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WP Late Night #11: “Cowboy code it” with Jason Cohen

Ryan Imel — Thu, 31 May 2012 04:50:54 +0000

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear and WPEngine joined the WP Late Night crew for episode number eleven. We discussed WordPress 3.4 RC1, nine years of WordPress, editing core files, and WordPress on mobile devices.

This episode was sponsored by Obox Themes and their Social Commerce plugin. I recommend checking out their demo for a quick idea of what Social Commerce can do for your site.

Episode #11 Show Notes

“I organized WordCamp Seattle and lived to tell about it”

Ryan Imel — Wed, 30 May 2012 19:15:46 +0000

Bob Dunn recapped his experience organizing his first WordCamp:

Why talk about it now? Although I have attended numerous WordCamps, this was the first one I organized. Typically, I’m happier when I’m out there speaking, but when I took over the Seattle WordPress Meetup, I inherited WordCamp as well.

PandoMonthly Fireside Chat with Matt Mullenweg

Ryan Imel — Wed, 30 May 2012 18:10:54 +0000

PandoDaily posted the video of their two-hour chat with Matt Mullenweg in New York City last week. The audio is out of sync pretty badly, so you might just want to listen to the audio in another tab rather than watch it.

Jason Cohen will join the WP Late Night podcast tonight for episode #11

Ryan Imel — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:50:35 +0000

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear and WPEngine, will be our guest for the WP Late Night podcast recording tonight. Join Jason, Brad, Dre, and myself for episode #11 to discuss all the WordPress news of the last week.

We’ll be broadcasting from the WPCandy Stream tonight at 8:00 PM EDT, and of course we’ll have the WPCandy chat room open (#wpcandy on freenode) throughout the show.

If there are any topics you’d like to see discussed, or questions for Jason even, drop them in the comments below.

The Weekly Theme Show #9: P2 and Polaroids

Ryan Imel — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:35:02 +0000

In this week’s episode of The Weekly Theme Show we discussed the recently updated P2 theme and I gave a lengthy review of the Polaroids theme that was released on WordPress.org this week. The three of us are also working on contributing to the WordPress Theme Review Team, so there’s a bit about that in there too.

This episode is sponsored by Obox Themes and their Obox Mobile plugin.

Episode #9 Show Notes

Make the P2 theme even more useful with plugins built for it

Ryan Imel — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:16:55 +0000

The version 1.4 release of the P2 theme brought one intriguing feature: the ability to add to-do items into update messages by starting a line with an “x” (for a checked item) and an “o” for an open item. While crazy useful in and of itself, it got me thinking about plugins made specifically for the P2 theme again.

P2 theme, if you haven’t checked it out before, is a theme from the folks at Automattic made specifically for collaboration and team communication. It’s a bit like a private Twitter, really.

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, really, that I’m a big fan of plugins made just for a certain theme. Plugins are the most natural way to expand upon WordPress itself, and it shouldn’t be any different for WordPress themes too. Below I’ve put together a small (but hopefully growing!) list of plugins made specifically for P2, as well as a few non-P2-specific plugins that I find particularly useful when used along with the theme.

Mention-Me Widget

Mention-Me is a tiny plugin that adds only a widget that you can include in your P2 sidebar. It has a couple of configurable options, but basically it will display (relative to the logged in user) a list of any mentions “@” you or comments on your posts.

Mention-Me Widget by Thorsten Ott is a free plugin on the WordPress.org plugin directory.

P2 Likes

P2 Likes is a plugin I only just started using, but it’s a fun one too. Along with the normal set of actions for a post (like reply and edit) it adds a “like” link. Liking a post will add your avatar to the post.

There have been many discussions on the relative value of things like “likes” and “plus ones”. In this case, I’d say it’s helpful to have a quick way to recognize a post on a P2 blog, particularly because it’s so obvious once you’ve done so. Not every post needs a followup comment, but that doesn’t mean you can’t respond.

P2 Likes by Scott Basgaard is available for free on the WordPress.org plugin directory.

P2 Resolved Posts

One problem I’ve run into with P2 blogs is not quite that conversations get lost, but that they get buried. As authors post new updates, and new threaded conversations take place, important conversations can slip off the home page. That’s why I’ve found P2 Resolved Posts so useful.

P2 Resolved Posts lets you mark a post as “resolved” or “unresolved”. By default a post is nothing, not until you mark it as unresolved. At that point the display changes a bit, and the widget that comes with the plugin will update to show a list of unresolved posts. When used correctly, this is a great way to always keep important conversations in sight.

P2 Resolved Posts by Daniel Bachhuber is available for free on the WordPress.org plugin directory.

Handy plugins to use with P2

In addition to the plugins above, which various developers made specifically for use with P2, I’ve also found a few plugins useful in my experience with P2. I use Subscribe2 and Subscribe to Comments to enable simple email notifications of posts. I could use Jetpack for the comment subscriptions, but normally I don’t need anything else it offers so it’s not worth the trouble. ¹

Speaking of privacy: I use the More Privacy Options plugin to make sure private P2s stay that way. I also use Widgets Reloaded because I find myself wanting even more control oer the sidebar widgets in a theme like P2.

At times I’ll also use WPMU Custom CSS, or a plugin like it, to make adding simple CSS tweaks to the theme really easy. Sometimes I want to tweak the theme a bit, and it’s not worth firing off a child theme for such a minor change. A custom CSS plugin keeps those tweaks painless.

How do you use P2?

If you’re a plugin developer who has cooked up something specific for P2, let me know in the comments so I can add it to the list above. And if you have a private P2 customization that could be rolled into a plugin for public use, I’d love to see it and try it out.

If you find yourself using P2 in a specific way, or with customizations or plugins that others might benefit from, leave a note in the comments. Also, if you are a P2 theme user, what other themes do you find as consistently useful as P2?

Notes:

And many of my P2 sites aren’t public, and therefore wouldn’t work with Jetpack anyway. ↩

10 things to know about WordPress 3.4

Ryan Imel — Mon, 28 May 2012 22:05:52 +0000

Aaron Brazell wrote up another one of his guides to the high points of the new version of WordPress. With 3.4 in the RC1 phase, it’s a good time to start brushing up on what’s coming.

Mark Jaquith’s WordPress Skeleton on Github

Ryan Imel — Mon, 28 May 2012 21:45:47 +0000

Lead developer Mark Jaquith has shared his own skeleton Github repo for WordPress sites. If you’re thinking about using it, have a look at his writeup on building Have Baby. Need Stuff! as well.

WordPress 3.4 Release Candidate 1 is available

Ryan Imel — Mon, 28 May 2012 15:56:56 +0000

What better way to celebrate nine years of WordPress than a brand new release candidate? WordPress 3.4 has been in the works for the since the beginning of the year and is quickly nearing final release. Remember, the release candidate phase comes after the beta stage and just before the final public release.

Now is the time to help out by testing themes and plugins. If you find any potential bugs you can share your findings in the Alpha/Beta support forums.

Version 3.4 is bringing a live theme customizer and HTML in captions to WordPress, along with a slew of other improvements. Is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to?

WordPress is nine years old today

Ryan Imel — Sun, 27 May 2012 21:34:33 +0000

On May 27th, 2003, Matt Mullenweg announced the availability of the first release of WordPress, version 0.7. He and Mike Little became the co-founders of a little project that, in the years since, has made a big impact on web publishing.

A lot has happened in the last year. If you have the desire to reminisce a bit, browse through our post archives starting last May and see just how much has happened since then. ¹ The WordPress community is a busy one!

If you’re in the mood to thank people today, you can thank WordPress co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, the hundreds of contributors to WordPress core over the years, support forum moderators and the theme review team, anyone who has made a theme or plugin that you’ve used, or maybe even the person who first introduced you to WordPress.

And looking forward, don’t forget that Mullenweg has made some interesting goals for the next year of WordPress development.

For the comments below, let us know how long you’ve used WordPress. Have you made decent progress in your career or hobby in the last year? What do you want to see the next year bring? And just think, as Ryan Duff joked on Twitter, about what we have to look forward to as WordPress approaches that “defiant teenager” age.