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.)

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?

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?

On the 29th episode of the WPCandy Podcast we talked about the sometimes poor state of plugin user interfaces. Many WordPress plugins are inconsistent with the native WordPress user interface in how they implement settings in the administration area for users.

I’m writing this guide to outline a (completely unofficial) set of best practices for implementing settings pages that is consistent and current with the native WordPress administration user interface. I’ve based these guidelines on my observations and experiences with using plugins in WordPress. They’re also totally a work in progress—if you have suggestions, feel free to add them in the comments section.

Navigation

When utilizing the Settings API it is important to place the link to your plugin’s settings page appropriately, otherwise a user with even a moderate amount of plugins installed can get confused about where each settings page is.

As a general rule of thumb, unless your plugin adds significant functionality to WordPress, it should sit as a secondary item under the general “Settings” panel. If you aren’t sure what significant functionality means, ask yourself if your settings page has multiple pages and/or includes options to manage or view content that a user will need to navigate to often. These are only guidelines, of course, and answering “yes” to any of these questions does not mean that your plugin needs its own top-level entry.

Proper placement of navigation.

Above you can see two plugins that following this guideline correctly. The form plugin adds a new type of content, with settings to view and manage all that content. The plugin appropriately take a place as a top-level menu item. The caching plugin’s developer correctly determined that the page would not be accessed often enough to call for a top-level item.

If you do choose to include your plugin’s settings as a top-level menu item, you should consider where in the list it will go. The side panel is loosely divided into two sections: content management (top) and settings (bottom.) Where you put your panel should depend on what category it falls under. Placement within these sections is at the plugin author’s discretion, though it is probably best not to place your panel in a spot that disrupts the location of commonly used panels such as the Posts Screen. This can mean placing the panel above or below such items, depending on what section you’re in and what you’re trying to avoid.

Improper use of colored icons

When setting up your admin menu icon, keep in mind:

• All icons should stay monochromatic gray until the user hovers over the panel. This is easily the most overlooked design convention of the side panel. Being the only colorful spot on the sidebar draws undue attention to your settings panel and distracts users.
• If you choose to display a colorized version of your icon on hover, try to use the same color palette that the other icons do. Use a color picker to find the hex codes in use on the menu.
• Try to use an icon that resembles the feel of the other icons. Please see the aforementioned form plugin to see this in action. If you can’t do this, it might be helpful to choose one of the default icons that is closest to what your plugin does.

Tertiary Tabs

If your plugin is complex enough to call for options spanning multiple pages but does not meet the criteria for creating a top-level panel, you should create a tabbed navigation on the settings page itself. This is a native WordPress user interface element that you can see in use on the Themes Screen. The developer of the aforementioned caching plugin has used this method correctly on his settings page, albeit with one abnormality.

Tabbed navigation

He has placed the title of the settings page above the tabbed navigation, as opposed to the left of it. This is acceptable in cases (and probably this case) where the title and tabs might be too wide and create a horizontal scroll bar for users on smaller screens. However, best practice is to put the heading (with an icon/logo) of the settings page to the left of the tabs. Below is the general markup of the tabbed navigation with the heading added in its correct place.

<h2 class="nav-tab-wrapper">
	Plugin Settings
	<a href="#" class="nav-tab nav-tab-active">Tab 1</a>
	<a href="#" class="nav-tab">Tab 2</a>
</h2>

Toolbar

The bar at the top of WordPress is a relatively new feature (a new form since 3.3, actually) meant to provide shortcuts to common actions in the admin area. It encourages plugin authors  to take advantage of this feature as a means of improving their plugin’s usability.

If you do choose to add an action to the bar, make sure that it is one that really belongs there. For instance, the author of the aforementioned cache plugin added an action to clear the cache to the admin bar in his latest update. This is easily the most common reason people navigate to his settings page and he saved people a bit of time. Do not assume that your plugins needs an entry on this bar, and please don’t add most of your plugin’s functionality to this bar.

If you believe you’ll have a few of these actions, create a drop down menu.

Dashboard Widgets

The dashboard’s purpose is to give users a quick look into important information on their WordPress installation. It is not meant as a way for you to advertise your services to users or publish a news feed from your site that is only tangentially related to the plugin itself. Although dashboard widgets are easily hidden and rearranged, not every user has the technical skill to do so. Please consider heavily whether or not your plugin really needs a dashboard widget before creating one. Another idea is to have the widget be opt-in, so that only users who explicitly want it have it.

If you decide to create a dashboard widget, the colors and styles should be consistent with the rest of the WordPress admin UI. The widget should attempt to display all pertinent information in the most efficient space possible. As usual, try to look at the standard widgets to get a feel for how yours should look.

Design of Settings Page

It should go without saying that the design of a settings page is extremely important to a plugin’s usability. While inventing interesting and unique interfaces might be a little much to ask of plugin developers, it is possible for every plugin to at least include a competent user interface by following a few guidelines.

Options page that is inconsistent with admin UI.

In general, keep this tips in mind for your settings pages:

• Make your page free of any custom elements that clash with the native WordPress administration UI.
• Infer structure of pages from WordPress core settings page designs. Be on the lookout for updates in this UI with each major version release.
• Use native WordPress IDs and classes for form elements. Not doing this is the number one way to have a bad settings page.
• Try to consider real use case scenarios when laying out the options. Not every single thing has to be changeable or customizable.

That’s it!

Still with me? Excellent. This completes a basic primer of plugin user interfaces. If you like the guidelines, be sure to check every plugin you submit against them and hopefully we’ll be on our way to a better WordPress experience for everybody.

Do you have any tips for plugin developers that aren’t listed above? Have you run into any inconsistent UI practices that are worth warning against?

Another 365 days have gone by, which means it’s time again for WPCandy’s Year in Review. Crazy, believe me, I know.

If you’re the type of person who enjoys stats and traffic numbers, this post is basically designed just for you. Grab a cup of coffee (or your beverage of choice) and reflect a bit on the last year at WPCandy.com with me.

Traffic statistics

WPCandy grew a good deal in 2011, in numbers but more importantly in its place in the community. I think I can confidently say, at this point, that WPCandy is an important site to follow for many members of the WordPress community.

That said, numbers and trends are still fun to look at. Let’s start with the big numbers for the year.

In 2011 there were nearly two million pageviews at WPCandy, and around 547,000 unique visitors. Looking at the chart above, I’d say March through June were our most active numbers for the year. The summer wasn’t bad either, but both the beginning and the end of the year weren’t quite as impressive.

For those interested in browser stats: 38.03% of visitors using Firefox, 35.6% Chrome, 14.15% Safari, 5.9% using IE, 3.1% “Mozilla Compatible Agent”, 1.67% Opera.

Comparing these 2011 numbers to 2010 is a bit difficult, since I only implemented Google Analytics halfway through 2010 (before that the site was tracked using Mint). So let’s look at some numbers in December 2010 compared to those same numbers in December 2011.

Content statistics

We also published a lot of content in 2011. Altogether, 1,031 posts were published on WPCandy, 598 of which were categorized as news. I authored 773 of all published posts in WPCandy, and the other 258 were handled by the rest of the team (more on that below).

But it’s not all about the quantity of posts, it’s about the community and the interaction. Approximately 8,000 comments were made by our community in 2011, which is kind of a staggering number. That’s around eight comments per post, or over six hundred every month. One of my goals in December of 2010 was to see over six hundred comments in a month, so I’d say that one was achieved with flying colors.

The most popular pages on the site in WPCandy weren’t all created and published in 2011. There are still a few posts from the back archives, and some published in late 2010, that amounted to quite a bit in 2011. If I keep the list to just what was published in 2011 (and skip the homepage) the list looks like this:

1. Our tutorial section
2. Our themes tag
3. WPCandy Pros
4. How to make your own WordPress functionality plugin
5. The future of WordPress themes in 2011
6. Collection of retro and vintage themes
7. Is Tumblr the new WordPress?
8. The WPCandy Forum
9. How to find WordPress themes
10. A Hypercritical Analysis of $35 Themes

The popularity of our tutorials on this list surprised me a bit, to be honest. It’s one of the sections that I’ll be spending more time developing in 2012.

I was also very pleased to see Pros so high on that list, since its launch was one of the site’s major milestones in 2011 (see below for more). I’m very excited to grow that particular part of the site as well.

Lastly, I’m excited to see two editorials on that list, and in particular that those editorials were from members of the WordPress community and not just this schlub (read: me). I plan on working harder to bring more editorials to WPCandy this year as well.

Milestones in 2011

When focused on the day to day tasks that come with running the site and planning out each week’s content, sometimes it can be easy to overlook just what the site has accomplished in the last year.

In January of 2011 I launched the Powered By system, which stuck around for more than half the year. It helped me to make the transition to working on WPCandy full time, and allowed for a number of the fun projects done in the first half of the year. Powered By, like many great projects, eventually evolved into something even stronger (see below).

Theme Madness 2011 in the spring was a lot of fun, and I think introduced folks to a lot of theme shops they didn’t know about before. You can bet that this one will be coming back to WPCandy this spring, and in a big way.

WPCandy Pros launched over the summer of 2011, and now lists hundreds of WordPress professionals, of various skills and rates, from all over the world.

In September Pressed Ads launched as the spiritual successor (at least in part) to the Powered By system. I explained the transition in the original launch post, but it’s safe to say that Pressed Ads offers a lot more room for growth, and opportunity for others to become a part of the network. Pressed Ads became particularly exciting in November when other WordPress-centric and developer blogs started coming on board. I love that Pressed Ads not only works for WPCandy, but is paying others in the WordPress community to blog about WordPress.

A couple of new shows popped up on the site, and have really found their stride. The Sweet Plugin is my solo plugin lovefest, and First Taste has been a fun way to test out new commercial WordPress products. I’m looking forward to building up the other video ideas I and the WPCandy team have in 2012.

The WPCandy Team in 2011

Speaking of the WPCandy team, I’m very proud of the team that’s begun to come together around this site. The first half of 2011, personally, I was working on (aside from making a cool site for all of you) making WPCandy sustainable for myself. In the second half of 2011, though, I sought to make WPCandy work for a few other people.

2011 saw a slew of awesome people contributing posts to WPCandy.

• Brian Krogsgard wrote a slew of posts in 2011, and though he now has a (proper WordPress) full time job, he still finds time to contribute now and then. He also pops in for podcasts and First Taste episodes, which is great.
• Justin Rouch has become a solid and dependable author here at the site, and is one of the few people that blog on WPCandy who I’ve met in person more than once or twice. It’s like we have a special bond, he and I. And no, you can’t have any part of it. The bond is ours.
• Mark McWilliams is helpful all over the place at WPCandy, not only when it comes to writing up posts. He also enjoys pushing me a bit when it comes to bugs around the site and new features, which I always need more of.
• Daniel Immke has joined the site not only as an author but as a member of the WPCandy Podcast, starting somewhere between the fall and the winter of 2011. Oh, and he also does that goading thing Mark does really well too. Now that I think about it, I might have my quote of goaders on the team.
• Kelvin Glover has been around as a new intern contributor for the last couple of months, and I’m very excited to see him getting more involved in the WordPress community this way.
• Also important in 2011 were friends of mine that did a really great job writing for the site in those first few launch months. Justin Vela, Aaron Kugler, and Eric Lash were a huge help writing posts both in 2010 and the beginning of 2011.
• I don’t want to forget to mention Jonathan Dingman, who jumped on board right at the end of 2011. Enjoy a tiny mention on this list, Jonathan, and likely a much bigger mention at the end of 2012.

Members of the community also stepped up to contribute a post here or there. Eric Weiss sent in a few reviews, and Matt Cohen contributed some killer tutorials as well. Then there were those that wrote up editorials or participated in the WordPress Workspace series—a big thanks to everyone who did that too.

Now we aren’t quite to the point of bringing anyone on full time yet, but it’s on the horizon. Yikes, can you imagine what this ragtag group would pull off with that much time on their hands? It’s probably best we avoid it altogether.

Oh, and before I forget: if you’d like to join the team at WPCandy in one capacity or another, please do get in touch. I’d love to chat with you.

Looking ahead to 2012

I have a number of plans and goals set for 2012. It’s going to be the biggest year at WPCandy yet. I won’t share everything, because where’s the fun in that? But there are a few items worth mentioning.

What we do write and produce here—whether it’s news, reviews, the podcast, or various video productions—will improve in quality. That’s something I’m particularly excited about this year. Specifically I’d like to see reviews, features, and editorials happening with a greater frequency that in 2011.

Then of course there are the various projects we have underway here, but plans for those might be better left to their own posts. In short, the plan is to get much bigger and much, much better.

Phew, that was both exhilarating and exhausting to go through. I hope you enjoyed it a little bit, assuming you made it through the whole post. Thanks to all of you for reading the site and for trying out all the projects and ideas that we try out here. I love doing what I do, and I really am thankful for all of you for allowing me to.

But I’m done talking now: how was your 2011?

With a new version of WordPress out and about, one might wonder just what’s new under the hood. Wonder no longer dear friend, because in this post I’m going to walk you through everything about WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” that we’re aware of. Before you know it you’ll be the coolest kid on your block.

You know, assuming relative coolness where you live is decided  by how much you know about the latest version of WordPress. In which case you might already be the coolest kid there. So. Yeah.

The real fun starts after the jump.

Welcome screen

Upon installing a new version of WordPress you’ll now be greeted by the updated welcome screen. It includes a “What’s New” section, a credits tab, and the WordPress freedoms. Odds are you landed on a page like the one below when you upgraded your copy of WordPress to 3.3.

WordPress 3.3 Welcome Screen Gallery

For a bit more about the credits screen in 3.3, see Andrew Nacin’s post on the topic.

New installs will also see a welcome screen on their dashboards prompting various setup tasks.

Feature pointers

In addition to “What’s New” in the upgrade welcome screen above, feature pointers are in play in WordPress 3.3 to show you what’s been added to the latest release. In this case a pointer popped up for me to tell me about the new toolbar (see below).

For now the pointers are only available for use by the WordPress core. Technically you can fish out the code and pull it off on your own, but not using public functions supported by core. This is the case of a neat feature that themes and plugins should just wait to use until (likely) WordPress 3.4.

Improved contextual help

I’m a big fan of contextual help myself, and think you should be too. The Help tab saw a redesign in 3.3, going from a simple space for text to sit to a three column organized help area.

For a bit of comparison, this is what the contextual help used to look like:

If you haven’t clicked around in the help section of WordPress pages before, give it a try. There’s helpful stuff in there for you and, assuming you have them, your clients.

Media drag and drop uploader

Easily one of the biggest “wow” moments you’ll have using WordPress 3.3 will be the moment you drag and drop a bunch of files into the new uploader. Instead of selecting the files you want to upload from a file window, whether in a post or via the Media navigation, you can simply drag them from your desktop over into the browser and, well, poof them into your site:

Am I the only one with the urge to drag in lots of files now?

Don’t worry, if for some reason you need to upload the old way, that hasn’t gone anywhere. Just select the browser uploader if you’d like to upload things the old-fashioned way.

Flyout Dashboard menus

For a while now (since WordPress 2.7) WordPress has used accordion menus in its Dashboard. As of 3.3 that changes; flyouts now rule supreme.

Billed as “one click to any screen”, I’ll admit that at first I really didn’t like the idea of flyouts at all. I wasn’t convinced that hovering and waiting would get me someplace faster than clicking an accordion menu open and clicking again. However, after using it a bit, I think I’ll end up liking this new dashboard menu even more.

I’d venture to bet, though, that this and the new toolbar (see below) will be the two things that take the most time to get used to.

Admin Bar + Admin Header = Toolbar

The admin bar and the admin header have been replaced by the new toolbar, which acts as a persistent header on the front and back-end of WordPress sites. It reduces clutter in the header and cleans up the default links a bit with icons.

For some comparison, this is what 3.2′s admin bar looked like (new on the top and old on the bottom):

The new toolbar is darker and sleeker, which I like a lot. Also, you should update your WordPress Lexicon (because everyone has one, right?) to specify that this is now the Toolbar, and not the Admin Bar.

Responsive design (mostly), iPad optimized

The WordPress Dashboard isn’t yet fully responsive, though it’s on the right track. Certain screens will be optimized at various sizes, in particular on iPads and other tablets. I haven’t toyed with this one yet on the iPad yet, but will soon.

Improved co-editing

This might not apply to everyone, but those of us who have worked on multi-author blogs at all will know the feeling of this dialog (image borrowed from the outstanding 3.3 launch video):

That’s just the worst, right? Technically it’s the best, as long as it’s accurate. Previously WordPress was a bit generous with the window of time that it determined someone else was editing a post. Now that window is much tighter and once someone stops editing a post—you guessed it—that nag is immediately gone.

I’m excited for this one, and hope it results in happier co-editing situations in the future.

Tumblr importer

There’s no question about it: people use Tumblr. Even more accurately, a lot of people use Tumblr. To enable easy migration from Tumblr to WordPress, 3.3 also includes a Tumblr importer.

Not much more to say on this one. If you want to use WordPress but currently use Tumblr, you’re covered.

New wp_editor API

This one’s really only for developers, but it’s a powerful one: wp_editor will now allow more than one instance of the WYSIWYG editor on a screen at one time. There’s a growing amount of information about this in the codex, but in short: you can use the standard WordPress WYSIWYG editor anywhere within the admin that you’d like to.

jQuery version 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.16

Lovers of jQuery will no doubt also love the inclusion of updated versions of jQuery and jQuery UI in WordPress 3.3. This is another one for developers, but worth knowing either way.

Improved permalinks

Remember being instructed not to use only slugs (or post names) as your WordPress permalinks? Remember hearing that doing so could cause performance issues on your sites?

Now, as of 3.3, there is no performance hit for using the post name permalink structure. It’s so solid, in fact, that post name permalinks are now one of the recommended structures in the permalink settings screen. How cool is that?

We talked about this on the blog and the WPCandy Podcast back when it was first introduced, and it’s just as interesting now that it’s released.

Widgets are a bit smarter

Widgets get a bit brighter in 3.3. Now switching from a theme doesn’t mean your widget layout is lost forever. If you decide to switch back to that theme your widgets will return to their old position, saving you the time of reconstructing your old setup. Nifty, right?

Widgets aren’t yet perfect, but they’re getting closer.

is_main_query() introduced

This one is certainly only for the developers out there. The is_main_query() function will now let you hook into only the primary WP_Query object and modify it, leaving secondary queries alone.

For anyone who’s ever wanted to do this before, well, you know who you are. And you know this one is mighty useful.

Post formats join the party

Before 3.3 post formats couldn’t be edited using the quick edit or bulk edit options on the edit.php screen. Now those options are available, which will make editing those format posts a bit faster.

All plugins on plugins.php

This, if I had to guess, is a bit of a subliminal issue that you might not even realize you’ve run into before. Before 3.3 the plugins.php page (that lists all of your site’s plugins) would save its state and display for you, each time you loaded it, the last state you were viewing when you left it. That state might be Active Plugins or Inactive Plugins, or even Recently Active plugins. This would result (for me at least, and it seems others) in needing to click All each time I visited the plugins.php page.

As of 3.3 that page will always default to listing all plugins, with the option to change state still available of course. Don’t you love it when those tough-to-articulate pains go away?

Network Enable link after installing themes

After installing a theme in the network admin the user will now be greeted with an option to enable the theme across the network. It’s a small thing, but for those managing networks and adding themes it’s a handy new shortcut to have.

Noteworthy plugins release for WordPress 3.3

It hasn’t even been a day since 3.3 was released, but already plugins are popping up that developers designed to work specifically with new features introduced. I’ll be keeping and updating the list below so that you’ll know what should be on your radar.

So far these are the plugins I’ve heard about:

• Andrew Nacin released the Hide Welcome Panel for Multisite to, well, hide the welcome panel for multisite users. I love when plugins tell you what they do right on the lid.
• Matt Cohen of WooThemes crafted a plugin just for WordPress 3.3 that adds a simple theme switcher to the new toolbar. It’s called Matty Theme Quickswitch.
• Dominik Schilling has released Admin Bar Backend Search, which lets you search various aspects of the WordPress Dashboard right from the new 3.3 toolbar.

That’s all I know about now. If you or a friend has made a 3.3-specific plugin, let me know in the comments below.

Additional WordPress 3.3 links

This week has already resulted in a good deal of WordPress 3.3 coverage, and odds are the next few days will bring even more. If you’re interested in digging in further, I recommend the following links:

• Full list of features and changes to WordPress in 3.3
• The WordPress 3.3 Launch Video
• Known plugin compatibility and dev issues with WordPress 3.3
• Listen to our WordPress 3.3 playlist on Spotify
• First Taste: WordPress 3.3 (coming shortly)

That does it for today’s in-depth look at WordPress 3.3, but be sure to check back. With all of this on the table, I’m curious to know: was there one feature (or features) in particular that made you the most eager to upgrade to 3.3?

I’m a big fan of the products out of byproducts phillosophy. In other words, pay attention to the sometimes hidden, but very real, value in the tools you just so happen to create when working.

For example: in order to cover WordPress community news the way we do at WPCandy, we’ve developed quite a list of sources. Some prove to create news with every post they publish, and others take more time to release their gems. But every single source is necessary in order to keep a finger on the pulse of the WordPress community (so to speak).

That’s one of our byproducts, and that’s what this post is all about. Just after the jump I’ve included our exhaustive (and categorized) list of sources that I use every day at WPCandy. Each categorized section includes a link to an OPML file so you can subscribe to these blogs easily if you’d like to.

If you see a site that is missing from our list, by all means make note of it in the comments. We’ll be updating the list here and the OPML files every now and then, to hopefully maintain the most exhaustive WordPress news source list online.

Commercial WordPress services (17 RSS feeds)

This category is just for those services built around WordPress.

• After the Deadline blog
• Akismet blog
• IntenseDebate blog
• ManageWP blog
• Pagely blog
• Ping-O-Matic blog
• Plinky blog
• Polldaddy blog
• Sucuri blog
• VideoPress blog
• WebDesign.com blog
• WP Design Coach blog
• WordPress.com Publisher blog
• WordPress.com news blog
• WPEngine blog
• WPWebHost blog
• ZippyKid blog

Download the OPML file for commercial service blogs.

Community blogs (51 RSS feeds)

This one is a larger list because folks like starting blogs about WordPress. Who can blame them, right?

• Blog Oh Blog, um, blog
• Blog Perfume blog
• Cats Who Code blog
• Club WordPress blog
• Daily Plugin blog
• DevPress blog
• Digging into WordPress blog
• Omninoggin blog
• PixoPoint blog
• Pro Blog Design blog
• ThemeShaper blog
• TechCrunch blog (WordPress tag)
• The WordPress Guy blog
• Theme Lab blog
• Themegrounds blog
• Themergency blog
• Theme.fm blog
• Weblog Tools Collection blog
• Weblog Tools Collection forum
• WordPress on Reddit
• WPArena blog
• WPBeginner blog
• WP for Ministry blog
• WP Hacks blog
• WP Honors blog
• WPTavern blog
• WPTavern forum
• WP Theming blog
• WP Vibe blog
• WPMU.org blog
• WP Addict blog
• WP Dude blog
• WP Engineer blog
• WP Garage blog
• WP Mayor blog
• WP Modder blog
• WP Mods blog
• WP Toy blog
• WPazo blog
• WPBlogger blog
• WPCanada blog
• WPCandy blog
• wpCanyon blog
• WPCookies blog
• WPKube blog
• WPLift blog
• WPLover blog
• WP Recipes blog
• WP Roots blog
• WPShout blog
• wpTuts+ blog

Download the OPML file for community blogs.

Official sources (15 RSS feeds)

These “official” sources are the various WordPress blogs, core project blogs, and related sources that tend to carry official news.

• bbPress blog
• BuddyPress development blog
• BuddyPress blog
• GlotPress blog
• Gravatar blog
• Make WordPress Themes blog
• Make WordPress UI blog
• WordPress Development blog
• WordPress for Android blog
• WordPress for BlackBerry blog
• WordPress for iOS blog
• WordPress for Nokia blog
• WordPress Foundation blog
• WordPress News blog
• WordPress.tv

Download the OPML file for official blogs.

WordPress people (37 RSS feeds)

The most fun on the list, really. The people make the community, the blogs these people make are a good time.

• Adii Pienaar’s blog
• Alex King’s blog
• Alex Shiels’ blog
• Anthony Cole’s blog
• Austin Passy’s blog
• Benjamin Bradley’s blog
• Ben Gillbanks’ blog
• David Peralty’s blog
• Brian Krogsgard’s blog
• Chris Pearson’s blog
• Coen Jacobs’ blog
• Cory Miller’s blog
• Darren Hoyt’s blog
• Donncha O Caoimh’s blog
• Gautam Gupta’s blog
• James Koster’s blog
• Joost de Valk’s blog
• John P Bloch’s blog
• Justin Kopepasah’s blog
• Justin Tadlock’s blog
• Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s blog
• Lorelle’s blog
• Matt Mullenweg’s blog
• Michael Kuhlmann’s blog
• Mike Jolley’s blog
• Nathan Rice’s blog
• Ozh Richard’s blog
• Pete Mall’s blog
• Ptah Dunbar’s blog
• R. Bhavesh’s blog
• Ron and Andrea Rennick’s blog
• Ryan Duff’s blog
• Scribu’s blog
• Sam Bauers’ blog
• Tom McFarlin’s blog
• Trent Lapinski’s blog
• Westi’s blog

Download the OPML file for WordPress people blogs.

Plugin blogs (10 RSS feeds)

They aren’t as prevalent as blogs for themes and theme shops (see below), but every now and then a developer will start up a blog tracking the development of a plugin.

• Achievements for BuddyPress blog
• Artsy Editor blog
• Buddy Dev blog
• CollabPress blog
• GetShopped blog
• Gravity Forms blog
• Organize Series blog
• Shopp blog
• VaultPress blog
• WP Symposium blog

Download the OPML file for plugin blogs.

Marketplaces (8 RSS feeds)

There are only a few that specialize, or offer a heavy focus on, WordPress themes and/or plugins.

• Envato Notes blog
• MOJO Themes blog
• MOJO Themes’ themes
• ThemeForest themes
• ThemeGarden blog
• ThemeGarden themes
• WonderThemes blog
• WPPlugins blog

Download the OPML file for WordPress marketplace blogs.

Theme shops (70 RSS feeds)

I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is every single GPL theme shop out there (per our editorial policy, that’s what we choose to cover), but it’s likely pretty close.

• Aloha Themes’ blog
• Antisocial Media’s blog
• Band Themer’s blog
• Bavotasan’s blog
• Blog Oh Blog’s…er, blog
• BuddyBoss’ blog
• BuddyDress’ blog
• Catalyst Themes’ blog
• ComicPress’ blog
• Crowd Favorite’s blog
• CyberChimps blog
• Dev4Press blog
• Elegant Themes blog
• FlexiThemes blog
• Furu Themes blog
• Gabfire Themes blog
• Gabfire web design blog
• Gorilla Themes blog
• Graph Paper Press blog
• Headway blog
• iThemes blog
• KreativeThemes blog
• Mint Themes blog
• NattyWP blog
• NeueThemes blog
• New2WP blog
• Obox blog
• Organized Themes blog
• Photocrati blog
• Organic Themes blog
• Press Coders blog
• Press75 blog
• PressWork blog
• PriMoThemes blog
• Pro Theme Design blog
• RichWP blog
• Rockable Themes blog
• RoloPress blog
• Solostream blog
• Standard Theme blog
• Storefront Themes blog
• StudioPress blog
• Templatic blog
• The Theme Foundry blog
• Theme Junkie blog
• Theme Wars blog
• Theme Weaver blog
• ThemeBaker blog
• ThemeFuse blog
• ThemeJam blog
• Themeopoly blog
• Themes Kingdom blog
• ThemeShift blog
• ThemeWarrior
• Themify blog
• Thesis blog
• Tokokoo blog
• UpThemes blog
• WhoaThemes blog
• Win with WordPress blog
• Wobzy blog
• WooThemes blog
• WordPress.org theme feed
• WP Yuzu blog
• WPArcade blog
• WPCharity blog
• WPShower blog
• WPZoom blog
• Xtreme Theme blog

Download the OPML file for WordPress theme shop blogs.

WordCamp blogs (32 RSS feeds)

This list is modified every time a new WordCamp starts up, which seems to be every couple of weeks or so. Very soon we’ll need to start pruning, as 2011 blogs go quiet and new 2012 blogs start up.

• WordCamp Albuquerque
• WordCamp Atlanta
• WordCamp Austin
• WordCamp Bucharest
• WordCamp Caguas
• WordCamp Cape Town
• WordCamp Chicago
• WordCamp Denmark
• WordCamp Detroit
• WordCamp Gold Coast
• WordCamp Ireland
• WordCamp Jerusalem
• WordCamp Kansas City
• WordCamp Kenya
• WordCamp Kobe
• WordCamp LA
• WordCamp Lisboa
• WordCamp Louisville
• WordCamp Melbourne
• WordCamp Miami
• WordCamp Minneapolis
• WordCamp Montreal
• WordCamp Philly
• WordCamp Phoenix
• WordCamp Portland
• WordCamp Richmond
• WordCamp Salt Lake City
• WordCamp San Diego
• WordCamp Sevilla
• WordCamp Toronto
• WordCamp Vegas

Download the OPML file for WordCamp blogs.

Everything (240 RSS feeds)

If you’re crazy enough to want to subscribe to everything here, by all means go for it. It might be simpler to catch the big news on WPCandy, but hey more power to you if you want it straight from the hose.

Download the OPML file for all the blogs WPCandy tracks.

Anything worth adding?

If you see a blog feed or something important that is missing above, drop a note in the comments — even if it’s your own blog. This list will be periodically updated to reflect the additions.

How do you track WordPress news? Do you rely on WPCandy for any of your daily reading, or do you prefer to subscribe to a number of the sources listed above?

We have no shortage of interesting and unique sites in our Behind the Site series. Today’s is no different. The site we will be hearing more about today is called Adaptistration, and it’s a blog run by Drew McManus all about the orchestra business.

And naturally it’s running on WordPress.

Drew will tell us a little bit more about the site and what plugins he is running just after the jump. If you see something interesting, or if you’d like to submit your own site for inclusion in a future installment of Behind the Site, leave a note in the comments.

I’ll hand the mic over to Drew for the rest of the post.

About Adaptistration

I recently updated to the WooThemes Canvas theme and made some moderate customizations, such as inserting the search field into the top navigation bar. The blog (about the orchestra business) is the parent site of a network of sites, each focusing on different specialty areas (all of which run on WordPress):

• A jobs board (free to post and apply, something my field didn’t offer).
• A premium subscription site which offers access to compensation report data and website reviews for the orchestra field.
• A weekly cartoon site featuring a comic strip about orchestra life.
• A resource site for an annual audience development effort.

I have customized a few areas of the site using plugins as well.

The contact page includes the ability to upload a file. This is especially useful for groups wanting to send press release oriented content, complete with the explanatory options you see in the image on the right. This is built using the Gravity Forms plugin.

The index is specialized and derived from tags using the Taxonomy List Shortcode plugin.

The site also has sortable data tables for the compensation report data (example). It’s using WP-Table Reloaded with an add-on plugin written by the author to incorporate percent signs and currency symbols into the sortable functionality. He’s a great guy for doing that!

Plugins on Adaptistration

The full plugin list includes:

• Akismet
• Audio Player
• Currency Values in Tables (extension for WP-Table Reloaded)
• Custom Widget Area for WordPress – I love this one as it has universal settings for existing WordPress templates like single posts, archives, etc.
• Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite Support
• Gravity Forms
• Lightbox Evolution
• Pie Register
• RSS News widget – This is a great plugin as I had some unusual sidebar RSS display requirements and this plugin made all of it point-and-click-here-stupid easy.
• SexyBookmarks by Shareaholic
• Styles with Shortcodes for WordPress
• SWS: CSS Tooltip add-on – Very handy as I use a lot of acronyms.
• Taxonomy List Shortcode
• TweetMeme Retweet Button
• W3 Total Cache
• WP-Optimize
• WP-Polls
• WP-reCAPTCHA
• WP-Table Reloaded

More about the site

I’ve been writing this blog since 2003 and went from being an author on a blog aggregate (artsjournal.com) to running the site and extended network myself in 2007. Over that time it moved across four different publishing platforms: Web Crimson, Movable Type, Typepad, and then WordPress. Cleaning up content has been an ongoing chore.

Although it isn’t plugin related, I do use all of the characters created by Ioannis Kounadeas (licensed of course!) to help brand the site in the featured image area.

Be featured on “Behind the Site”

Thanks for telling us about the site Drew!

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

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

Behind the Site is easily one of the most popular series on WPCandy. In each edition of Behind the Site, we welcome a new guest author to the site to walk us through their WordPress site, what they use to power it, and hear a bit about their overall WordPress technique.

This week’s Behind the Site is wpMail.me, a weekly email newsletter that collects and sends out all sorts of WordPress articles each week. Cristian Antohe is the one behind wpMail.me, and will take things from this point on to tell us more about the site.

About wpMail.me

I’ve started wpMail.me after learning about JavascriptWeekly, which is a free, once–weekly e-mail round-up of JavaScript news and articles.

I realized that I could launch wpMail.me in a ridiculous short amount of time, so it looked like a really cool side project. It actually took me just one day to purchase the domain, create a small HTML template and set up MailChimp.

The articles that are featured on each weekly newsletter are manually curated, mostly from RSS feeds, Twitter and Topsy.com. Also since a lot of articles are basically covering the same thing (not a bad thing mind you) I try to feature the source or the most relevant article. I admit it’s a subjective process but I’m fine with that.

The Theme

After the initial launch I wanted to stretch my self a little and improve the initial design. The reason behind it was simple: a cool looking design will make subscribers feel positive about it. Also the new design increased the conversion of new subscribers and I managed to get it featured on a lot of CSS galleries which in turn sent a little bit of traffic towards the site.

The theme itself started as Twenty Ten, then I modified it to support my design.

Core functionality

The main reason I moved from a basic HTML template to WordPress was to automate as much of the creation of the weekly newsletter as possible. Initially the newsletter was done using MailChimp’s visual editor, which is fine if you’re sending a simple newsletter once a month, but it would have taken me hours to finalize just one issue.

To solve this problem I’ve user the cool Advanced Custom Fields with the $25 Repeater Field addon. It lets me create the newsletter’s sections and easily add article titles, URLs and descriptions.

Once all the articles are saved we’re using a custom template for the newsletter custom post type “Newsletter,” where we’re pulling all the information for display on our own archive.

This template is 98% the same as the one you get in your email. To make this easier we went an extra mile and this is sent to MailChimp via a custom built plugin we’ve used before on client sites.

The Plugins

The active plugin count is rather small. I’m only using five plugins:

• Advanced Custom Fields – In order to add content to the newsletter
• BackupBuddy – I initialy used it to migrate the site from a test server to the live and now for backups.
• Google Analyticator – To add Google Analytics tracking code
• WpMail.me Mailchimp Newsletter – The custom plugin that connects with the MailChimp API
• WP Super Cache – For caching (no point wasting server resources now is there)

What’s next?

At this point I’m focused on growing the mailing list. There are over 2000 subscribers and I’m hoping to get to 10000 by issue 50, which is when wpMail.me will be one year old.

Other then that I honestly don’t know. It’s a little side project for me and by curating such a large number of articles every week I’m bound to stay in touch with the WordPress community and always stay up to date.

Be featured on “Behind the Site”

Thanks for the insight Cristian!

If you have a WordPress site with an interesting story, using a clever mix of plugins and a theme to pull off its beauty, let us know and it just might be the next site we take a peak behind.

In the meantime, what do you think of what Cristian is doing at wpMail.me, and how it works? Are you an email subscriber on his list?

Behind the Site is a new series where site owners give us a peek behind the scenes of their website.

This week’s entry in the Behind the Site series is Olive Oil Times. In this post the site owner Curtis Cord will tell you about the site, what plugins they are using, and what they’ve customized to make it work the way it does.

Take it away, Curtis!

About Olive Oil Times

What started out as a personal blog reviewing different extra virgin olive oils morphed into the “publication of record” for olive oil consumers and industry pros.

Articles are written by contributing writers in every olive oil producing region and edited by us here in New York. The site is supported by advertisers.

Recently we launched a guide to the world’s olive oils, and a recipes section is next.

Click the image for a larger view.

Theme

We’re sporting a highly modified WooThemes theme with an extensive array of custom templates, post types and custom widgets.

Speed

We want Olive Oil Times to have a lot of things going on. An extensive array of plugins help keep things fresh and moving. With all these plugins firing away, we’re big on keeping the site speedy – not  easy with all that back-and-forth. So we rely on a fully dedicated server at Hosting.com, W3 Total Cache and APC opcode PHP accelerator.

It’s a little tricky getting everything to work together, but by now we’ve learned a few tricks. We have an average page load time of around 400ms — as measured by Pingdom and Watchmouse data points around the world. Without W3TC it shoots up to 1,500ms.

Plugins

Our current plugin count is 60. Impressive, I know. But, believe me, every one is there because we like what it does. We regularly comb through to make sure we are still happy with what we’re using.

• Akismet – ’Nuff said.
• Ambrosite Next/Previous Post Link Plus – For the custom Next/Prev in our guide pages.
• Amikelive Google Adsense Widget – Adsense banners in our sidebars.
• Audio Player – For the occasional interview with olive oil bigwigs.
• Better Delete Revision – Clear out all of those post revisions you’ll never need.
• Custom Login Logo Lite – Even though no one sees it except a few of us here.
• My Category Order, My Page Order, Custom Taxonomy Sort – Because alphabetical is not always alphabestical.
• Display Widgets – Very handy for sidebar management and keeping the posts and pages different.
• Disqus Comment System – Very pleased with Disqus. Looked great right out of the box.
• External Links to New Window – You didn’t really mean to leave, did you?
• Fluency Admin – Probably our most loved plugin. With so many plugins and activity in our dashboard, Fluency makes it, well, fluid. Expands menus on the hover and even makes the whole interface nicer to look at.
• Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types – Olive oil producers submit listings using a gravity form that saves as a custom post draft.
• GUAR Google XML Sitemaps – Gets our custom post types into our sitemaps and to a SERP near you.
• HelloBar for WordPress – A pricey little number from the guys at Digital Telepathy, but when we want to get the word out about something it’s in your face and looks pretty sweet.
• Insert Callout – Easy way to insert callouts (enlarged/highlighted text within an article) using a shortcode. Problem is what happens to those callouts if we ever disable the plugin. Not good.
• Limit Login Attemps – 2 tries. Go ahead, guess.
• Link Library – Related products and services are invited to get listed in our “Resources” page – but they need to link to Olive Oil Times first.
• Meteor Slides – Meteor Slides’ Josh Leuze himself set us up with his nice slideshow when other slides we tried didn’t cut it.
• Post Type Switcher – In the rare case we need to change the post type, this works nicely.
• WPTouch Pro – We’ve tried every mobile theme out there. None is perfect, but WPTouch is the best. Our site looks great on an iPad without switching themes, and thankfully WPTouch leaves it “unTouched” for ‘Pads.
• Related Posts Thumbnails – We’ve tried a bunch of different related posts solutions. Going with this one in the sidebar for now. Uses the 90×90 thumbs auto-generated by WPTouch which, by the way, WPTouch doesn’t use itself.
• Search Light – Cool Ajax drop-down instant search for the home page. This one is at the top of the “fluff” plugin category. Not exactly essential.
• Secure WordPress – Little more piece of mind.
• SEO Friendly Images – Adds metas where we would have never taken the time to.
• SEO Ultimate – Very happy with this SEO solution. The plugin gets updated very frequently, which can be a hassle. But it’s solid and works well. Best part is you can disable the modules you don’t want to use and not look at them again.
• Simple Facebook Connect – Posts new articles to our Facebook fan page.
• Shutter Reloaded – Lightweight lightbox effect for images.
• Simple Admin Menu Editor – Hides dashboard menu items we don’t use often. This with Fluency and you’re all set.
• Smart 404 – Tries to guess the best place to send you instead of to the 404 page.
• Socialize – Our newest addition. Nice call to action at the end of each post. We’ve tried them all.
• Subscribe / Connect / Follow Widget – Another little something in the sidebar.
• Tentblogger Optimize WordPress Database – Every once in a while.
• VaultPress – Works in the background backing us up ’round the clock. No complaints.
• W3 Total Cache – Frederick Townes’ high-performance plugin powers Olive Oil Times with database, page, object and browser caching, Amazon Cloudfront CDN, and minification. There was a learning curve to get it all right but now that we did, the site hums.
• WordTwit Pro – Version 1.0 sent out about 100 empty tweets which cross-posted to Facebook. It took us an hour to delete them one-by-one. Then we deleted the plugin. When we noticed the latest update we decided to give it another try (after all, we paid for it). Now we’re glad we did. Lets you tweet from multiple accounts and we can use our own custom short URLs. No other Twitter plugin has the features this one does.
• WP-PageNavi – Much nicer archive page navigation than the standard “Newer Posts / Older Posts”
• WP-Postviews with AJAX the Views – This combo lets us show the number of post views in our Olive Oil Guide even though they’re cached with W3TC.
• upPrev – If it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for me. Grzegorz Krzyminski made this cool flyout that, just as you near the end of an article, tempts you with the next one in the category. Disappears if you scroll back up. We don’t use breadcrumbs, instead we like to offer readers related articles in a few places on the page.

That’s it for plugins. Do you use any of these? Anything you picked up and will use in the future?

iPhone App

Our Olive Oil Times app is kind of like WPCandy’s which I like for its ease of use and nice interface. I open the WPCandy app every few days to check out the latest stories.

What’s Next for Olive Oil Times

We have pretty much the whole olive oil industry tuned in, so what we’re after now is more consumer readership, hence the guide and recipes sections. Look for more user-generated content, user ratings and discussion tools. We’re working on discoveroliveoil.com – a sister site focusing on basic olive oil information and usage. Another associated project, oliveoil.tv will be a WordPress site with multi-media features like video news and features, podcasts and user-submitted content from the olive oil world. Didn’t know there even was an olive oil world, did ya?

Be featured on “Behind the Site”

Thanks for the insight Curtis!

If you have a WordPress site with an interesting story, using a clever mix of plugins and a theme to pull off its beauty, let us know and it just might be the next site we take a peak behind.

In the meantime, what do you think? Did you find this look behind Olive Oil Times to be an interesting one?