This morning I spent some time investigating feed readers and services to replace Google Reader. A lot of internet users have been since Google announced Reader is going away this summer. It’s easy to pull up a list of possible alternatives, but ultimately I found it necessary to just dig in and try them out to see which works best.

I dug in, and here’s what I found out.

Where I’m coming from

In a replacement RSS reader, I’m looking for a couple of things. I’ve always liked the idea of hosting the feeds in one place and having my pick of applications for doing the actual reading. Reeder has been my go-to app on the Mac, and apps like Flipboard are fun to use on iPads.

And I’m not just looking for myself, either. Ashley has RSS subscriptions, though she does use them a bit differently than I do. Sync isn’t as important to her, but there is an account with subscriptions that we share from time to time. That’s one reason why Google Reader and syncing apps were so useful.

So ideally I’d like a service that will hold my subscriptions, but is also compatible with apps that might want to sync with it. Obviously this is a pretty tall order right now, so I’ve got to look for those services that look like they will offer the best options in the coming year.

After all, Google Reader has been the standard for so long it’s going to take some time for other services to really rise up.

I made a list based on what I’ve found recommended online in the last week or two. Then I just ran down the list trying things out. Here’s what I found.

(I should mention I’m a Mac user, so I really only look into apps that will work for me. That said, many of these options are web apps and should work no matter what platform you’re operating on.)

The Old Reader is pretty simple, but I’m still waiting

I don’t recall using Google Reader during its earliest days – though honestly I don’t have the best memory with things like that. The Old Reader claims to emulate that early Google Reader experience, which sounds fine to me. Simple and to the point sounds great to me.

Signing up was easy, as you’d expect. Once logged in, though, I found what what seems to be an unmovable “trending” section that sits below other options. I could care less what’s trending on the service. Ideally I could remove or hide that, which I don’t think I can, but at least it doesn’t look like it’s the default view when you pull the site up.

That said, I haven’t been able to spend any time with The Old Reader. It seems there are lots of folks jumping into the service, and my OPML file import file is behind a queue of over 12,000 other imports. Still is. Assuming I’m notified by email when the import is finished, I’ll give The Old Reader a proper shake.

Until then, let’s move on.

NewsBlur just doesn’t do it for me

I saw mentions of NewsBlur too, so gave it a look. The sign up process alerted me that free sign ups have been disabled, and prompted me to upgrade my account. I didn’t do that, since I wanted to check everything out and get a lay of the land before paying anything.

It seems the big increase in sign ups since the Google Reader announcement is what motivated NewsBlur to turn off free sign ups.

So at this point I moved on to try other things out. After returning to it later, though, I discovered what I thought was a partial sign up was actually a full sign up and was working. As far as I can tell the prompt to upgrade and the “free account sign ups are disabled” message is only to motivate upgrades, and not quite real. At least, in my case, my account is a free one and functions.

So long story short, I was able to give it a trial. And I’m glad I was able to. The feel is very – for lack of a better word – Windows-y. It feels like a Windows explorer window, or a file structure in a web-based FTP app of some sort. In other words, not great. I’m not into the aesthetic at all, and I’m glad I didn’t need to spend twenty bucks to figure that out.

Moving right along.

Feedly was a bit confusing, but close

Next I tried Feedly, which I knew going in was a big favorite amongst those who’ve walked from Google Reader. It’s a service that, on first glance, seemed like it would work like The Old Reader and allow me to import my subscriptions in. But it’s not quite that.

On the Feedly homepage I was confused. In my mind RSS services tend to fall into two large groups: those where you read the feeds in a browser, and those where you download an app and use that. Google Reader is one of the former kind, and NetNewsWire one of the latter. On first glance, I wasn’t sure what the heck Feedly was.

Feedly homepage, before setting up the browser extension.

It offers three options: download for Safari (or Chrome, in the screenshot above), for iOS, and for Android. This makes me think it’s app based, right? After all, there are definitely iOS and Android specific apps. But the language download for Safari threw me, since I’m not sure what that means. I would expect it to say download for Mac.

Turns out that downloads an extension, which is what I did next. It acts like any other extension or bookmark in your toolbar, expect the only purpose it seems to serve (as far as I can tell) is to take you to your Feedly homepage. To put it in context, right next to the Feedly icon in my browser I have one for 1Password and another for iCloud tabs. Both give me enhanced functionality in the browser, and do what I expect them to do. The Feedly icon doesn’t subscribe to the current site’s RSS feed, which is what I expected, but just jumps me to the Feedly site.

Okay, whatever. So it’s a web-based service. Got it. Now I need to import my RSS feeds.

Feedly, after setting up the browser extension.

This was another confusing step, because I couldn’t see a way to create a Feedly account. Any service like this uses an account, right? I need to create a username, add my email, and maybe set a password. But the only option I had was to login or sync with Google Reader.

Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of this process, but I was hung up on it for a good minute. Because synchronizing with Google Reader is not what I’m looking to do at this stage. I’m looking to upload the OPML file I’ve backed up from Google Reader and transition over to something new. Synchronizing with the soon-to-be-dead Google Reader seems like a silly choice. Heck, I already have Google Reader synchronized with Reeder and NetNewsWire and I know that won’t work for longer.

Without any other option I could see, I went ahead and logged in with my Reader account and set it all up that way. Only after doing some digging did I discover, on the Feedly blog I believe, that synchronizing is the way to do it right now. By the time Google Reader closes down, they say, everything will be seamlessly ported over. So signing in with Google Reader info is the right thing to do, as odd as it seems to me to do it.

Now that I was actually into the service, I thought it was mostly neat. The design of the interface will take some getting used to, mostly because it always takes me some time to find my way around the really minimalist design aesthetics. The style carries over to the iOS apps, which I grabbed to try out as well.

While on the Feedly blog I also read a bit about their Normandy project. It’s an effort on their part to create an API to match the Google Reader API, to make it easier for other services and apps to offer Feedly synchronizing as an option sooner. It sounds like a neat endeavor and definitely weighs in on my decision as to which option to go for.

Alright, next up.

NetVibes seems like overkill

I actually ran a second Google search for NetVibes after arriving on their site, thinking there must be another one that offers RSS services. The NetVibes homepage emphasized what seems to be their core offerings: monitoring and analytics. It didn’t seem to be an RSS service, as far as I could tell.

But this was the correct NetVibes, the one that people had mentioned in a few Google Reader alternative roundups. So I dug in a bit more, watched their demonstration video, and signed up.

Or I should say, I tried to sign up. For the life of me I couldn’t get their sign up process to successfully send me an activation email. I tried a couple of times, and it just wasn’t sending. I checked junk mail, tried a different email and username, but it just wasn’t doing it. Since the service already looked like it wasn’t quite the right fit, I moved on. It just wasn’t worth my troubleshooting for that long.

Next.

Pulse isn’t aimed at me

First impression: I think I’ll really like the look of Pulse. I signed up without trouble (not normally something I would mention, but after the tough NetVibes experience it stands out) and took a look around.

It was frustrating trying to import my OPML file. My first impulse was to search out a settings screen or option to do it within a preferences menu or something. You know, like most apps and services would handle it. It still seems crazy to me now, but it seems the only way to import the file is to first sign out of the site, visit their homepage, and use their importer. Then, after the file imported, I could associate the feeds with my existing account.

Totally weird. But it worked, and then I had my feeds in.

But not quite. That was when I discovered that Pulse operates a bit differently – not bad differently, per se, but in its own way that shows a clear philosophy at hand. Pulse organizes feeds, or what they refer to as “content” throughout, into topics. But each topic can only hold a handful of feeds – which they call sources, I think. The end result here is that my feeds, which number in the hundreds and are assembled into meticulous folders, ended up in folders like My Folder Name 01, My Folder Name 02, My Folder Name 03, and so on. Pulse broke up my feeds into folders based on their folder limitations, which had the effect of destroying my organization method.

Which means I can’t use Pulse.

I still spent some time playing around with it. I tried out the iPhone and iPad apps, both in an attempt to properly organize my feeds. You know – rename folders, change the order, move feeds around, and so on. I couldn’t find a way to do it. Not in the web app, or the mobile apps. There may very well be a place to do it, but I couldn’t find it. So that’s no good.

But really, once I knew the folder limits were set in place and don’t seem to be changing any time soon, I knew it would never work for me. It’s not that Pulse is bad, really, it’s just that it won’t work for me. It has a different kind of reader in mind. Perhaps a more casual one. But not me.

Next is Fever.

Fever, hot but a bit more work

I enjoyed reading Ryan Markel’s reasoning behind his choice to go with Fever as his Google Reader replacement. It seems like a neat product, with a very pleasant aesthetic. But there’s no trial, and requires a purchase to then install it on my own server to use it.

That made me think. Really, it just seems like too much work for a feed service. I’m all for owning my own stuff and having control over it, but there’s also some stuff I prefer not to have to think about.

In this case, I see the OPML feeds I’ve curated as my stuff. And I have those. Backed up and safe – even more so after the news about Google Reader. But where I put those feeds, and where I choose to read them, I guess I don’t feel like I have to fully control that. I’m happy to rely on a hosted service or application that isn’t going to make me handle everything.

The more I look at Fever, the more I wish it had a hosted version. Or at least a proper demo that would let me really play with it to see if it’s worth my purchase.

That said, moving on.

Vienna is a fun project to follow

I didn’t see many mentions of Vienna, but I wanted to give it a fair shake. It’s an open source Mac application that is being openly developed on Github. Fun side note: their site is using a fairly recognizable WordPress theme. Open source loves company, it seems.

So the app seems solid. Along with a now nearly useless Google Reader synchronization option, it allows you to dump feed subscriptions directly into it. This would be a solid option for Ashley if she wanted to ditch NetNewsWire, but it’s not great for me since I still want a service that will allow synchronization in multiple places.

I’m going to keep an eye on the project, of course. If it ends up with broader synchronizing options than Reeder does before Reeder does, I’ll likely switch over to it for a bit. After all, I still have a thing for desktop apps.

What I’m sticking with in place of Google Reader

That does it for what I spent time with today. Ultimately, I didn’t find exactly what I wanted: a subscription management service that can sync with multiple applications that I could choose from. But I knew from the beginning that I was likely asking too much. Until lately, development time with RSS applications seems to have been mostly focused on Google Reader integration. Now we need more options – any other options! – and it will take time for those to pop up.

So while I didn’t find exactly what I wanted, I think I found a horse worth betting on. I’m going with Feedly, for now. The design works for me, is an update to Reader while still keeping things fresh and new, and has a plan for the future that seems smart to me. Let’s say I’m cautiously optimistic about Feedly.

It’s possible I’ll switch over sometime – I still haven’t had proper time with The Old Reader yet – but for now I’m with Feedly. I don’t generally like just going with the accepted popular option. I prefer to try everything out myself and make a decision on my own. It just turns out in this case that what I like best and what it seems the internet at large likes best is pretty close.

I’m still a bit nervous – no, let’s say curious – about the more confusing aspects of Feedly. For one, I don’t seem to have a login with them aside from my Google Reader info. So when that goes away, what do I log in with? Will they just email me that information in time? I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.

One last takeaway: I was surprised how many of my experiences finding the right service just weren’t pleasant ones. I still think there’s room to make this process a lot better, and probably room for better products and services. Heck, even Feedly, the service I ended up choosing over the rest, gave me about as much trouble getting started with as anything else did.

If you’ve found something interesting in your own search, feel free to drop your findings in the comments below.

The post My experience looking for an RSS service to replace Google Reader appeared first on WPCandy.

Photo and graphic: Michael Kimb Jones

Michael Kimb Jones — or Kimb, as he prefers people call him — sat waiting for his time to stand up and speak. There he sat, on the ground floor of Surgeons Hall at the Royal College of Surgeons, running over the things he was about to talk about. His presentation was for WordCamp Edinburgh in 2012, the largest WordPress unconference event in the UK.

The slide sitting behind him on the projector, waiting for him to start, read “How I Made WonderThemes.” His pitch on the WordCamp Edinburgh wiki said that his presentation included the initial concept for WonderThemes, cost breakdowns, development struggles and how he sometimes felt like he was “punching [himself] in the face.”

Because this presentation wasn’t all positive. In it Kimb would tell his WonderThemes story, as well as the various elements that contributed to him closing his WordPress theme marketplace down and moving on.

It was just three years earlier, in July of 2009 at the WordCamp held in Cardiff, Wales, where Kimb first remembers drawing the inspiration for a theme shop of some sort. The drive to the conference from his home was eight hours, he said, but was “well worth it.”

In 2009 the state of the WordPress industry was quite different from today. Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme had only recently been brought under the new StudioPress banner. Thesis, ThemeForest, and WooThemes had each existed for only about a year. Heck, there weren’t even 50 WordCamps taking place that year. WordPress was in a crucial place, and poised to grow in big ways.

And Kimb found himself driving home from WordCamp feeling inspired. He had an idea. Seeing so many people in the community pulling together a business and selling their work — particularly seeing Tung Do, then known primarily as Small Potato, build and sell his blog for more than $60,000 — Kimb saw a theme shop in his future. After all, he had designed and built WordPress themes as a freelancer for some time.

He would need to build the business part time, however. Kimb worked as a web and digital manager for a hospital in the National Health Service. With a busy nine to five, his theme business would need to come after work wrapped each day. And so that’s what he did.

From a theme shop to a theme marketplace

The initial idea was a theme shop reminiscent of WooThemes. Kimb simply wanted to make and sell themes. He’d put together his own branded shop and sell his work. After he started digging into the details, however, Kimb noticed the process itself was pretty difficult. Putting up a store and selling to customers elegantly was easier said than done, particularly for someone like he that was less a developer than a designer.

On top of that, Kimb wasn’t satisfied with the terms he saw at ThemeForest. He disagreed with the percentages the marketplace took (anywhere from 30% to 50% or more) and the non-GPL nature of their licensing. Both seemed wrong to him, and he wanted to make something better. Smaller, perhaps, but ideologically better.

With these thoughts in mind, Kimb started down the road toward building and launching his own WordPress theme marketplace.

Being primarily a designer, Kimb found himself spending time up front initial design and branding work. The WonderThemes superhero mascot — which we’ve featured a couple of times in posts on WPCandy — was one of the first elements to come together.

Photo and drawing: Michael Kimb JonesKimb says the mascot was one of the earliest pieces of the marketplace to come together. As a designer, he was most comfortable starting there.

Kimb chose the name and purchased WonderThemes.com about six months after his inspirational WordCamp experience in Edinburgh. At the time Kimb and his partner Jonny Allbut — who has since moved on to other projects — planned on building the marketplace around their theme framework, appropriately titled Wonderflux. The idea was for the themes sold on WonderThemes to all be built on top of the WonderFlux framework.

As time went by, however, they ironed out the marketplace concept just as much as the code behind the platform. Before long their marketplace concept expanded to allow any framework theme, and later any theme at all. Wonderflux was less and less important to WonderThemes, though it is still under active development, for those interested.

“It was more of a long slog.”

After spending some time in beta, the WonderThemes marketplace fully launched in May of 2011. After that it took about two months for their store to list nine themes from seven different theme authors.

“It took a long time to get out there,” Kimb admitted. “It wasn’t a lean startup. It was more of a long slog.” He attributes a number of things to the delay in launching, the biggest reason possibly that he was not a strong enough developer to build out the marketplace himself. Instead, he bootstrapped the development of WonderThemes using what was available and by hiring work out to a more competent developer.

The final site ended up built on WordPress Multisite, using the MarketPress plugin, Gravity Forms and bbPress as the support system. “It was cobbled together and it worked,” Kimb said.

“It was cobbled together and it worked.”

The WonderThemes system wasn’t without its hard edges, though. Kimb hired a developer to build in the digital downloads capability to the plugin he was using, since it didn’t yet support it. This was great, in a sense, because it worked exactly the way he wanted: instant PayPal transfers to vendors when customers made theme purchases, while automatically removing the WonderThemes percentage.

This was before plugins like Easy Digital Downloads existed to make this process so much simpler, Kimb said.

Technical issues aside, Kimb found it difficult to bring in real revenue with the terms he had set. “One of the stupid things, although at the time sounded like a good idea,” he told WPCandy, “was to give every early adopter the maximum rate of 95% per sale.” In other words, for any vendor who joined WonderThemes early on, every sale netted them 95% of the theme’s cost.

This, of course, left only 5% of each sale for Kimb.

Graphic: Michael Kimb JonesKimb used this graphic to show the progression in the thinking behind WonderThemes. What began as a theme shop became a very open, and very generous, theme marketplace.

Difficulty gaining traction

“Whenever a sale would go through, and I’d get my three or four dollars in payout,” Kimb said, “I’d think if this was just a little bit more, than I could at least reinvest that.”

Kimb also discovered that many vendors would sign up and then leave. They wanted to check the place out a bit, he explained, but then left when they weren’t “feeling it”.

These theme developers proved very difficult to sway over to WonderThemes. “Vendors are always going to go where the market is,” Kimb told WPCandy. “It’s because people use it, it’s not just because it’s marketed to the hilt. People would say if you want a WordPress theme, go to ThemeForest. ThemeForest is the place where a lot of people start their journey into WordPress themes. A lot of people haven’t heard of branded theme shops but have heard of ThemeForest.”

Customers proved equally difficult to bring to the site. Kimb reached out and was a sponsor for two WordCamps in an attempt to grow his customer base.

His tone sharpening, Kimb said, “Never buy t-shirts by the way. They’re the worst decision.” He purchased shirts to hand out to attendees at the event. “I would ask people afterward, oh, you got a free t-shirt, did you buy a theme? Nope. It was just a terrible idea.”

A screenshot of the WonderThemes website, in the beta period leading up to having themes to list there.

A year after launching, stepping in front of the room at WordCamp Edinburgh, Kimb told much of this story.

“It’s been a year now,” he said thinking back, “and the site’s not getting any traction. I can either kill it off, I can re-engineer it, or I can continue with the current system but invest more time and money and maybe get a partner.”

He said, “The ultimate outcome was to turn it off, because I didn’t have any more cash to invest in it.”

WonderThemes closed its doors. During the six months it was active 215 users registered, 150 of which were vendors wanting to potentially sell products. Just fourteen vendors became active, which a combined total of thirty themes at its most active. Some were free themes, but most were commercial.

WonderThemes saw 17 sales during its operation. Kimb made about $50. The site itself cost upwards of $10,000.

Lessons learned

At WordCamp Kimb presented on the lessons he learned, and told the attendees that even though the business failed it doesn’t feel like that much of a failure because of what he learned along the way.

“I think offering a 95% cut of sales was a mistake,” Kimb told WPCandy. After building a bit of an audience he fully intended to reign back the high vendor cut and offer more reasonable rates. The more extreme deal was simply to bring in vendors early, he said.

Kimb also regrets not implementing an affiliate system, which he says was mostly coded before he closed the marketplace down. He would have built the marketplace itself quite differently if doing it again, as well — likely not on top of the WordPress platform at all. At the very least, he said, he wouldn’t have waited until WordPress and WordPress MU merged into one system before really building out the WonderThemes platform.

In reflection, though, Kimb recognized that all things considered, particularly nowadays, the technical side of a marketplace built on WordPress really isn’t that difficult. Managing the marketplace after launch, he said, is really the important and difficult part.

It would be understandable, particularly after all the effort spent on the project, that Kimb would have his own frustrations with that part of the industry. It turns out that’s not quite the case.

“It’s funny,” Kimb told me. “I was incredibly cynical before. I remember signing up for ThemeForest and thinking this is terrible, for the terms and the percentages.” But after seeing the other side of the marketplace coin, so to speak, he feels differently. Envato isn’t the only company out there pursuing a stable marketplace model.

“The management of the marketplace after launch is really the important and difficult part.”

“Apple isn’t evil, and Envato isn’t evil. They just want to be in a position where they can bring enough money in to keep the business going and grow the business. And that’s what Envato has done and I have a lot of respect for them.”

And Kimb said as much during his WonderThemes story at WordCamp Edinburgh in 2012. Three years earlier, in Wales, he had presented a slide deck titled “WordPress in the Health Sector”, based on his experience with WordPress in the hospital he worked in. Now his presentation covered the building and eventual closing of his WordPress business — quite a journey, really.

After reminiscing with me for a little over an hour, Kimb sort of chuckled to himself. “I always anticipated that I would set up the marketplace,” he said, “and then take a couple of weeks coming up with some new and fresh themes, and sell them myself. I would sell them on the marketplace that I built. Then I would get 100% of the money and it would all be great.”

All said and done, WonderThemes was open for about six months. It brought in around fifty dollars and a handful of vendors, and Kimb ended up printing a lot of WonderThemes shirts. And he never did get around to releasing a single theme of his own.

Kimb is still an active WordPress user, designer, developer and evangelist. He runs a local monthly meetup in Sheffield, and plans to speak at WordCamp UK in June and the Edinburgh WordUp in April. Since closing WonderThemes he has refocused on building his freelance client base while also moving into the event and education space with the MAKE DO Initiative. All of this, of course, while still working nine to five for the National Health Service..

You can follow Kimb on Twitter at @mkjones.

The post The Story of WonderThemes: Why starting a WordPress theme marketplace isn’t easy appeared first on WPCandy.

Today sees the release of WordPress 3.5, the most recent and much-anticipated major version of our favorite content management system. Lots of talented folks have put hundreds of hours into this release, and it’s filled to the brim with all sorts of nifty updates.

Let’s take a look at a few of them.

All new media manager

I’m not sure there’s been as much buzz around a major WordPress featured since Distraction Free Writing in version 3.2. Based on what I’ve seen, I think it’s well deserving of the buzz.

The new media manager replaces the old modal iframe that popped up when clicking the insert/upload button. One way I find this neat is it means that opening the manager is quicker, and jumping between the post and the manager will bring you back to the last screen you were looking at. This will save plenty of clicks, especially in a post with a lot of photos embedded in them.

Have a look at a few of the new workflow screenshots:

Images can be inserted more than one at a time now, and not as galleries but as standalone images. Depending on the situation, this could seriously cut down on time previously spent jumping between the media manager and the editor.

Galleries are much easier to create, and won’t require editing shorttags. I’ve hobbled together my own custom galleries before, and know just how much of a pain the process was before. I really look forward to crafting off the cuff galleries with the new manager.

The media system within WordPress is something that has been nearly on the able for a few versions now. Everyone wants it updated and improved, but nobody has wanted to touch it. This new user interface and experience is a major step forward, even if many of the underlying functionality remains the same.

Twenty Twelve included in the package

Twenty Twelve has been available on WordPress.org Extend for a while already, but this release brings the new default theme into the WordPress package itself. If you haven’t spent any time with it yet, it’s worth a look. This theme is a great starting place for a lot of different sites (I’ve used it as a starter theme on a couple of sites since it was finalized).

It’s about time to start throwing out crazy ideas about Twenty Thirteen, isn’t it?

A fully HiDPI Dashboard

HiDPI — or Retina — resolution support starting working their way into WordPress in the last release, but those updates are finished with 3.5. All icons and elements have been updated to support new displays.

For those who don’t have HiDPI screens to see the dashboard themselves, here’s a close approximation:

Sigh. I really need to upgrade my machine. I feel like I’m the only one missing out on this lately.

Link Manager now removed by default

Did anyone else just hear a sound, almost like thousands of people cheering at once? The Link Manager has been on the proverbial chopping block for some time, and at long last has made its final default appearance in core. Unless a user is already using links, the update will remove the manager entirely.

WordPress Lead Developer Andrew Nacin has authored the Link Manager plugin that will add the menu item and screens back to the dashboard. I’m curious to see this plugin’s download stats in the next couple of weeks.

Favorite WordPress.org plugins in the dashboard

WordPress 3.5 brings in favorite plugin support, a feature that has been available for WordPress.org users. Any plugin marked a favorite will now show up on the Install Plugins screen when the username is entered.

The screenshot above, for instance, shows Otto’s favorite plugins.

Tumblr importer support

Tumblr is one of the most popular platforms in the world, and now it is (relatively) easy to import Tumblr posts into WordPress. I say relatively because the process will require you to register an app with Tumblr, give them information about your installation — all of which is due to the way Tumblr has set it up.

Still, it’s nice to have an easy way to move your tumbled content over to WordPress. You know, if you want to.

Multisite can now be installed in a subdirectory

Remember how a multisite WordPress install couldn’t be installed into a directory, but had to be at the root of your web directory? No longer!

It’s not exactly a feature, really, but will make getting started with multisite a little bit simpler for new users. That’s always good, right?

switch_to_blog() performance problems fixed

Speaking of multisite, use of the switch_to_blog() function isn’t dangerous like it used to be. It has been refactored to not be nearly as expensive as it used to be.

New color picker adopted from WordPress.com

WordPress comes with a new default color picker, which itself was born over at WordPress.com (where it’s called Iris). The most common way to make use of the color picker will be the theme customizer, where registering color controls will add the picker you see in the screenshot above.

The picker can be added to any admin screen, of course. You can read more about this one on the Make WordPress Core blog.

New admin hooks: edit_form_after_title, edit_form_after_editor

Who doesn’t love new hooks? Particularly new hooks on the dashboard? 3.5 includes two new hooks on the edit post screen: edit_form_after_title and edit_form_after_editor. This will make adding your own stuff to these admin screens quite a bit simpler.

For example:

You can read more about these new hooks on the Make WordPress Core blog.

Taxonomy metaboxes will collapse if only a few items

Here’s a clever change for you: hierarchical taxonomy metaboxes (so, categories or any custom taxonomy you create) will now collapse to the height of the taxonomy items that exist. So, rather than having a tall box with a bunch of empty space, the box will only be as tall as it needs to be.

I like these kinds of changes most of all, because it makes total sense but had never really occurred to me before seeing it.

The relevant trac ticket is #15925.

Soundcloud, Slideshare, Instagram join oEmbed providers list

Soundcloud, Slideshare, and Instagram are all now easy as can be to embed into a standard install of WordPress. There’s really not too much to say with this one — it’s just a nifty addition that will make sharing these service’s photos, presentations, and audio that much simpler.

Relevant trac tickets include #21704 and #15734.

HTML editor renamed to “Text”

The WordPress editor is built from two tabs: a visual view and an HTML view. The “HTML” tab has been renamed “Text” with this release. Discussion points in the trac ticket for this change mentioned “text” being more descriptive of that tab’s behavior, since the tab never offered true HTML editing.

The relevant trac ticket is #20993.

Option to display post date in recent posts widget

Prompted by Twenty Twelve theme development, this particular change adds the option to display post dates within the recent posts widget. How the date itself displays will depend on the theme, of course, but the option itself might make finding a more advanced widget via a plugin unnecessary.

The relevant trac ticket is #21064.

Widgets headers clickalbe to open/close

Speaking of widgets, one neat UI touch this release is a larger click target for expanding and closing widgets. Previously only the arrow on the right side of the widget would open the widget, but now the entire header will open it up.

I know it’s not a crazy big change or anything, but I find little touches like this interesting. This tweak also brings widget metaboxes more in line with the dashboard metaboxes.

The relevant trac ticket is #21247.

XML-RPC on by default, removed dashboard option

It seems that XML-RPC has improved a bit since it was introduced into WordPress core. Previously it was off by default — now it will be on, and the dashboard option itself is removed too. For most users this will remove the annoying step of enabling XML-RPC when connecting to apps and services that use it.

Though the admin option is gone, XML-RPC can be disabled using a filter. Or, if you’d rather not create your own, it looks like WordPress.org user philerb has put together a plugin to disable it already.

The relevant track ticket is #21509.

945 tickets annihilated for 3.5

You read that right: 945 tickets were completed and closed for this version of WordPress. That includes bugs, features, and necessary tasks. The biggest of kudos go out to release lead Andrew Nacin and all the core developers who contributed — especially Daryl Koopersmith who took the lead on the media manager. Thank a developer today when you get a chance!

Hey, that reminds me. Does anyone have a wish list for 3.6 yet?

The post Everything we know about WordPress 3.5 appeared first on WPCandy.

For those willing to read a bit more, continue on. The speaker’s notes and slides are linked up below as well, including further thoughts on the events and the presentations I sat in on.

Speaker presentations

I’ll be updating the list with further slides and notes as they are posted and available.

The developer track speaker notes and slides were:

• Topher Derosia: Intro to Plugin Development
• John P. Bloch: Awesome Helper Functions in WordPress Core — Slides on his blog
• Tim Shangle: Developing for Committees — Slides on Slideshare
• David Tufts: Webb Apps for the Masses — Slides on SlideShare
• Pippin Williamson: Extensible Plugins — Slides on Slideshare
• Aaron Holbrook: WordPress and Version Control — Slides on his blog
• Mark Jaquith: Deploying WordPress with WPStack

The theme track speaker notes and slides were:

• Jonathan Calvin: CSS3 and WordPress Themes
• Ryan Imel: Every Theme Sucks and Nobody Cares — Slides on SlideShare
• Jake Caputo: No, I Didn’t Read the Instructions, Just Do It For Me — Slides on SpeakerDeck
• Ross Johnson: The Overlap of Emotion and Usability — Slides on SpeakerDeck
• Chip Bennett: Developing Child Theme-Friendly Themes — Slides on SlideShare
• Brad Parbs: 320px and Up, Getting Started with Responsive Design
• Reid Peiffer: WPatterns — Slides on Tribe’s site

The community track speaker notes and slides were:

• Justin Razmus: Using WordPress to Start and Grow Your Business
• Kimanzi Constable: How to Keep Them Coming Back for More
• Paul Kortman: Stop Selling SEO — Slides on Slideshare
• John James Jacoby: BuddyPress or bbPress? Which to Use and Why.
• Benjamin Lotter: Getting Started with Video Blogging
• Tharon Rodriguez: Getting Familiar with PODS
• Timothy Burns: Social Media Broadcasting — Using Online Tools and Metrics to Build Your Tribe

The user track speaker notes and slides were:

• AJ Morris: WordPress: Up and Running
• Chad Warner: WordPress Admin: A Guided Tour — Resources on his blog
• Andy Stratton: Everything is Relative (Frameworks, Plugins and SEO)
• Justin Jones: WordPress Security, or Why Google Says You Shouldn’t Visit My Church — Slides on Slideshare
• Lisa Sabin-Wilson: Exploring WordPress Multisite — Slides on Slideshare
• Dustin Hartzler: Podcasting with WordPress and Live Podcast Recording — Planning PDF

Presentations I attended

I attended a session or two every hour, minus the hour that I gave my talk about WordPress themes. First up was Jonathan Calvin’s in the theme track, who everyone was really bummed for because his car was broken into this morning and his laptop was stolen. So, unfortunately, his talk — on CSS3 and using it in WordPress themes — was mostly on-the-fly and in response to questions. It was a great talk, particularly considering the limitations he was put under — and dealing, no doubt, with the frustration of losing a computer that way.

Above: Brian Richards giving the opening words at WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012. Right after he announced his candidacy for president, by the looks of it.

I spoke next, and then after chatting it up in the hallways came back just in time to see Jake Caputo using me as a stand-in for an annoying customer’s support questions during his talk about supporting a commercial theme user base. That was pretty funny, although a bit creepy in how well the joke was timed.

I enjoyed Jake’s talk, particularly because I don’t think I’ve seen support talked about from a commercial theme developer’s perspective before. He explained the reasoning well, and how to effectively do it, though really my takeaway was learning that the bulk of his customers are turning around and using his themes on client sites rather than using the themes themselves. I’ve heard this sort of thing quite a bit from those who sell commercial themes, and I’m beginning to wonder how much bigger a lot of theme shop’s businesses would be if they could find a way to sell directly to the end user. Food for thought, I suppose.

Above: Jake Caputo presenting, mere moments after making me his example obnoxious customer in a screenshot.

After lunch I sat in on Web Apps for the Masses, a presentation by David Tufts where he talked about building web applications on top of WordPress and used his KickPress project as an example. It was interesting to hear about their experiences building on top of WordPress that way, and will be very excited to see them launch their (paid, I believe) product before too long.

Above: David Tufts talking about KickPress and how to take advantage of “The WordPress App Stack”.

Above: Pippin Williamson talking about making smarter plugins.

During the 2pm hour I was torn between Pippin’s Extensible Plugins and Chip’s Developing Child Theme-Friendly Themes. In the end I sat through the first half of Pippin’s and the last half of Chip’s. The funny thing is, and perhaps this was by design, they were each talking about the same thing — extending another person’s codebase, or rather making your own codebase something others can extend — but were talking about it in regards to plugins and themes, respectively.

I’ve been beginning to build my own plugins to work together, so hearing a few tips from Pippin about how to go about it, and the various ways to consider going about it, was super useful for me and I’ll use his tips in the immediate future. Like, tomorrow.

My favorite part of Chip’s presentation was when he talked about how to write out theme options for a theme in such a way that a child theme (or plugin, really) can filter them and add, subtract, or modify what they are entirely. Just think of it: there could exist a plugin strictly for the purposes of making crazy theme options panels go away. Oh, the possibilities.

I enjoyed Brad Parbs and his presentation in the theme room toward the end of the day, particularly when the room became part of the discussion and various war stories and client tales were shared from those in the room about their responsive site designs. It’s impossible to argue against the importance of responsive designs and media queries nowadays, but the exact implementation and problem solving that is needed is what makes this topic so fascinating to me. I’ll be seeking him out soon to discuss this one some more.

Finally, I wrapped up my day of sessions with Reid Peiffer in the theme track (yes, I hung out there for most of the day) where he talked about web design patterns, and how they apply to the WordPress theme industry. What I liked about his discussion was that, though it’s clear that design patterns are everywhere — sometimes to a comical degree — that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Instead, he said, see that as an opportunity to work within the conventions and spend your time instead to create interesting things within the expected layouts.

For instance, one example he showed was for a zoo and had a small cartoon dinosaur at the bottom of the page that had taken a big bite out of the footer background area. Clever things like that, he said, is what we miss out on when we get too fixated on making something super original across the board. Of all the slides I saw today, Reid’s are the ones I’m looking forward to grabbing and sitting down with to look through again.

(Kind of) final thoughts on Grand Rapids

Obviously there is still another day of WordCamp tomorrow, specifically a Study Hall day. I’ll be spending a bit of time, at least, chatting with folks about finding blogging inspiration. That should be fun, and not something I get to do that often. I’m also hoping to spend some time hacking away at core stuff and plugin development if time allows.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the event today. I think it can be daunting to run your first WordCamp, and the Grand Rapids organizers has pulled it off well and with style. There are small hiccups here or there that any camp will have — the wifi required some tweaking to stop it from kicking you offline every twenty minutes, for instance — but where it mattered I thought it was great.

Keep an eye out for the presentation videos as they make their way to WordPress.tv (except for mine, which I guess my mic was muted on, sad face) and make sure to get your ticket for next year’s WordCamp in Grand Rapids. These folks know how to throw a WordCamp.

The post Recap: WordCamp Grand Rapids, Day 1 appeared first on WPCandy.

Here are some ways to make the most out of WordCamp:

Don’t be afraid

Introduce yourself to people around you. There’s a chance you use one of their themes or plugins. Maybe the person next to you wrote the code for your favorite WordPress feature. They’re right next to you! Talk to them.

Do you know someone you admire in the community will be at WordCamp? Track them down! Maybe not in a weird stalkerish way, but make sure you find them and let them know that you appreciate what they do, or let them know you use their stuff. I bet it’s hard for anyone to get sick of hearing that. Don’t be intimidated!

Here’s the attendees list for WordCamp San Francisco so you’ll know who’s going.

Get out of your personal boundaries

“I’m a designer.” Or, “I’m a developer.” Or, “I’m a marketer.” So what! Check out a couple of sessions that make your head spin.

You’re probably pretty good at what you do, and there’s likely a lot to of good subject matter on that at your WordCamp. But if you’re a developer, you don’t have to stay in the development track all day. Crawl over to a design session, or better yet, a user session. Sometimes seeing what’s important to other types of people will open your eyes to how you can do your own job better.

Stay connected while you’re there (or not there)

Every WordCamp I’ve ever seen keeps a unified twitter hashtag for people to track what’s going on. A couple days before WordCamp, make sure to save the search term for the camp’s hashtag, and then keep up with it as the camp goes along. Both during and outside of official WordCamp hours, you can get the scoop on the best places to be and what’s coming up.

WordCamp San Francisco is going to be even crazier than most WordCamps. Probably close to a thousand people will be there, but there will also be hundreds or thousands of people live streaming from their homes. Last night during WP Late Night, Brad Williams mentioned he would love if there was an active IRC channel throughout the day to make people feel like they’re “there”. Great idea! Hit up #wcsf on IRC now and see how it goes throughout the weekend.

Last year, I couldn’t go to WordCamp San Francisco, so I kept up on Twitter. David Bisset was absolutely rocking the #wcsf with quotes and resources that were being mentioned. I heard that Matt Mullenweg even went looking for him to meet him. Turns out, he was on the livestream, and still very much part of the WordCamp. You can be too!

The pre/after parties

WordCamps aren’t just about sessions. One of the greatest parts of WordCamps is the opportunity to just talk to people. The pre-parties and after-parties that are both official and unofficial become the best place to do that.

At WordCamp Birmingham early this year, I got to talk to people I really respect in the WordPress community and pick their brains about business, development, design, bacon… you name it! Whether you partake in the party beverages or not, the pre and after-parties are a great place to get to know the community.

Happiness / Genius Bars

I don’t remember which is the appropriate name for WordCamps, but you probably know what they are. There’s usually a dedicated space at WordCamp where industry experts will be hanging out, ready to field your questions. You can usually talk to them about anything. So if you’re not in a particular session, or maybe during a break, hit up the bar and talk to some really smart people.

Know the schedule

WordCamps will always have a schedule available within a few days of the event. Be sure to check it out before you get there. You may want to switch tracks depending on the speaker, and it’s good to know what you plan to do ahead of time.

WordCamp San Francisco’s schedule is posted, and it’s going to be a wild one. Each talk is only about twenty minutes, and they are in blocks of two. So when you commit to a talk, you get the block of two for the hour in that room. Choose wisely, the speakers will be amazing!

Hack / dev Day

WordCamps vary in their format. But a common format is to have the main WordCamp on a Saturday and a hack day or dev day or breakout day, or whatever you want to call it, either on Friday or Sunday.

WordCamp San Francisco will have a hack day on Sunday. It will be for people to dig into Core trac tickets. If you’re capable of doing so, join in! If not, hopefully someone will be able to organize a get together of sorts for Sunday for people that don’t feel comfortable at hack day. Maybe there’s a coffee shop that can be hijacked, or a hotel lobby. But find some people to get together with on Sunday, and ship some code (or whatever you ship)!

Take Notes!

You will forget if you don’t. People are going to say awesomely informative things left and right. You’ll think you’ll remember. You won’t. Take notes on your laptop or notebook. Write down urls, names, etc. so you can go back after WordCamp and lookup what you’ve inevitably forgotten.

Get the slides and video!

Most speakers will offer up their slides on Slideshare or their websites so that people can go back ad reference them later. I’ve learned a great deal from some people’s past slides, months after an event. Be sure to be on the lookout for tweets or links to speakers’ slides. But still take notes, because sometimes slides tell you just enough to say, “YES!” and just little enough to say, “BUT, NOW WHAT?”

Follow a liveblog

When WPCandy is at an event, we try to liveblog it. We’ll definitely be live blogging San Francisco. Also, some WordCamps will have their own live blogs so you can stay in tune while you are there, or maybe just check it out later to see stuff from sessions you missed.

Have fun!

If you need any more convincing on how awesome a WordCamp can be, talk to other people that have gone. And definitely read this excellent diary of a WordCamp, by Siobhan McKeown, on her trip to WordCamp Netherlands earlier this year.

WordCamps are supposed to be fun. Some of us make our living off of WordPress. But the odds are we got there because it was our hobby first. WordCamps should be fun. They’re not just a work conference. So make sure to relax, listen, absorb, and just have a good time.

Hopefully I’ll meet some of you in San Francisco or a WordCamp near you!

The post Making the most out of WordCamp appeared first on WPCandy.

With WordPress 3.4 “Green” out in the wild, and of course our review of all the top features you want to know about (you’ve seen that, right?) now is a good time to see what our collective favorite new features are. Which new feature is the most welcome, according to you?

Vote in the poll below (just after the jump) and leave a note in the comments explaining your choice. You can pick up to two features when you vote.

The post Community Poll: What’s your favorite feature in WordPress 3.4? appeared first on WPCandy.

Today saw the release of WordPress 3.4 “Green”, the most recent version of everyone’s favorite open source publishing platform. And no matter how closely you might follow WordPress development, there seems to always be one feature or another that sneaks by and you miss it. In this feature breakdown of WordPress 3.4, hopefully I can help remedy that by pointing out all of the noteworthy features I could find.

If there’s something in particular that you find useful, let me know in the comments so we can make sure it’s included in the roundup.

Let’s dig right in.

Customize themes

Without a doubt the feature highlight of the release, the theme customizer will allow a front-end editing experience for WordPress theme options. Along with customizing things like background colors, site titles and tag lines, and header images, themes can be previewed and customized before they are activated.

From the average user’s perspective, this could end up removing some of the undue excitement that comes with finding out just what a new theme will make your site look like.

As far as taking advantage of the customizer from a developer’s perspective, I couldn’t do a better job than Otto did in his post on the topic.

Child themes in dot org and via theme installer

Child themes are now supported via the theme installer. For instance, if you’re trying to install a theme that requires a parent theme, yet you don’t have that parent theme activated, WordPress will install that theme as well so your child theme will work. No doubt this change will result in far more child themes in the official WordPress theme directory.

As an added bonus, infinite scrolling has been added to the theme page. Searching for, and browsing through available themes, is a wee bit faster now.

If you’d like to read the brainstorming on this topic, view the related ticket on Trac: #13774.

Embed tweets via oEmbed

Embedding tweets via oEmbed is now possible. Pasting the URL to a tweet onto its own line will automagically embed that tweet into your post. For many of us, I’m sure this will remove the need to use a plugin or use a shortcode or something to achieve the same result.

Speaking of which, let’s use this feature right now:

WordPress 3.4 “Green” is now available for download wpcandy.com/?p=39798 by @ryanimel

— WPCandy (@wpcandy) June 13, 2012

Neat.

Improved touch support

Touch support was much improved this release, which should make using the WordPress dashboard on mobile devices quite a bit easier. There’s a great post on the WordPress davelopment blog that talks about a good number of the touch improvements.

For developers, though, know that WordPress is now bundling the jQuery UI Touch Punch plugin that you can take advantage of within your plugins.

On a related note: the next year of WordPress will involve rethinking the experience for mobile.

/login, /dashboard, and /admin now redirect

Even though it’s a small addition, I think this might be my favorite new bit in the 3.4 release. Instead of appending /wp-admin or /wp-login.php to URLs to login you can now use these shorthands. /login will take you to the login screen and both /admin and /dashboard to the WordPress dashboard.

Nifty, right?

Also important to note: if you have a page, post, or otherwise that uses one of the names above then the redirects won’t work for you. In other words, WordPress defaults to respecting your content and your URLs.

HTML is allowed in captions

HTML support within image captions could be one of the longest-requested features to make it into a final WordPress release in a while. If you’ve ever wanted to include an author credit or other relevant link in an image’s caption, previously you would have been pretty limited. Limited in the sense that no HTML was allowed in the caption input field.

That all changes today, though. Include HTML (links or otherwise) to your heart’s content!

Admin bar scrolls to top

I linked to Eric Mann’s explanation of getting this feature added to WordPress around a week ago. After seeing the feature implemented on Google+ he worked with a few other core developers to get a similar feature into WordPress. So now, clicking the empty space in the admin bar will scroll you to the top of the page.

Clever use of empty space, don’t you think? You can view the related ticket on Trac: #18758.

Query improvements

Query improvements were introduced in 3.4 that some contributors said delivered a performance improvement of 2-3 times. Technical information aside, I think we can all agree that faster queries are excellent.

I would do a disservice to this update by attempting to explain it any further. I would recommend looking at Aaron Brazell’s breakdown on his blog or the discussion on the original trace ticket.

Updates to XML-RPC

XML-RPC is the API that allows for other applications to interact with WordPress. In short, this is the thing that allows for the WordPress apps for mobile devices to work and modify content on your site.

WordPress 3.4 introduces a brand new XML-RPC API to support things like taxonomies, custom post types, and whole bunch of other fun goodies. It should allow the clients that rely on this API to get a bit more advanced.

This is another one of those areas where I feel I’ll do it a disservice if I try and talk about it too much. I would recommend the XML-RPC Codex page or Max Cutler’s blog post on XML-RPC changes in 3.4.

Flexible header images

Before 3.4 a theme’s header image had to be a specific size (height and width). Now theme header images are more flexible, and a theme author can simply recommend the size that will work best for their theme.

For anyone who ran away from Twenty Eleven for no reason other than the header image is massive, this update should be a welcome one.

The Make UI blog has a nice rundown of taking advantage of the updated custom header and background APIs in 3.4.

Custom post types can use DFW

I actually hadn’t noticed that custom post types can’t use the distraction free writing editor. Apparently that was the case before, though it’s not now. So in WordPress 3.4, if you use custom post types you can now enjoy the distraction free writing (or DFW) editor when composing your content.

Internationalization improvements

More internationalization = more better, right? There’s a full rundown of the changes on the WordPress translator’s blog.

In brief: comma translation is now supported, single-double quote translation, and default timezones can now be overridden by translations.

Slightly more complex theme template hierarchy

Theme page templates can now be stored inside of subdirectories of theme folders. So if you are a bit of a neat freak, or you are putting together a complex theme, you can organize things a bit more than you could pre-3.4.

Performance improvements for the Recent Comments Dashboard widget

I use the Recent Comments dashboard widget constantly. It’s the first thing I look to when I pull open my WordPress dashboard, and probably the place I spend the most time clicking on a daily basis. So of course I’m happy to see that 3.4 includes performance improvements for this particular widget, especially for sites with large numbers of comments.

If you’re interested in this change you can dig into the nitty gritty via this ticket on Trac: #14222.

Publish new comments from the Edit Post screen

In earlier versions of WordPress you could respond to comments on the edit post screen (what you look at when you’re editing a post) but you couldn’t post new top level comments. One simple change in 3.4 now allows this.

Yet another simple change so you can spend more time on the WordPress dashboard. I like that.

View the related ticket on Trac: #15527

Add user autocomplete for Multisite

While this release isn’t heavy on the Multisite features, there are a couple of goodies in there for everyone using WordPress to run networks of sites. For one thing, existing user’s usernames will now autocomplete when you’re adding them from the Add New User screen.

So if you’re adding a new user to your site, and that user is already registered on another one of your network sites, adding them is a bit easier than it was before. If you can recall a part of their username or email they’ve registered with, you’re likely good to go.

Upload limit increased from 10MB to 100MB for Multisite sites

As pointed out by Andrea Rennick in Trac ticket #18831, a 10MB default limit on individual site upload totals is a bit small. This was bumped up to 100MB in core, so that if it’s something you commonly change in your Multisite setups you won’t have to do that next time.

It may seem like a small thing, but I’m always fascinated to see defaults like this change/increase over time.

The 3.4 dashboard is retina-ready

I can’t claim to have a Retina Macbook Pro at the moment (sigh) but I hear from those that do that the WordPress dashboard looks pretty good on the new display. The core team prepared for that, of course, by including assets specifically for retina displays.

To give you an idea, here’s a cropped screenshot at the full resolution on the retina display.

It’s kind of big. (There’s a slightly off gray on the right there, but I’m sure it will be cleaned up before long. Retina displays will start making those small errors a bit more obvious, I think.)

Developer Matthias Kretschmann has a post about the new retina assets, as well as information on adding retina support to your own plugins and themes (at least when it comes to dashboard menu icons).

Noteworthy articles

These are the most important new features, as far as I know. Speak your mind and tell us your favorite features in our community poll.

But hey, don’t just take my word for it. There are a number of other articles covering new features in WordPress 3.4, and how to properly take advantage of them. If you just can’t get enough:

• Crowd-sourced field guide to 3.4 for developers
• What to expect in WordPress 3.4 from Wptuts+
• Aaron Brazell’s 10 things you need to know about WordPress 3.4 (previously linked up on the blog)
• Video showing off features in WordPress 3.4 by WP101
• Smashing Magazine on 3.4 features

The post Feature Breakdown of WordPress 3.4 “Green” appeared first on WPCandy.

Is blogging journalism? Are bloggers journalists? Have you ever heard these questions, or questions like them, before? For those interested in writing and publishing, as I’m sure many of us are, these are important questions. Words like “blogger” and “journalist” are important and carry a lot of meaning.

But I think asking whether bloggers are journalists is asking the wrong sort of question. It’s mixing up ideas. Asking whether bloggers are, or can be, journalists, is like asking if those who email can be poets. See what I mean, about it being the wrong sort of question? We can’t mistake the method, the format, with the content.

Now, that said, it’s important to recognize the writing style that typifies blogs and the writing style that journalists practice. Generically speaking, blog posts aren’t concerned with sources, other people’s opinions, and the kind of ethics we wish to hold our journalists to. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t bloggers who do think and care about those things. I think there definitely are, just like there are journalists who don’t care for them so much.

So, rather than talk about what exactly makes a blogger a journalist — again, an interesting discussion for those of us involved in all of this — today I want to focus on the issue of quality. Let’s focus on the blogger that is a journalist, and about how WordPress and the community can help that person be more professional.

I would argue that blogging can, in fact, empower journalism. Rather than seeing it as a hindrance, it should be seen as an opportunity.

Blogging is iterative

It’s as easy as it could be to iterate on your writing when you’re blogging. No matter how many people you talk to before writing an article, the odds are that you’ll hear from someone, after publishing, with something to add to the story. Maybe it’s an angle you hadn’t considered, or even new information.

In contrast to most traditional journalism, blogging allows you to update an article (with the appropriate editor’s note of course). Or you can post a followup, pretty quick if you wanted to. You can also revisit topics, or continue the story in the comments. This is one of the reasons why stories can so quickly develop on blogs — there’s only as much delay between publishing as you want there to be.

Blogging is spacious

One of my pet peeves — major, major pet peeves — is when sites break up articles into multiple pages. You’ve probably seen it before: two or three thousand words, spread out so that around 800 words or so occupy each page. I’m sorry if you do that, but that practice makes me hate you.

One argument I’ve heard is that this is done to (artificially) increase pageviews for advertisements. Others have told me that they actually prefer the reading experience when a longer piece is broken up into multiple pages like that.

Those are crazy people, of course.

It perpetuates this old idea that doesn’t make sense online, the idea that space is limited. But on the web, when you’re blogging, space isn’t. Where a column in a newspaper or a magazine might only have so many inches of space and no more, blogs don’t. Bloggers should see this as an opportunity, I think, to spend even more time on a topic, and get more in depth on an issue that traditional forms of journalism might allow for.

Blogging encourages specialization

One of my favorite things lately is 5by5, a network of podcasts run by Dan Benjamin.

5by5 is so cool. Dan Benjamin has a lot of radio experience, and the ability to publish podcasts at a tremendous quality. So he has put together this network where he makes shows with other interesting people. He has a show with Merlin Mann, the 43folders/Inbox Zero/You Look Nice Today guy, called Back to Work. He has a show with John Gruber on Apple and technology. There are about a dozen active shows over there right now.

Dan sets up these really interesting shows, in large part because each one is specialized. The show’s topic and the show’s co-hosts work so well for the topic, the end result is really interesting.

So maybe your story isn’t the first one out there. That’s okay. Can it be the better story?

In the best cases, online journalism is the same way. On top of being an excellent writer and professional journalist, there are infinite opportunities to choose a specialty. A journalist can choose a topic or industry they are either more interested in or have a background in. Personally, I think this makes for more interesting work.

I also mention 5by5 because I’ve been shamelessly taking ideas from Dan’s work for the various WPCandy shows we do. So shamelessly.

Blogging is timely (sort of)

The obvious thing to say here is that blogging lets you publish fast. It’s not about printing the paper and distributing it in the morning, or even about hitting an arbitrary deadline. It’s about publishing the news as it happens. And that’s all well and good, but to be honest I’m not sure that’s necessarily the true value here.

Instead, I would say that because bloggers don’t have the time restrictions that others do, they can take more time on stories. So maybe your story isn’t the first one out there. That’s okay. Can it be the better story? Can it cover angles the first stories didn’t? Can it be a more complete story because the journalist waits to have all the facts before covering it?

Not better, just different

This isn’t all to say that blogging is the next evolution in journalism. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. But I think there are things that journalism, as a field of study, can learn from the practice of blogging.

WordPress tools for journalists

One huge advantage to WordPress as a tool for journalists is how much is available out of the gate. Let’s not forget what we’re probably all already aware of:

• WordPress is freely available and you can do what you want with it.
• Starting a WordPress blog can take five minutes or five seconds.
• Portability of content.
• Seriously free, and serious freedom.
• Proper punctuation.
• Using WordPress is just fun to do.
• Did I mention freedom?

Particularly as the writing experience continues to improves within WordPress, and it will, it becomes one place that I increasingly enjoy writing in. If you still haven’t given the Distraction Free Editor a serious try, you’re missing out.

But plugins available for WordPress can really improve things for journalists as well. There are a handful that I use, that I would highly recommend, and a few that I’ve heard about but don’t use myself.

All of the plugins I’m going to mention are available on the WordPress.org directory.

Post Revision Display

While one of the great things about WordPress, and blogging in general, is how easy it is to iterate, you don’t want to unwittingly mislead your readers. If I publish an article, then later revise it to be more accurate, it would be disingenuous to pass off the updated post as the original.

One common way to get around this issue is to post bold update notifications: “Updated on November 9”, “Editor’s Note: Why this was updated”, and so on. There are times when this is necessary, but then again other times it’s not.

Post Revision Display adds a section to the bottom of your posts when they have been updated since they were published. It offers up links to the revisions — so readers can go back and see the original, the update an hour later when you found a typo, and the update later that evening when you added an additional photo or caption. It tracks your editing after you’ve published the post, so that others can see the life-cycle of the article they’re reading.

This is one of the plugins I do use. Here’s how I implement it on WPCandy, which is a bit different than the default behavior.

Also, because this has been asked before: the revisions don’t show up in searches or anything like that, so I’m not aware of any issues with duplicate content.

Edit Flow

I’m not sure I can say enough about Edit Flow. Edit Flow is a plugin that adds a writing workflow right into WordPress. It’s made up of a series of components, my favorite of which are:

• Editorial Calendar
• Editorial Comments
• Notifications
• Custom Post Statuses

Custom statuses (shown to the right) add to the default WordPress post statuses. By default, posts in WordPress can be drafts, pending review posts, scheduled, or published. They can also be trashed, technically. Edit Flow allows you to create custom statuses, to essentially enable your own post workflow.

Editorial comments allow you to have dashboard-only, private team discussions around posts. On a post’s page you can discuss sources, the angle of the article, and changes that should be made.

Notifications will notify selected authors when updates are made to a post — like when a post is marked as needing another revision, or comments on it are made.

My favorite, though, is the editorial calendar. It displays all of your posts in a calendar format on the dashboard. You can move posts around to new days or jump straight into editing them. When it comes to reviewing yet-to-be-published posts, I choose to go to this screen long before I go to the default WordPress posts screen anymore.

We’ll talk more about workflow in a minute, but keep Edit Flow in mind. Whether you’re a solo writer or work with a team, this thing is awesome. I don’t mean to go on too long about it, but honestly it’s really five or six killer plugins in one.

After the Deadline

Since I write within the WordPress editor a lot anymore, I’ve taken a liking to After the Deadline. Currently I believe it’s only available as a part of the Jetpack plugin, but it’s a solid spellchecker and grammar checker. I also like that it points out things like common clichés, which is helpful.

It will also tell you how to properly spell clichés.

Content Audit

I’ve begun using Content Audit lately to revisit some of my older articles. Content Audit gives you a customizable set of editor’s tags (which don’t show publicly in any way) to mark content for auditing. So I have a few:

• Outdated
• Redundant
• Review SEO
• Review Style
• Trivial

I find this to be a useful way to flag content for review, both for myself and other contributors on my blog. I don’t use it as much as I could right now, but I want to.

Graceful Pull-Quotes

I used to use Javascript Pull-Quotes, which was the predecessor to this plugin. I don’t use it anymore, but I really should. Graceful Pull-Quotes does the same thing.

If you drop your own pull-quotes into your articles, you likely use something like the block quote tag. You choose a position, grab the text from your article, and put it in place. Simple enough, but the problem is you now have redundant copy on your page. In printed publications this isn’t an issue at all — print’s entirely visual in nature. But your article online is machine-readable and searchable. Some people might even be listening to the article being read to them via a machine. In those cases, it’s not the best to have text repeated like that.

Graceful Pull-Quotes gets around that by allowing you to, within the editor, signal what should be in a pull-quote. The plugin drops the selected text into a pull-quote using Javascript, so it will only be seen in the browser and not be picked up by machines. I think this is a more friendly way of adding pull-quotes to articles.

Revisionary

I haven’t used Revisionary yet, but after discovering it while working on this post I’m now really tempted to do so. Revisionary allows your authors to submit revisions of content that you can then choose to publish.

This makes a lot of sense, because once something is published you don’t want to send it back into the review queue. You don’t want it to go away — it needs to stay available, in its current form, until the reworked content can take its place. Revisionary lets you accomplish just that.

My gut is that Revisionary, combined with Content Audit and Edit Flow, could provide a pretty solid workflow all on their own.

Storify

I personally don’t use it, but I can tell you what it is. Storify describes itself as a “platform for social media storytelling”. Okay, but what does that mean? It means that you can create a timeline of sorts, based on interactions on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others.

Storify is a site and service all its own, but the WordPress plugin is pretty slick. It lets you create your “Storify” and then embed it into a post. I mention this plugin only because it seems that it could be a way to add relevant social interactions to a story or article.

WinerLinks

WinerLinks is a plugin named after Dave Winer, and it does something that he first implemented on his own blog. WinerLinks adds paragraph-level permalinks to your articles, so visitors can link to a specific paragraph of your writing.

I don’t currently use this one, but I think I’ll be implementing it shortly as well.

Postie

Postie is an advanced post-by-email plugin. Personally I would only use this to email drafts or ideas in to my WordPress site, but it can be used entirely for publishing if you want.

There are a lot of options and ways to trigger certain behaviors within emails that I think are pretty clever, but at its core it’s pretty straightforward: email your words to your site.

Simple Footnotes

Simple Footnotes is a plugin that makes adding footnotes, as you might guess, simple. It executes footnotes the way you would expect, with your having to create the numbers and add a list to the bottom of your post yourself. I don’t footnote enough that I have dug this one up, but I kind of want to footnote more often just to be able to use it.

Themes

I may disappoint you because I don’t have theme recommendations for journalists. At least, no exciting and flashy ones. I would recommend not trying to reinvent the wheel, and instead sticking to something well tested and readable. Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven, and generally minimal themes tend to be my favorites when it comes to reading.

Unless you’re very confident about the direction you’re heading in with a custom design, sticking to something that works isn’t a bad option.

Multi-author Workflow

I think thinking about workflow is important. Every practice has a path, whether you recognize it or not. The presentation this post is based on began as notes jotted down over them. Then it was outlined, drafted, timed, edited, improved, and then slides were made.

WordPress, by default, isn’t a great workflow for a multi-author site. It’s just not, and that’s okay. Most blogs are solo endeavors. Most people don’t have 10-20 people contributing posts. Most only have themselves.

I’m certainly not an expert it in or anything, but I do have some thoughts. And, there are smarter people that me that have done awesome stuff that I can tell you about.

What not to do

I like talking about my pet peeves. That’s kind of what “pet peeve” means, right? There are a couple of things that really bug me, when it comes to multi-author blogs. One, though, is when authors aren’t given proper attribution on the site. If I’m expected to spend my life minutes reading something on a website, I want to be reading a human being’s words. I can’t connect with an author called “Editorial Staff”.

Not properly crediting authors is a problem for at least two reasons:

1. I can’t get to know an author over time. Many of the people I read on a daily basis, I read on a daily basis because I’ve learned how they think and I trust their work. It’s impossible to do that with what is essentially an anonymous credit.
2. It’s likely inefficient. In many cases, when authors aren’t properly credited, they also don’t even have access to the WordPress dashboard. So they don’t have access to the heart of the editorial workflow.

Contributors should have accounts on your WordPress site. If you have enough of a team to have multiple editors, those editors should have the proper editor accounts. If you need to get detailed with controlling what your team members can do, look into Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin. It lets you tweak what each user role (contributor, author, editor, and so on) can do, and it lets you create additional roles if your situation requires it.

WPCandy Workflow

I’ve handled workflow a couple of different ways. One thing I do, for just about any site I put together where I’ll be an editor with a team, is I create a team P2 blog. If you haven’t used it before, check it out sometime: P2 theme is a theme from the folks at Automattic, and it’s basically a front-end blogging experience, similar to Twitter in some ways, that makes certain team collaborations easier.

Anyway, I pretty much always set up a subdomain with the team blog, say team.mysite.com, and then use the More Privacy Options plugin to turn off access to non-members of the site. So then I can add only the team members, and basically have a team chat blog. I’d recommend something like this, or maybe even a persistent chat room, no matter what your setup is.

I used to also use a separate instance of the P2 theme to manage stories on WPCandy. We would post links or summaries of new ideas, tag them, and then comment on them to claim them. As you can imagine, this became unwieldly pretty darn fast. There wasn’t much in terms of filtering, and it just kind of turned into a mess.

Then, we moved onto a ticketing WordPress theme. There are a couple out there, but we used FaultPress from WooThemes. So now we could submit article ideas and news stories as tickets, assign them to folks, discuss things, and then run over to the main site and write the post. This worked okay for a while, but the problem had to do with managing two separate systems. We had to create a sort of translation layer in order to make them work together. It wasn’t very elegant, and not a long term solution.

Now, and I already talked about this so I won’t again, we use Edit Flow. It gives a lot of the control we enjoyed from the ticketing system, with the familiarity that we liked from the P2 theme, and the simplicity of using it within the primary site’s own dashboard. I can manage the entire workflow, in terms of the production of articles on the site, within the site itself. I’m pretty happy about that.

The WPCandy Quarterly

This year I started a magazine project called The WPCandy Quarterly. The goal is to publish, on real paper, a magazine all about WordPress, related business, the community, and topics like this one. The workflow was interesting there, because what we ended up using was a special instance of P2 just for magazine discussion and drafting the articles. I’ll probably add Edit Flow to that mix in the future, because I like the drafting/reviewing/editing workflow it offers.

Everyone drafted their articles, and then they were worked into an app I used called Scribus. Scribus is an open source page layout application. I’ve used InDesign in the past, but I wanted a bit more options in terms of the computers I used to work on the project. Plus, once I discovered that Scribus is pretty good, and open source, I was pretty interested.

When I say everyone’s article where “worked into” the app, by that i mean I transferred them over myself and dealt with the formatting and style changes at that point. Hardly elegant, as you might imagine. So don’t do what I did, if you can avoid it.

Bangor Daily News

There are other ways to go about the web-to-print jump, much smarter than what I did. My favorite example from 2011 is the Bangor Daily News team’s workflow. William P. Davis has written about their setup, but I’ll summarize it quickly here.

They publish to the web and have a print edition as well. Their workflow involves Google Docs, WordPress, and InDesign. Their authors begin in Google Docs, where the articles are written and edited. When they’re ready to publish, the doc is put in a special folder that is then sent via XMLRPC to WordPress.

From there they have a process in place to turn the WordPress posts into InDesign Tagged Text files that InDesign can search for and import. In this way, they have a pretty seamless workflow from Google Docs to WordPress, and finally to print.

There’s a plugin for the Google Docs to WordPress half of it, and instructions for setting up the InDesign half of it on the Bangor Daily News dev blog.

Improving our craft

Somebody somewhere once said that the best way to learn something is to teach it. When you’ve learned something well enough to teach it to someone else, you know it really well yourself. I was excited to talk about this issue at WordCamp Phoenix this year because, well, it’s something I want to be better at. I want to improve my work. I know I can do better than writing “10 New Widgets to Accomplish Something Trivial”, right?

None of these tools and techniques are any good if we aren’t doing good work we can be proud of. I’m sure we all have our own opinions of the state of journalism today, but we’re also the ones that can improve it.

One thing I’ve been doing lately is assembling a list of people who I respect as journalists and as writers, no matter the niche they write in. I think one’s calibre of writing increases or decreases based on the quality of what they read.

If you’re looking for simple ways to improve your work right away, I would recommend holding yourself to some higher standards:

• Source your work, using multiple sources when you can.
• Make it clear to your readers what it is you’re writing. Differentiate an editorial from a news story; there are different expectations for each.
• Resist reblogging and taking the easy route. I’m guilty of this. Work harder on original stories. Take a minute, find the interesting story. If it’s not there, let it pass.
• Assemble an editorial policy and link it up properly.
• Disclose conflicts of interest.

Finally, don’t forget to listen to what your readers think. Are they satisfied with the level of quality you’re offering? If your readers aren’t challenging your work often enough, it might be time to seek out a new audience that will.

Further, I would recommend reading and following folks like Ben Balter and Daniel Bachhuber, who both talk a good deal about WordPress and journalism (like here and here).

WordCamp Phoenix 2012 presentation

I presented on this topic at WordCamp Phoenix in February of 2012 and then adapted it into this post.

If you’d prefer my deck on Slideshare, it’s up there too. The video from the session is up on WordPress.tv as well. (I’m going to avoid watching it though, so let me know if it was any good.)

The post Empowering journalists with WordPress appeared first on WPCandy.

Ed: Brady Nord is one of the founders of the popular WordPress theme marketplace, Mojo Themes. Brady offered us a look behind the scenes of their site, which is (of course) built on WordPress. It’s the perfect addition to our ongoing Behind the Site series.

In this series, a WordPress site’s owner walks us through what makes their site unique and how it does what it does. At this point I’ll hand it off to Brady, who wrote in-depth about their popular WordPress marketplace below.

Behind Mojo Themes

When my partner (JR – @jrfarr) and I (Brady – @bradynord) decided to build Mojo Themes we were very passionate about all things WordPress, and made the initial decision that we would build our buy and sell marketplace using WordPress everywhere possible. It was very important for us to educate people that they could use WordPress for more than just a blog.

For those not aware, we are currently on our second framework (theme). When we first launched, you could say that Mojo-Themes was a theme with some digital e-commerce abilities and not much more. We ran with that current system for a year, added a few new features along the way and quickly found out that we needed to re-develop the site with a much more robust and sustainable structure which we currently use. So basically, Mojo Themes is a WordPress theme on steroids.

Core Functionality

So basically, Mojo Themes is a WordPress theme on steroids.

To help us manage all the items within the marketplace, we use custom post types to handle all items and use taxonomies along with meta data to handle a lot of the extra information about each sellers item. This allows us to use a lot of WordPress’ built in functionality.

Now, as great of a system as WordPress is, WordPress did not really give us the best set up for our complete development needs. There really wasn’t an MVC model that would satisfy our framework needs as we saw fit. So we decided on building an MVC framework inside of the theme. This allows us to use Models, Controllers and Views to control everything that you see on the front end.

Take a look at some of our large custom applications built into our theme:

Account Center

Our account center was custom-built to offer as much functionality to our buyers and sellers as possible. Everything from the marketplace activity feed, sellers uploading and checking stats to buyers downloading items purchased.

Affiliate System

We built an in-house affiliate program that every user automatically has access to. Along with that, there’s a section within the account center for affiliates to track stats in real-time like clicks, sales and earnings.

Seller Statistics and Features

All Mojo sellers are able to view their item sales statistics and any other applicable information. We’re working hard this year to bring more stats the sellers can use, one feature is about to launch soon. Also, sellers can manage uploads and submit item updates for review like new version changes.

Mojo Social

We wanted to find a way to integrate the Mojo community and make everyone more friendly. We made many attempts at using BuddyPress to handle this functionality but could not find an effective way to integrate it into our system without editing the core code which we didn’t want to do. So in essence, we built our own version which we call Mojo Social. Mojo Social includes following users, activity streams, notifications and private messaging. (We have even thought about turning Mojo Social into a plugin for the WordPress community to freely use. ;))

Joint Forces

Easily, one of the teams proudest features in the marketplace although we’ve done a poor job promoting it since we launched it almost 2 years ago. Joint Forces is a very cool tool we custom-built into our framework which gives theme designers and theme developers the ability to team up and sell themes together. Our Joint Forces system will divide the earnings among team members and enable the team to provide quality support and updates. Look for us to really push this to a new level this year as we have a few things planned to help designers and developers really leverage this innovative platform.

Site Administration

As the marketplace grows, we’ve built a custom “Options Panel” to help the team manage the day-to-day functions of the marketplace. Inside the options panel, we have quite a few separate areas to manage the site.

• Dashboard: This gives us an eagle eye view of the marketplace. We can see detailed info like recent user sign ups, recent sales, recent deposits, top-selling items, top sellers, etc. Just to make sure things are ticking like normal. All elements are displayed using default WordPress dashboard widgets.
• Uploads: The marketplace lives and breathes with the sellers. Without them and their items we wouldn’t be around so here’s a quick shout out to them! Anyway, we actually review and deny items right in the backend of WP. We can make edits to each part of the upload, send messages to sellers about their item, set pricing and push the item live to the marketplace. In addition to reviewing new uploads we can also review all item updates and compare the new update with the previous version.
  
• Sales/Statistics: Similar to the dashboard we can see the sales flow by day, week, month, etc. and see how revenue, commissions, refunds, etc. are shaping up for the marketplace.
• Withdrawals: We also have a separate section to manage the sellers/affiliates earnings. We can complete, cancel, decline withdrawals for our users straight from here.
• Misc: There’s a few other tabs we use to manage the site, emails, refunds, etc. but they’re pretty boring so we’ll just leave it at that.
  

Important Systems and Libraries

To keep the system running faster and smoother, we have began implementing some caching systems and other libraries. We initially tried to use an out of the box plugin such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache which turned out to be a disaster. When dealing with constant uploads, downloads, account center activities, etc we were running into many errors. As of now, we use APC cache as much as possible and we are constantly finding new places where we can integrate APC caching.

WordPress Basics

• Sidebars: 3
• Menus: 3
• Custom Widgets: 2
• Popular Items
• Latest Items
• Custom Page Templates
• Full Width Page
• Anniversary Bundle
• Cyber Bundle
• Custom Post Types
• Items: 558 Total
• Custom Item Meta Boxes
  

• Custom Item Taxonomies
• Custom Options Panel

• Dashboard
• Uploads
• Sales
• Refunds
• Orders
• Withdrawals
• Settings
• Emails

Plugins

Despite the large number of really great WordPress plugins available, we try very hard to keep all the development out of plugins for control and speed purposes. Regardless, there still are some plugins that we prefer to use.

• All in One SEO Pack
• Gravity Forms
• Simple:Press (Launching a new forum with bbPress 2.0)

Hosting and CDN

We went through a lot of troubles with hosting. We started on VPS.net and eventually switched over to Amazon Web Services where we reside now. Transferring a site like Mojo-Themes and matching up all the technologies and new ways of doing things proved to be a big task. We made the switch this past fall and has proven to be a much more effective solution for us.

We use the EC2 hosting solution for our servers and use RDS for our database. We love Amazon’s services and are gradually taking advantage more and more to help keep the site functioning how it should. We also use Amazon CloudFront as a CDN to serve our assets. We are just about to launch a master/slave database environment through AWS to help handle the large database stress we constantly battle.

How we put it all together

I just want to say that we LOVE git. Git has been the best thing to happen to Mojo Themes. We operate on multiple branches and have a dev site (Top Secret) and live site. We started off by using Beanstalkapp for git hosting but eventually switched over to github.com and have never looked back since. We also use a service called deployHQ.com to deploy changes to site. In the future we hope to have our own self hosted git and deploy solutions.

What we use to build Mojo-Themes

All of us here at Mojo Themes have our own way of doing things, but for the most part we all use a lot of the same tools. Here are a list of some of the tools, scripts and apps that helps keep Mojo Themes going.

Computers

• Apple Computers.

Developing

• Git
• Git-Flow
• Textmate
• Sublime Text 2
• Vim, Nano

Support

• Tenderapp

Everyday Tools

• Terminal (bash and ssh)
• Google Chrome

Team Conversation

• Skype
• Google Hangout (Awesome!)

Online Services

• github.com
• deployhq.com
• basecamphq.com
• Google Docs
• Gmail

More about Mojo

We launched Mojo-Themes almost two years ago and had some big goals. We felt growing our Mojoness Inc. network around this industry was important and to this day we have yet to build a project with anything but WordPress at it’s core. I am very excited to announce that we just launched a new design for our Mojoness Inc site and are launching some killer products very soon. Since we built all our sites on WordPress (mojoness.com, support.mojoness.com, mojo-themes.com, wproots.com etc) we want all our users to be able to have access to each site with the same Mojoness user information. We learned a good lesson from Justin Tadlock on how we can integrate our network users to share the same user database. So be sure to keep a lookout for the official announcement and watch for some awesome new WordPress projects and products coming soon.

Behind the Scenes

All this wouldn’t be possible if it were not for our amazing team behind Mojoness.

• Brady Nord – @bradynord
• JR Farr – @jrfarr
• Nick Searle – @nsearle
• Will Ayers – @cointilt
• Mike Miller – @dr1v3n

Be featured on “Behind the Site”

Ed: Thanks for telling us about your site Brady! If you (or someone you know) have a WordPress site with an interesting story, an interesting mix of plugins, or a clever use of a theme, let us know and it just might be the next site we take a peak at behind the scenes.

In the meantime, what do you think of what the Mojo Themes team are doing, and how their site works?

The post Behind the Site: Mojo Themes, a WordPress theme marketplace appeared first on WPCandy.

Ed: Tripawds is, in all honesty, a very touching site. It is a community of bloggers and users supporting canine amputees. The site is run by Jim and Rene Nelson, and just so happens to be running on WordPress. Jim offered to share some background information on Tripawds when he saw our ongoing Behind the Site series.

In this series, a WordPress site’s owner walks us through what makes their site unique and how it does what it does. At this point I’ll hand it off to Jim, who wrote about he and his wife’s site below.

About Tripawds

Never in our wildest dreams did my wife and I ever imagine that running the largest online community for canine amputees and their people would become our full-time labor of love. But that is exactly what the little blog we started when our dog Jerry got cancer back in 2006 has become.

Home to more than 750 sites now, with over 3,000 members and more joining everyday, the Tripawds Blogs Community offers helpful resources, information and support to anyone facing amputation for their dog. We maintain free three-legged dog blogs, discussion forums, a live chat room and much more. And we couldn’t do it without WordPress multisite.

We have had our share of growing pains with the site over the years, migrating from a simple WordPress install on shared hosting to WPMU and finally to WordPress multisite, now on our own server. But the gratitude of members who find the site helpful makes it all worthwhile. I suggest anyone interested in how to grow a niche website or hearing our tips for maintaining an online community read my guest posts on ProBlogger.

Favorite Plugins

Since I’ve written an overview of all the best WordPress multisite plugins we’re using to build the Tripawds community, I’ll just review a few of my favorites in more detail here.

The Tripawds discussion forums are powered by the massively configurable yet easy to use Simple:Press Forums plugin. Simple:Press can be deployed across a multisite network, but we run forums on the main site only to provide a central location for all discussions. We use various forum topics to keep the community updated about news in our featured blogs. And the built-in Private Messaging option allows members to easily communicate directly with each other using a searchable username directory or their own Buddy List.

Any registered member can have a free Tripawds blog. By upgrading with a Supporter Subscription, however, they will have ads immediately removed from their site, get their upload quota increased, and gain access to additional plugins and premium themes. We do this all automatically using the Pro Sites plugin which allows us to easily offer enhanced features for paid subscribers.

Since the WordPress Admin Bar is only visible to logged in members, and it’s search field will only return results of the site being viewed, we’ve created a Tripawds Search page using the Global Site Search plugin that will search all blogs across the network at once.

Speaking of the Admin Bar, we have facilitated network navigation for Tripawds members with the Custom Admin Bar plugin. This lets us easily create a custom menu with our most popular resources easily accessible from any page, of any site on the network, even within a user’s dashboard.

Another way we direct members to helpful content is with the Admin Ads plugin. Instead of using it to show advertisements in a user’s dashboard, however, we display a list of quick links. This also comes in handy for notifying members about special announcements or site maintenance.

To help all our new members get started blogging, we’ve embedded various Unbranded Help Videos on the Tripawds Help page. We use a Technical Support discussion forum to provide additional help as needed.

Speaking of new bloggers, we use the Default Blog Templates plugin to configure every new site with the specific theme, widgets, blogroll links, and other settings I want them to have. We use this to help novice bloggers with info about getting started in their sidebar and links to our featured blogs in their blogroll.

One more free plugin I like that helps us keep members informed about news from the Tripawds community is the WordPress Multisite Dashboard Feed Widget. This lets us display recent posts from our featured blogs in user dashboards. It works by pulling in posts from a specified RSS feed. Anyone interested in learning how I created a feed for specific blogs should read my post about how to create a recent featured posts feed.

I could go on and on but I’ll wrap this up with bit about our theme and the role it played in improving site performance.

Long Overdue Theme Overhaul

After more than four years, the original theme we chose for Tripawds had become bloated with hacks, scripts and hard-coded widgets. After troubleshooting site performance issues we identified the theme as a primary cause for slow load times. Users were complaining and posts were getting dropped when saved to the forums. A site overhaul was long overdue.

I chose WPMU-Nelo for its custom homepage, multiple widget areas, menu support, built-in social networking bar and profile panel option; but most importantly for its clean, slim code base. For most people, Nelo’s many configuration options will suffice for designing a professional site to meet the needs of any business or organization. But I like to be difficult.

I added dynamic community user and member stats to the header, implemented random header images, and edited the profile panel which shows a log-in area to visitors or helpful dashboard links to logged in members. Anyone interested can read about how I customized the Nelo theme in more detail.

What’s Next?

The Tripawds community is just one of the WordPress sites I maintain. In the future I’ll be applying the expertise I’ve gained from growing this community to other niche markets.

Many thanks to WPCandy for choosing to take a peek behind the site at Tripawds. We’re always happy to share with the world how it’s better to hop on three legs than to limp on four.

Be featured on “Behind the Site”

Ed: Thanks for telling us about the site Jim!

If you have a WordPress site with an interesting story, an interesting mix of plugins, or a clever use of a theme, let us know and it just might be the next site we take a peak at behind the scenes.

In the meantime, what do you think of what Jim and his wife are doing at Tripawds, and how it works? Did you see any plugins in his list that you are going to check out now?

The post Behind the Site: Tripawds, a user-supported three legged dog community appeared first on WPCandy.