changed over to use the native WordPress resizing functionality.

Language Support

You can now use StartBox in a number of different languages. With added language support, you can view StartBox in British English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese. This support is built right in!

Slideshow Phase-Out

The built in slideshow function will be removed in StartBox 2.8 and in 2.7 the feature has been disabled by default. This has been done because we believe that there are a number of great slideshow plugins out there and recommend using one of them.

Sites with slideshows already enabled will continue to display them and you will still be able to use the Startbox slideshow by following the instructions below. A plugin with the Startbox slideshow code will be released so you can still use slideshows on your site.

If you want to continue using Slideshows on new sites with StartBox 2.7, you can do so by running add_theme_support( 'sb-slideshows' ); on the 'after_setup_theme' hook.

Bug fixes

With any theme framework there will be the occasional bug or two. We have been working hard to fix bugs as they show up to assure our customers they are working with a quality product.

We fixed a rather nasty bug with the custom sidebars implementation that prevented more than one custom sidebar appearing on any given page at the same time. We fixed another bug with loop.php and single.php that prevented articles with pagination from showing their pagination. Finally, we fixed the author template archive to actually return the full archive of posts, instead of just the most recent one. – Brian Richards

You can view the change log for StartBox 2.7 or you can always download a completely free version of StartBox on GitHub.

Shayne was recently just added to the WDS team at the beginning of year, as our Technical Project Manager. His job is to help our clients and our developers/designers work together to create a successful and easy going relationship. He has been working with WordPress since 2006 and has spoken/attended too many WordCamps to list. He’s an avid learner and teacher of all things WordPress!

If you’re going to be attending the event this weekend, running from Friday April 26th until Sunday, April 28th, make sure you drop by and say hello to Lisa and Shayne!

The organizers have put together an awesome roster of speakers, including Lisa, this year. To see who you can learn from, make sure you check out their speakers page.

Also, don’t miss out on the BuddyCamp that will be held on Sunday – you are promised food.. and you can’t argue with food.

To view the talks that Lisa will be giving, you can view our previous blog post about her presentations.

Her first talk will be held at 3:00 PM on Saturday
“Scoping projects to avoid stress, headaches, and angry mobs”

What exactly is this magical event?

WordSesh is basically the online version of WordCamp minus the BBQ lunch and after party. The event will consist of speakers from all over the world, talking about our all-time favorite topic, WordPress! 24 sessions. 1 session every hour, on the hour, for 24 hours.

WordSesh will be live streamed everywhere using the combination of Google Hangout and YouTube’s live streaming. You can find all things WordSesh at WordSesh.org.  Starting Saturday, April 13th at 00:00 UTC (Friday, April 12th at 8:00pm for those of you in the Eastern time zone) – from a computer near you.

24 hours of WordPress is a pretty cool thing, but we also know you might need to get a little sleep, don’t worry! All presentations will be available after the event at WordSesh.org and on the WordSesh YouTube page. You can also follow along on the WordSesh Twitter feed and #WordSesh hashtag.

What’s the best thing about this event? It’s absolutely free. That’s right – you can stuff your head full of WordPress facts, without touching your wallet!

And what is UTC exactly? You can use this link to help you out, and avoid confusion:
Convert Time

How is WebDevStudios involved?

Kicking off the event will be our very own Brad Williams with his Partner in crime, Dre Armeda with the DradCast. You can see the kick off at 8:00 PM EDT on their DradCast website or WordSesh.org. If you haven’t tuned in yet, DradCast is a weekly talk show that showcases all things WordPress and has new guest host every week. It’s both entertaining to watch AND informative.

Also, our very own Lisa Sabin-Wilson will be speaking at 2:00 AM EDT about Scoping Projects to Avoid Stress, Headaches & Angry Mobs. If you missed the talk at WordCamp Miami last week, don’t you fret because you will have another chance this weekend! Tune in to watch it from wherever you are!

Last, we would like to give a big thank you to our friends over at WooThemes for presenting WordSesh and main organizer, Scott Basgaard. It’s going to be a great event!

• wp-config.php – ‘DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE‘
• wp_blogs table – domain column
• wp_site table – domain column
• wp_options and wp_*_options tables – ‘siteurl‘ and ‘home‘ option values

That should get you to where the site will load and you can log in. You’ll still need to search and replace urls in the post content using a tool like Search Replace DB 2 or the Search Regex plugin.

Brochure; which is the name of the new theme – was designed with “being different” in mind. You have many areas that you can place widgets in, so that you can easily customize your site to make it stand out from all the other news sites.

Jayvie created three different feels to this new theme. This is how he described them on the StartBox website blog:

Visually, I made three different “looks”, all very different from each other in character. “Elegant” has a classic look that invokes the look and feel of old paper; “Modern,” whose name speaks for itself, and “Columbia,” a feminine—and rather daring—look dedicated to the classic personification of the United States.

It was also designed to work in tangent with all different types of layouts and adapts to the lot of them perfectly. Magazine themes almost always have slideshows. StartBox has a built in slideshow feature, which is extremely customizable – allowing you to make the slideshow as big or small as you want for your site. (How cool is that?!)

Brochure is also responsive – allowing users to see your site in full action on tablets and smartphones! There’s a demo to see how awesomely responsive it is – Check it out!

To view full details on Brochure; see the blog post on StartBox’s website.

Today I ran across a little gem of a function called get_post_field() that’s been around since version 2.3. It wraps get_post() and sanitizes output all at the same time. The function is simple and at a minimum just needs a field name and post id. The field names correspond to those returned by get_post() and there’s a handy list in that codex article.

Here’s the source of get_post_field() as of WordPress 3.5.1

/**
 * Retrieve data from a post field based on Post ID.
 *
 * Examples of the post field will be, 'post_type', 'post_status', 'post_content',
 * etc and based off of the post object property or key names.
 *
 * The context values are based off of the taxonomy filter functions and
 * supported values are found within those functions.
 *
 * @since 2.3.0
 * @uses sanitize_post_field() See for possible $context values.
 *
 * @param string $field Post field name
 * @param id $post Post ID
 * @param string $context Optional. How to filter the field. Default is display.
 * @return bool|string False on failure or returns the value in post field
 */
function get_post_field( $field, $post, $context = 'display' ) {
  $post = get_post( $post );

  if ( !$post )
    return '';

  if ( !isset($post->$field) )
    return '';

  return sanitize_post_field($field, $post->$field, $post->ID, $context);
}

We have 4 of our team members speaking at this event! Below you can see who, where, when, and what they are talking about!

Brad Williams
Saturday, April 6th at 9:45 am
Developers Track
“Using WordPress as an Application Framework”

WordPress is much more than blogging software.  This presentation will cover how to utilize WordPress as an application framework.  We’ll also cover examples of web apps powered by WordPress. The goal of this presentation is to get the audience to think outside the box when using WordPress.

Jayvie Canono
Friday, April 5th at 3:00 pm
Beginners Workshop
“Must Have” Plugins For Beginners

WordPress works great out of the box, but depending on your goals, there are some plugins you will need to get the most out of your experience. I’ll discuss plugins for different blogging cases, such as for photographers, podcasters, pure writers, and community queen bees.

Saturday, April 6 at 10:00 am
Designer Track
“Designing for Development”

A mockup is only good as a specification document if it keeps the development phase within its time budget. This talk offers recommendations on visual effects available in Photoshop that are easily converted to CSS code, as well as advice on font sizes and selection and layering your document to allow for an efficient development process.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Sunday April 7th at 1:00 pm
Business Track
“Scoping Projects to Reduce Stress, Anxiety and Angry Mobs”

Attention to detail in your code and design work is important – but before you lay down one single pixel, or one single line of code, you need to make sure that everyone (you, your client, your clients client, etc) are on the same page and make sure you are managing expectations on what the desired project outcome is.  This 30-40 talk minute covers some hard lessons I’ve learned in a decade of client work – I hope to pass those headaches on to you so you don’t make the same mistakes

Brian Messenlehner
Sunday, April 7th at 3:00 pm
Explorer Track
“Buddy Press 101″

What the heck is a BuddyPress and why do I need one? BuddyPress allows you to easily build a social network on top of your WordPress website complete with member profiles, private messaging, organic user groups, user forums, site wide activity and much more. We are going to go over a basic install, get you spun up on the core components and functionality, install some BuddyPress specific plugins, look at some BuddyPress Themes and get you to commit to using BuddyPress for everything you do in every aspect of your life!

If you can’t make it to the event, don’t worry! They are live streaming it here – so you can soak in the knowledge from wherever you are!

To view more on how WebDevStudios is involved at this event – see our blog post about WDS invading Miami!