Mumbai will host it’s second WordCamp (first one was in 2012) this weekend (15-16 March, 2014). I have attended a few WordCamps and they usually end up being informative and a lot of fun. It is always a lot of fun to see interesting new ways WordPress is used.

I am personally involved in WordCamp Mumbai 2014 as an organizer. For DW’s parent company rtCamp too, this WordCamp will be a very special one as EasyEngine – a CLI tool that helps users to easily manage their WordPress sites on Nginx will be introduced to the community. Rahul Bansal will be speaking on it in a session.

You can check out the event schedule here.

So if you live in Mumbai or nearby and want to check out WordCamp Mumbai – do register and buy a ticket online here.

Important Links for WordCamp Mumbai 2014

• WordCamp Mumbai 2014 Website
• WordCamp Mumbai – Schedule
• Buy Tickets for WordCamp Mumbai

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This Post WordCamp Mumbai 2014 on 15th – 16th March is Published on Devils' Workshop .

The WordCamp in Baroda, itself was a good one. The venue was at the outskirts of Baroda city. It might have been difficult for some attendees but there were bus pickups arranged from two different points in the city. It meant a big benefit which was, that most attendees came to the venue and left the venue at the same time.

The speaker sessions were interesting and a lot of impromptu discussions were held too. These unstructured discussions are one major reason I actually like visiting WordCamps. One such impromptu discussions was actually a self-appraisal of speaker sessions themselves by Saurabh Shukla. The simple question was to ask if some sessions were adding any value to the attendees. This stirred some passions but in the end the tone of the WordCamp Baroda turned from officious to camp like.

The formalities were dropped and the informal discussions ended up being a blessing for healthy debates and a lot more audience participation took place over the two-day event.

I have a lot of respect for WordCamp organizers and volunteers today than I ever did before. That is because I have ended up in the organizing team of WordCamp Mumbai 2014, which takes place on March 15th-16th. In this post more than reviewing WordCamp Baroda, I am taking stock of the WordCamp  and by extension the WordPress culture in India.

Some delusions about meetups in India

There were some arguments made about how tech related meetups do not work in India. I do not mean tech related events but meetups organized by like minded people where entry is free and control over what is discussed is minimal to none. The constant argument made against organizing such meetups are “Meetups do not work in India as India is different from other countries”.

In my personal experience is absolutely untrue. I am part of WordPress meetups in Mumbai for over a year and we might not boast of a large community but all the organizers of WordCamp Mumbai 2014 met each other at meetups and did not know about each others existence before these meetups began.

This clearly shows that India is not any different and meetups can and do work in India. It just requires people to keep having meetups regularly. I have attended meetups with only four people (me included). I have a simple rule to decide if a meetup is successful or not. If I meet someone new, the meetup is successful. In Mumbai we organize meetups over coffee or even dosas which always get decent number of people attending.

Too many celebrities at WordCamps

I found a disturbing trend at all WordCamps I have attended till now. There is a bit of a celebrity culture around some people. These celebrities are usually popular bloggers. Too many people mob and excessively praise popular bloggers. I won’t blame the bloggers themselves and I think most are a bit embarrassed by the attention.

I think this can be toned down a bit in the future – again back to the importance of meetups – if these bloggers were accessible with local meetups, I do not think there would be too much fawning over individuals.

Organizers need to contribute their experiences

I think people who have organized WordCamps in India, have missed a trick by not writing down detailed posts on what went behind organizing such an event. Explaining how they approached WordCamp Central and what should other budding organizers do would be a lot more helpful.

Hopefully after WordCamp Mumbai 2014 is over, I will write a series of long posts on what exactly happens behind the scenes while organizing the event.

Over to Mumbai!

As I wrote earlier, I am part of the organizing team for WordCamp Mumbai 2014. There are some very good speakers lined up and one of them is our very own Rahul Bansal.

The big challenge was to make this WordCamp in Mumbai accessible to everyone. We have started that by keeping the ticket prices to a minimum of Rs. 300/-.

Here are some of the useful links for WordCamp Mumbai 2014 (March 15-16)

• Official WordCamp Mumbai 2014 website
• Get Ticket to the event
• Speakers at the Event
• Venue Details

The WordCamp culture in India is still nascent but I can see it has moved forward since I wrote about my experiences at WordCamps a year ago. It is definitely becoming more informal and approachable. Hopefully it continues down this path. There are several thousand WordPress experts in India and hopefully they do not remain just a talent pool for companies but also end up becoming a thriving community.

Update: Rahul Banker brought to my notice that he had chronicled his experience as a organizer in a post last year.

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This Post WordCamp culture in India – It is still early days! is Published on Devils' Workshop .

I am using WordPress for the last three years now and I am big fan of it’s features, ease of use and security. When I first moved from blogger to WordPress it was the version 2.3 since then I have used multiple versions of WordPress. A couple of days agothey have also released the new version 3.6 named “Oscar” named after a great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” went live on 1st August 2013, it can be downloaded from the WordPress.org site or can be updated directly from the admin panel if you are already using WordPress.

But before you install or upgrade I think you might like to look up some new changes in this release, so here I’m listing all the important changes that will affect most common users.

This video gives a quick brief on what’s new in there.

New Theme: Twenty Thirteen

This version is being provided with a new theme called Twenty Thirteen, this theme is a simple theme that has been built specially to make visitors focus on the content without be distracted by anything else on site. It is a single column theme with sidebar and widgets in the footer.

Post Locking

Because of this feature you can always know who else is editing the current post on which you are also writing, with live updates that appear in the list of posts. And if someone leaves a post open for any reason, then you can easily take over where they left off.

Better Revision Browser

Every change you make to a post will be saved instantly on server and also locally so you won’t loose anything ever, and all revisions can be easily reviewed through the new side-by-side viewer with changed text highlighting.

Native Support For Audio/Video Embeds

With this feature now you can easily embed Audio and Video files in your article just with the direct file url, you just have to upload the audio or video file to your server or any other server which gives you a direct link to the file with valid extension, such as mp3,aac,mp4,mpg, avi etc.

And then just have to place the url in your post editor where you want the player to appear and the player will be automatically assigned to it through WordPress.

All the Audio and Video that you will be uploading to your server can previewed under Media > Edit page.

Integration with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud

You can now embed your custom playlists, songs and albums just by pasting the URL from any of these services Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.

Menu Editor Enhanced

Although no new feature has been introduced, menu editor has been customized for easier management, now you can also select multiple locations where menu has to be shown.

Improved Autosaves

They are now calling it Augmented Autosave, It will be very useful for sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Now every author of the article will have their standalone copy of Autosaves, It will store data locally as well as on server so there will be very less chance of loosing any data ever.

Other minor changes:

• The ability to change post formats was removed from Quick Edit
• The Media Library can now be sorted by Author name
• Removed three default contact methods (AIM, YIM, Jabber) for new installs.
• Allow any post format to be set as default in Settings

These are the changes which I thought are good, but there are lots more changes has been done you can check the complete list here.

Are you using WordPress 3.6? Tell us what you think about it in your comments.

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This Post What’s New in WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” is Published on Devils' Workshop .

Here are some of the interesting stats about the last year.

• Over 46 million downloads of WordPress happened.
• 336 themes were added to the library in a single year.
• There were 6,758 plugins were approved which takes the total over 26,000 plugins in all available on WordPress.
• And finally, about 18.9% of the web runs on WordPress.

Future WordPress Updates

There was also an outline of future updates planned for WordPress. This included WordPress 3.7 version that is scheduled for early October. WordPress 3.7 will apparently be a version where major cleanup of the platform will be done. WordPress 3.8 is scheduled to be released in December this year. You can keep a track of WordPress version road-map here.

(via Venture Beat)

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This Post WordPress Powers 18.9% of the Web is Published on Devils' Workshop .

Ad blocking on browsers has reduced many monetizing methods for the bloggers these days. Disqus discovery being less spammy has yet to be filtered by the adblockers. You can use this opportunity to monetize your blog with Disqus promoted discovery.

It seems that Disqus is using the related content feed as a way to show sponsored CPC ads. It also includes e-commerce affiliate linking in feeds, which also helps boost the revenue.

How Disqus Discovery work?

• Disqus commenting platform has asynchronus content service which doesn’t affect the loading time of your blog. Your content loads first and then Disqus makes the call for loading the discovery ads and comments.
• Anyone can use Disqus promoted discovery feature as It is included in the comment platform and there are no publisher requirements.
• However the promoted discovery feature works good on medium to high traffic blogs with visitor engagement. When you add the disqus comment system on your blog, It gives you option to apply for the discovery promotion feature. You can enable and disable the feature in your admin dashboard.

Working with Disqus WordPress plugin

• Register your site with disqus. Install Disqus WordPress plugin and add your login credentials into it. After that you can add the short name of your blog to enable the Disqus commenting system.
• Now go to Admin page of your Disqus.com dashboard.
• Click on your website profile and then go to settings. Select the discovery tab to edit the settings related to your website profile. You can set the discovery level to high and low, depending on your monetization needs

• If you do not want external affiliate links in your discovery feed, you can uncheck option.

• I suggest unchecking this option If you use other affiliate links of your own inside the content.
• We cannot compare Disqus revenue with Google adsense and other CPC networks. Disqus is unique with its sponsored listing on blogs. Disqus pays you via Paypal or Wire Transfer, once your earning reaches $100 every 30 days.

There is one thing to note that the promoted discovery sometimes shows off-topic sponsored listing (similar to AdSense).

You may not earn much revenue from less relevant sponsored listings. However, It does have the potential to make good money on high traffic blogs with comment activity.

If you run niche blog with limited revenue potential but more comment activity then I suggest you to check out Disqus promoted discovery.

Link: Disqus Discovery | WordPress Plugin for Disqus

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This Post Monetize Your Blog with Disqus Commenting System is Published on Devils' Workshop .

This plugin is not meant for general WordPress users as they will need to know how to deploy PHP applications on Google App Engine. The plugin will over-ride some core WordPress functionality, mainly the email and media upload functionality.

Useful Links

• Google App Engine for WordPress – Plugin
• Running WordPress – Google Developers Documentation
• Official post on Google App Engine WordPress Plugin

The plugin’s code has also been uploaded to GitHub.

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This Post Official Google App Engine for WordPress Plugin Released is Published on Devils' Workshop .