Photo courtesy of Dumitru BrinzanDumitru Brinzan, founder of Hermes Themes, rowing during a vacation in Romania.

$35, $75, $40, and $200. One of these doesn’t sound like the others.

Dumitru Brinzan, who has a long history in WordPress themes at WPZOOM, has started a new theme project called Hermes Themes. The shop offers strictly hotel themes, in contrast to WPZOOM’s more varied selection.

Interestingly, Brinzan is pricing his hotel themes at $200, well above the average cost of themes at the moment. It’s a bold decision, and not one that you see many theme shops making at the moment. I sat down with him to talk a bit about what motivated him to start Hermes Themes, and in particular to price his themes that high.

The pricing is very deliberate on Brinzan’s part. “To be honest, I thought about pricing for a very long time,” he told WPCandy. “I considered making it cheaper, or even more expensive.” His decision to sell themes for $200 wasn’t a simple one, and took his entire history selling WordPress themes into account.

Start by serving a real need

While the pricing is an intriguing aspect of Hermes Themes, it’s not why Brinzan started the new shop. He saw a need.

“Other options that hotels have right now are really expensive,” he told WPCandy. “This is why we still have hotel websites developed in 2002 and 2003.” Anyone who has ever booked a hotel stay can attest to that, no doubt.

Just a couple of days before our interview, Brinzan described seeing a luxury four star hotel with a website that hadn’t changed a bit since 2001. Well, aside from the addition of Facebook links last year. “Imagine that!” Brinzan said.

Many solutions for hotel websites are hosted and subscription based. This can cost hotel business owners anywhere from hundreds to four or five thousand dollars every year. That’s a good deal for a website, but even worse if and when they decide to move on they are left with nothing. No website to adapt and no content to work with (aside from scraping their own) leaves them needing to start over from scratch.

“Just imagine sinking in thousands in two or three years, and then you realize you have nothing, no website at all,” Brinzan said. “It’s a trap!”

“That,” he explained,” is the problem with using proprietary content management systems.” WordPress, Brinzan believes, is a much better long-term solution for hotels, and he has tried to emphasize this by sticking to standard content types and a focus on portability.

Photo by Ryan ImelHermes Themes is a solo project by Dumitru Brinzan that sells hotel themes for $200.

Hermes Themes currently offers four different $200 themes, with live demonstrations of each as you might expect. My instinct, particularly with a $200 price tag but also with hotel themes in general, is that the themes themselves would be fairly complex. I expected complex sections where availability would be reflected in booking forms and choosing the size of room desired would weigh in too. But that’s not the case — Hermes Themes seem very simple, with basic contact information and assuming booking forms that don’t suggest the need for these more involved features.

“Just imagine sinking in thousands in two or three years, and then you realize you have nothing, no website at all. It’s a trap!”

Instead, he puts an emphasis on local attractions, photo galleries, testimonials, and layouts featuring large photos of the rooms available. Brinzan seems to suggest, both in the features offered in his themes and the marketing within Hermes Themes itself, that the problems hotels face has nothing to do with advanced website features, but the basics. In a blog post Brinzan wrote last month he runs down the most common mistakes he finds hotel websites making. The list includes sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, flash navigation and slide shows, missing contact information and (yikes) background music that plays when the page loads.

Perhaps simple, attractive, and focused is what hotel websites need more than complex booking forms. I’ll be curious to see how this approach works for hotels, and more specifically what types of hotels it attracts.

Brinzan isn’t the only one to determine a new WordPress option is a smart bet for hotel businesses. Others, like Brian Casel, have come to similar conclusions. Casel’s Hotel Propeller service takes a different approach, which is to offer a hosted service for $29 per month. The service is still built on top of the WordPress platform, though, and offers a handful of different themes for use by subscribed members.

There are also occasional hotel theme offerings from known theme shops, and at the moment a search for “hotel” on ThemeForest pulls up more than 60 WordPress themes. This doesn’t make hotel themes as popular a subgenre as certain others — business and portfolio themes, anyone? — it’s certainly a growing one.

Customer trends and selecting your own clients

Competition in this space may demand more time and focus from Brinzan over time, as any success Hermes Themes sees will most certainly lead to others jumping at the chance to compete with hotel themes at his prices. Right now, along with his Hermes Themes project, Brinzan is the co-founder and lead developer of WPZOOM. WPZOOM began as a popular WordPress blog in 2008, and grew into a theme shop in 2009 when it released its first theme.

Balancing the needs of two projects can be difficult, as anyone who has tried it can tell you. Brinzan admits to taking this into consideration with Hermes Themes.

“I’m trying to better manage my time,” he said. “But at the moment WPZOOM takes more time of course. Hermes still needs to take off,” he said with a smile.

His time spent with WPZOOM is in part what inspired him to make the pricing decisions he has with Hermes Themes so far — specifically, the time spent working with clients WPZOOM worked with.

Brinzan is still co-founder and lead developer of WPZOOM, and currently splits his time between it and his new project Hermes Themes.

“I sometimes provide customization services to our customers,” he told WPCandy, and said that in doing so he has worked with quite a few people. Brinzan explained that customers would regularly not mind paying $69 for a theme — the current standard package price at WPZOOM — and then an additional $200 for customization work.

“This made me think they wouldn’t mind paying $200 from the start, for a product that is very close to their needs.”

But it’s not all about pricing at what the customer will pay — though that plays big into the thinking here — Brinzan is attempting to select his clients too. “Again, from my experience with WPZOOM, we have discovered something very peculiar: clients that pay more are somewhat less needy, if I may say so.”

He explained that clients utilizing coupons and discounts are more likely to also utilize WPZOOM’s support system, sometimes firing off ten support questions in as many minutes. These customers also tended to ignore instructions, documentation, and video tutorials more often.

“So I am thinking that such a price would attract mostly people that really need a theme, and really like what they see,” Brinzan said. “No impulse shopping.”

Theme pricing comes up yet again

I’ve heard the idea of a thousand dollar theme discussed a couple of times in the WordPress community the last year or two. Usually it’s a heck of a conversation starter. What makes a theme worth that much money? Will we ever see that sort of thing available in the current theme marketplace?

Theme pricing, do’s and don’t’s, and the direction of the theme market is a topic that comes up often in the WordPress community. The earliest pricing milestone I can remember probably came in early 2008, when designer Tung Do — who at the time ran WPDesigner.com — announced a $5 theme club.

“This made me think they wouldn’t mind paying $200 from the start, for a product that is very close to their needs.”

Now, at that point in time, theme clubs were a bit of a new idea. Themes more often cost around ten times that price or even higher, and no membership system even approached a price that low. The themes Do was producing were of a solid quality. It was a mis-match of price and quality that was bound to stir pricing discussions.

A couple of years later, in 2011, Mike McAlister started a heck of a discussion around his analysis of the $35 theme, a standard price point on ThemeForest at the time. His essay was great, but the more than two hundred comments following it were even more interesting.

Last year Jake Caputo’s ThemeThrift project brought up theme pricing again, but this time with the onus on the customer. ThemeThrift customers could choose which price to pay, with even the option to pay nothing in the beginning. Caputo later adjusted the pricing options, removing the zero dollar amount, and adding higher tiers that offered a bundled plugin along with it.

We’ve seen prices on themes go low to test the waters and draw attention, but not nearly as often have we seen prices go high. Is it about time for a thousand dollar theme?

The evolution of the value of WordPress themes

What exactly does the future of theme prices hold?

I tend to think we’ll see even more pricing toward the middle amongst marketplaces and your average theme shops, with up selling to developer packages in many cases. Smaller shops and individuals are likely to get a bit more bold, maybe not quite to the extreme of a $5 theme club or a $200 theme, but daring nonetheless. We’ll also see more specialty shops like Hermes Themes pop up, I think, to cater toward the growing need for WordPress themes geared more specifically toward certain needs.

Another way to ask the question is: what is the true value of a theme? Serious people are using WordPress and looking for professional themes to make it shine. Seeing theme developers and business owners take on that challenge is exciting to watch.

The post The true value of a WordPress theme: Hermes Themes and a $200 price tag appeared first on WPCandy.

WordPress is one of — arguably the — most popular content management systems in the world built on PHP. Many of the platform’s major features and enhancements since 2004 have been entirely written in PHP. Project lead Andrew Nacin, however, says that in the future much  more will be built in JavaScript.

“I think [WordPress 3.5] actually signifies a shift from PHP land to JavaScript land for pretty much everything we’re going to do in the future,” Nacin told WPCandy. “That’s been happening for a few releases now, if you look at most of the major features over the last three or four releases.” WordPress 3.5 brought the re-imagined media uploader, really taking the basic drag and drop uploading of version 3.3 to a new level. WordPress 3.4 introduced the theme customizer which allows users to make changes to any compatible WordPress theme in real-time.

“[These features] all very much JavaScript heavy because they have to be,” Nacin said.

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” bought a fully re-imagined uploader. It was the biggest JavaScript feature added since the theme customizer.

Two projects, similar ideals

Daryl Koopersmith, listed as a core developer on WordPress 3.4 and 3.5, was a major contributor to these new JavaScript heavy features. Nacin said that he and Koopersmith talk with the jQuery community a lot.

“I actually idle in all of their IRC channels, I’ve been to a few of their conferences, and I’m friends with most of their core team members,” he told WPCandy. “The nice part is that the partnership between WordPress and jQuery is really strong, and there’s not going to be a time when we kind of lose focus with what they’re doing.”

The two open source projects, Nacin said, have very similar philosophies to one another — both projects commit to backward compatibility, for one. Nacin has no qualms saying WordPress is always going to ship with the latest version of jQuery.

jQuery isn’t quite as old as WordPress — it was released in 2006 — but both projects have been popular tools on the internet for a long time.

Special considerations

“So if they try and override jQuery just drop the hammer on them…”

Of course, relying on JavaScript even more isn’t without its own issues. Relying on it for these features only puts a spotlight on certain frustrations.

One common issue is when developers disable the included version of jQuery and load their own. Nacin sees these issues as a priority in future releases of WordPress.

“I think one thing I finally want to do in 3.6 is just prevent plugins from overriding pretty much any core script in the admin,” Nacin said. “So if they try and override jQuery just drop the hammer on them and just literally prevent it through code. Because that breaks so much crap and I’m literally done with it.”

One thing is certain: if you’re looking for an area of WordPress core code contribution to dive into and be involved in important features in future releases, JavaScript development seems to be at the forefront — with all the benefits and new challenges that come with it.

The post jQuery and WordPress: “A shift from PHP land to Javascript land” appeared first on WPCandy.

Word of what to expect from BuddyPress 1.7 has been trickling in, and while it’s not quite here yet there’s a lot to get excited about. Brand new users should pay attention, but longtime users may be the most excited by what’s on the way.

At last month’s WordPress NYC Meetup the lead developer of the BuddyPress project, Boone Gorges, led the group in a presentation showing off what can be expected in the next major version of the popular social plugin. Let’s take a look.

BuddyPress themes? How about all the themes?

The biggest leap forward for the BuddyPress project may end up being the headline improvement in 1.7: theme independence. Currently in order to take advantage of BuddyPress properly you have a few options:

1. use the BuddyPress default theme as it is or modify it,
2. search for a BuddyPress theme (which is likely a modified version of the BuddyPress default theme already), and
3. take the time to add the necessary BuddyPress files to the theme you’re already using, possibly using the BuddyPress Template Pack.

Anyone who has gone down that third road can attest to the often frustrating experience that follows. Even sticking with number two, the reality is that a shocking number of theme developers have resisted making BuddyPress themes at all. This is at least in part due to the additional template files and styles that are necessary to properly integrate with the plugin.

On this topic I tend to share BuddyPress Lead Developer Boone Gorges’ sentiment when he says, “I never found BuddyPress theme development that frustrating. The thing that I’ve heard countless times is ‘ugh, there are so many files, it’s so confusing. I’m just a theme developer, I’m not a plugin developer.’ I’ve heard it, and I’m annoyed by it.” He continues, “But it’s fine. It is more complicated than a WordPress theme, and the reason it’s more complicated than a WordPress themes is because there are lots of different kinds of content.”

“‘There are so many files, it’s so confusing.’ I’ve heard it, and I’m annoyed by it.”

Suffice it to say this level of complexity will no longer be an excuse theme developers can use. With BuddyPress 1.7 any properly constructed theme (in other words it passes the most basic tests of WordPress theme sanity) will work with BuddyPress. Take a second and read that sentence again.

Every WordPress theme will become a BuddyPress theme after 1.7.

“The way that we make this work is It feels like magic when you use it,” Gorges said. “It is kind of like magic, like voodoo magic. The kind that you probably don’t want to know too much about.”

How does this happen exactly? BuddyPress 1.7 will utilize output buffering and a few included styles to bring a default uniform template into otherwise standard WordPress theme pages. While this shouldn’t relieve a theme developer from taking BuddyPress into account, it will provide a nice jumpstart to building full featured support into themes. Best of all, for users this means any WordPress theme on the market should soon double as a BuddyPress theme without any work at all.

Of course this doesn’t mean themes previously built with the added templates or manual BuddyPress support will stop working. This convenience is entirely backwards compatible with earlier themes.

Freelancer and BuddyPress developer David Bisset and I discussed precisely this during WPCandy Podcast #36 if you’re interested in a bit more discussion on the topic.

Bid the installation wizard farewell

For the last few releases of BuddyPress, the first-time activation of the plugin would prompt an installation wizard. A few steps were necessary before BuddyPress would fully activate. For instance the plugin asks that “pretty permalinks” be enabled and lists the enabled and disabled components.

Referring to this process in particular, Gorges said, “If you are just somebody who’s looking to set up your club for people who knit sweaters with dogs on them, and you’re asked about pretty permalinks, you’re just like ‘What?’ And then you go just use Ning or something.”

The installation wizard prompts user to set up pages and tweak permalink settings, among others. The BuddyPress team have determined these are too confusing, and are removing the wizard entirely from 1.7.

Despite the wizard having good intentions, in order to improve the BuddyPress experience the team axed it in the new version. Beginning with 1.7 BuddyPress will automatically set itself up for you when it activates.

In addition only the profiles and activity streams will now be on by default. This, Gorges explained, is to provide a coherent experience that isn’t overwhelming and delivers what most users will most benefit from right off the bat. BuddyPress Project Lead John James Jacoby (or JJJ for short) has often shared the sentiment that using all of BuddyPress is a step in the wrong direction. In many cases only a slice of what’s available in the plugin is worth putting to use.

It turns out that many users would enable every BuddyPress component when faced with this step in the installation process.

Last year Gorges, JJJ, and Paul Gibbs joined me on the Roundtable Podcast to discuss topics such as BuddyPress complexity in a bit more detail.

Of course despite BuddyPress setting defaults for users, all the important options are still present and changeable. It’s just that you will only have to deal with them if you go looking for them first.

Above: BuddyPress Lead Developer Boone Gorges previews the upcoming version 1.7 at a WordPress Meetup in New York City.

Meet BP_User_Query

The details behind the addition of the BP_User_Query to version 1.7 are more for developers than anyone, but the thing to know is this: with 1.7 many of the requests that include members (read: pretty much all of them) are much, much faster.

Regarding the improvements Gorges said, “When you load a members directory, and you have 100,00 users on your site, your page load time might go from five seconds down to half a second because of the optimizations that have happened here.” He continued, “It gets even better when you start doing complicated queries like search or a funky kind of sort. Those have even more dramatic speed increases.”

The BP_User_Query can be found in the bp-core-classes.php file.

Now, what about those details? Well one of the longstanding issues with BuddyPress has been that it’s sort of a resource hog. BuddyPress would execute joins on tables that, if you have more than few thousand users, could slow a site down real quick. That’s the exciting part about BP_User_Query. It gives developers a much quicker way to load up users within BuddyPress. It also allows for querying among multiple databases, which is a major factor in enterprise situations.

Gorges insists that these queries are backwards compatible with soon-to-be-old ways of querying, at least for “99.9% of sites.” There may be a few cases where a developer’s query might not work after the changeover. For those, however, there will be a way to force the use of legacy queries.

Group management akin to post and page screens

In order to make group management easier — particularly in situations where hundreds or even thousands of groups exist — BuddyPress 1.7 will also bring group administration within the WordPress dashboard. The management screens themselves are a lot like what you would expect from WordPress posts, pages, or custom post types. Exactly like them, actually.

These new screens will allow admins to take bulk actions on groups just the way you would to manage any other type of thing within WordPress. Modifying group settings on a singular basis can happen from the dashboard as well.

Not all big and flashy

Along with the major updates and changes will be a handful of smaller changes that should really appeal to those who have used BuddyPress for a while. Complete bbPress integration was completed with bbPress 2.3 (which is currently in beta) so that now, when installing BuddyPress forums, in reality the bbPress plugin is installed. It’s also now an option within BuddyPress core to limit certain blogs from being recorded within activity logs, for those cases where an administrative or housekeeping blog is kept that isn’t for public consumption.

BuddyPress 1.7 will also include an “admin only” visibility level for profile fields. Gorges, during his presentation embedded above, gave the example that an admin might want to include a profile field like phone number, referer, or where the user heard about the site — all of which isn’t exactly information the world needs to see. Soon those fields’ contents can be restricted to administrators only.

Sounds great. So when can we have it?

As for exactly when this next major version will launch, there is no specific date. The plan, according to the BuddyPress team, is to get a beta out in the next week or two, with the final release following a few rounds of betas. Obviously any number of timeline-affecting issues can come up during that time.

If you are running a BuddyPress site of any sort, it probably wouldn’t hurt to start testing the 1.7 development version that you can find on the BuddyPress trac. After all, the more people who run it through the ringer the fewer issues will end up in the final release.

The post BuddyPress 1.7: Theme independence, BP_User_Query, and what else to expect appeared first on WPCandy.

Development has begun on the next version of Edit Flow, the editorial management plugin and big inspiration for one of the major advances coming to WordPress 3.6. The plugin, whose lead developer is Automattic’s Daniel Bachhuber, is lauded by many (including myself) as one of the best ways to organize an editorial team with WordPress.

Among the planned additions to next version, Edit Flow 0.8, are quick post creation, iCal support for the calendar, and dashboard widget for editorial comments. That on its own would make for a killer update, but those are just a few of what’s planned.

Bachhuber says the 0.8 release coincide with WordPress 3.6, which wouldn’t hurt because Edit Flow will likely be linked up by anyone writing about the new WordPress release. So if you’re a user of the plugin keep an eye out around April 22. And if you’re a heavy user, or a developer, run over to the Edit Flow Development blog and see about contributing to its development.

A question for the comments: is it accurate to see Edit Flow in a similar light as the BuddyPress and bbPress projects? At least in the sense of usefulness and depth of a project built on top of WordPress I’d say it’s comparable — certainly not as a blessed sister project to WordPress in quite the same way. What do you think?

The post Edit Flow 0.8 scope begins coming together appeared first on WPCandy.

You’ll recognize Biryukov if you spend time lurking around in Trac, or of course if you’ve used any one of his twenty five plugins.

Nacin had great things to say in the announcement:

Sergey’s Trac activity can best be described as omnipresent. He has had many hundreds of contributions, large and small, accepted to WordPress core. His contributions are always thoroughly researched, with links to related tickets and changesets often going back to a previous decade.

Congrats to Sergey for the recognition, and here’s to a great 3.6 cycle! If you’re planning on contributing to 3.6 in some way, speak up in the comments below.

The post Sergey Biryukov receives commit access for the 3.6 cycle appeared first on WPCandy.

Jake Caputo is the developer behind DesignCrumbs, and you might also remember him from a ThemeThrift feature we posted last year. Caputo makes and sells WordPress themes, and does so via the ThemeForest marketplace. Last week he received notice that he was no longer allowed to speak or to volunteer at WordCamps.

Caputo wrote up a post in response to the news, which as of this writing has drawn in over 120 comments — including thoughts from a number of smart, experience developers and Matt Mullenweg himself.

The bit of the guidelines that Caputo ended up butted heads with is on the “Representing WordPress” page and reads:

If distributing WordPress-derivative works (themes, plugins, WP distros), any person or business should give their users the same freedoms that WordPress itself provides. Note: this is one step above simple compliance, which requires PHP code to be GPL/compatible but allows proprietary licenses for JavaScript, CSS, and images. 100% GPL or compatible is required for promotion at WordCamps when WordPress-derivative works are involved, the same guidelines we follow on WordPress.org.

Sellers on ThemeForest are not allowed to list their themes as 100% GPL, and Caputo said the Foundation told him that even if he found a way to do so, any participation at all on that network prohibits him from WordCamp speaking and volunteering.

Note that this is not about license compliance in a legal sense. Envato would argue that their stance is entirely legal, and the WordPress Foundation seems to agree. It’s not as simple as legal compliance — it’s about a special rule set for WordCamp speakers and volunteers by the WordPress Foundation.

Jake Caputo sells themes on ThemeForest as DesignCrumbs. He has thirteen products for sale, has over 3,000 sales, and says he makes nearly 100% of his income this way.

While Caputo at times confuses the WordPress Foundation and Automattic (hey, who hasn’t?) he makes a salient point that stands out above the minutia of the guidelines themselves: a lot of people end up in the middle of this disagreement.

“…there are over 2.3 million users on the Envato marketplaces,” Caputo said. “Over 2.3 million people are hanging in the balance. People who can’t speak, share their ideas, or share their expertise, at a WordCamp.” This is a sobering point, because many, likely most, of those people don’t have the slightest idea about the philosophical disagreements between the Foundation and Envato.

A philosophical disagreement is at the root of this, and those who have been in the community for a while recognize it likely won’t change any time soon. Still, the discussion continues.

The post Jake Caputo prohibited from speaking at WordCamps, sparks guideline discussions appeared first on WPCandy.

Scott Basgaard and Brad Williams are currently planning and brainstorming ideas for a brand new online event this year called WordSesh. WordSesh 2013 is set to take place every hour of the day on April 13th this year.

According to their website, the plan is to run one session every hour for 24 hours. The sessions aren’t locked down yet, but few events are more than three months out. They’re planning to use a combination of Google Hangout and YouTube.

Watch the WordSesh Twitter feed for more information about their event as it unfolds. Anyone interested in speaking during the event should read out to them via mail at wordsesh.org.

Will you attend?

Are you excited to learn about WordSesh? Will you attend a 24 hour online event, or will you check in after the fact to watch the recorded videos? I’ll be very interested to see how this ends up coming together and how the presentations end up recorded.

Interested in a full day of live streaming WordPress presentations? Check out WordSesh ’13 wordsesh.org #wordpress #wordsesh

— WordSesh (@WordSesh) January 19, 2013

The post WordSesh aims to bring 24 hours of live streamed WordPress presentations appeared first on WPCandy.

Photo credit: Jennifer Dodd

Jennifer M. Dodd joined the bbPress core commit team this week after contributing to the project since the plugin version of bbPress was introduced. bbPress lead John James Jacoby said, “Her ability to iterate and improve on core patches, her outstanding communication skills, and her knowledge of the codebase, make her a great addition to the bbPress team.”

Dodd blogs about WordPress at UncommonContent.com, and you can find a list of her (WordPress/bbPress/BuddyPress) plugins there too.

In the blog post announcing Dodd’s commit team status Jacoby said her first tasks for bbPress 2.3 will be focused on full forum searching. Her first commit after the announcement can be seen here.

Side note: has it really been more than a year since bbPress 2.0 became final? Holy. Wow.

The post Jennifer M. Dodd joins the bbPress commit team appeared first on WPCandy.

Photo credit: Ryan Imel

I fancy talking about WordPress download numbers. I do it a lot. But why not, right? With a growing user base and more and more people using WordPress every release, it’s fun to see those numbers go up.

But nearly every time I bring up download counts someone asks about what exactly is counted. Does it count dashboard upgrades? How about Fantastico or cPanel upgrades? I didn’t know, so I reached out to the WordPress.org folks to find out more.

What counts?

Otto told WPCandy that the WordPress download counter counts ZIP downloads from WordPress.org. This includes normal dashboard upgrades, he said, because they also download the ZIP file.

When a host (WordPress-centric or otherwise) upgrades all of their users, he said, then those likely are not counted because all the updates are done using a single ZIP file. The same goes for Fantastico and other control panel systems, since the upgrades are based on their own copy of the WordPress ZIP.

Otto said if he had to guess — a “pull-it-out-of-my-ass-guess” he called it — “eleventy percent of sites are upgraded that way”, meaning in a way not counted by the download counter.

Just the changes, please

WordPress version 3.2 brought partial downloads to the platform for the first time, thanks to an improvement to the automatic update system that release. This way deltas, or only the modified files of the minor release, would be the only thing downloaded.

The move to minor point release deltas was in the interest of speed and reliability rather than bandwidth, though the change did save over 1.5 TB of bandwidth in the first couple of days.

Deltas affect the download count the same way normal downloads do, though the counts are saved separately when archived.

Bandwidth. Lots of bandwidth.

In another of my favorite Otto moments, he told WPCandy the strain of serving up millions of WordPress ZIP downloads is “probably what we in the industry call a ‘metric shit-ton’ of bandwidth.” Scientifically speaking, of course.

Photo credit: Ryan ImelPictured: science.

The downloads themselves, Andrew Nacin said, are served off the web nodes as the rest of the WordPress.org website. Things like api.WordPress.org, stats processing, and SVN servers are on their own; he estimated the entire grid at 25 servers.

Napkin math

At the time of this writing the WordPress download counter reads 924,460. It’s going at a few copies of download every second, based on my quick glance for a few seconds. It’s at 924,618 now.

We’ll say it’s at one million downloads, since it will likely hit that before the end of the day anyway. And it makes the math simple. At a download size of 5.2 MB, WordPress.org will have served up 5,200,000 MB or approximately 5 terabytes in just a couple of days.

“WordPress.org will have served up approximately 5 terabytes in just a couple of days.”

Or consider version 3.4, which ended its life cycle earlier this week at nearly twenty nine million total downloads. At 4.9 MB the ZIP required around 130 terabytes of bandwidth while it was available. We’re estimating, of course, since 3.4 also included two minor (delta) releases.

Historical download counts are saved, they said, but are not publicly available at the moment. For general ideas of download counts you can always browse our series on download counts that goes back to version 3.0 in 2010.

Ultimately, Nacin told WPCandy, bandwidth for WordPress ZIP downloads just isn’t much of a consideration for WordPress.org. “It receives a ton of traffic anyway.”

The post Where WordPress download numbers really come from appeared first on WPCandy.

Photo credit: Ryan Imel

Last summer Brendan Sera-Shriar and Chris Bavota launched PressWork, a drag and drop theme framework. They announced the framework at WordCamp Montreal, saying they created it for themselves as much as WordPress beginners and developers. Sixteen months later, and despite helping “tens of thousands” of users to build their sites with PressWork, Bavota and Sera-Shriar have bid PressWork farewell and closed its doors.

“It was really a scaling issue,” Sera-Shriar told WPCandy. “Basic startup problems 101. We needed staff and time and had no budget.”

Starting strong

The duo wasn’t new to the WordPress community with PressWork. Bavota blogged about WordPress and built themes before PressWork, and Sera-Shriar was the Social Media Manager at Vanilla Forums which was pretty involved in the WordPress community.

“In the beginning the dream was to make PressWork a full-time gig…”

Sera-Shriar even co-organized WordCamp Montreal, the same event where the theme framework was announced.

“[I]n the beginning the goal, or should I say dream was to make PressWork a full-time gig,” Sera-Shriar said. “We were super excited about what we were doing and felt like we were breaking new ground in the world of WordPress frameworks.”

A world that, particularly at that time, was bursting at the seams with new theme frameworks. It’s not quite as true today, but throughout 2011 it sometimes seemed there was a new theme framework launched every week or two. Standing out was difficult.

Not quite enough

There was a strong initial response with the framework’s launch, Bavota told WPCandy, but there just wasn’t quite enough to keep the project alive. The response may have been that deadly middling response: just enough to show decent interest, not quite enough to make a real project.

“We just could not keep up with the demand in terms of our customer base and support,” Sera-Shriar said.

PressWorks growth included a mention from Matt Mullenweg during his State of the Word presentation at 2011’s WordCamp San Francisco; both were very proud of that. At the same time, they see WordPress core itself as part of the cause of their slow march toward closing.

Bavota told WPCandy:

[I]t seemed like WordPress took a page out of our book when they released the live preview theme customizer in 3.4. And also the Custom CSS editor in JetPack. I kind of take it as a compliment since it goes to show that our ideas were good enough that even the folks developing the core felt like they should be incorporated. But it did take a bit of thunder away from our project.

The team took this as a compliment and moved forward. In the end, though, they said life had different plans for them than their theme framework. Bavota’s first child was coming along, and Sera-Shriar had his second, and it became increasingly difficult for the two to devote 100% of their time to PressWork.

Graphic credit: Michael PickThe PressWork slide shown during Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2011 at WordCamp San Francisco.

Sera-Shriar said that given a bigger team and funding they could have devoted more time to the project and PressWork might have become a serious contender in the growing theme framework market. As it stands, the framework is available for free on WordPress.org, though the two state they won’t be putting any more time maintaining the project.

The end…maybe?

The two have moved on to their own projects. Bavota has refocused on developing themes at Themes by Bavotasan, writing for Wptuts+, and being a new father. Sera-Shriar started a marketing firm with a friend also named Brendan called Brendan & Brendan Consulting.

When asked, Bavota and Sera-Shriar said they would be very interested in someone else taking over PressWork. Bavota said that, so far, they have had no interest from the outside. “I am totally open to that and hope that it does happen,” he said. “It would be a shame to see PressWork disappear when so many people have used it to help kickstart their websites.”

“[T]hat would be great,” his partner chimed in. “I’d love to see PressWork live in some form or another.”

Until that happens, PressWork is no more. “Yes, it’s sad,” Sera-Shriar said, “but an unfortunate reality of the open source meets business world.”

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