Author Archive

Is Automattic Evil?

47
responses
by
on
November 18th, 2009
in
WordPress

Stick around the WordPress community for a period of time and you’re bound to come across a few folks who say Automattic is an evil company or Matt Mullenweg is evil in the way in which he runs WordPress.org. The more time I spend talking to Matt and with other employees of Automattic, the more I don’t understand where these thoughts and feelings of evilness come from. Sure, there is a decision made from time to time that a vocal group of people disagree with but you can’t make the right decision 100% of the time. Let’s take a closer look at Automattic as it relates to WordPress. When I interviewed Matt at WordCamp New York, one of the things I asked him to address is the notion that Automattic commercially benefits from those who work for free. This indeed happens but on the flip side, Automattic gives a ton […]

[Continue Reading...]

I Wish I Was At WordCamp

2
responses
by
on
November 12th, 2009
in
wordcamp

If you’re looking for a cool way to keep tabs on what’s shaking at WordCamp New York this weekend, check out this site created by DimensionMedia called IWishIWasAtWordCamp.com. The site contains feeds from a few notable Twitter accounts that will be tweeting during the event as well as the important hashtag Twitter widget which goes above and beyond single accounts. Near the center of the site is a collection of photos published to Flickr but some of the photos are from the wrong WordCamp. This should be fixed by only aggregating photos that are using a unique tag such as the event Twitter hashtag. Near the bottom are even more Twitter accounts. The only bad thing about this page is that asides from the hashtag widget at the top, the rest of the page requires refreshing in order to see new information. Hopefully, Dimension has a decent server to put […]

[Continue Reading...]

WordCamp Phoenix Live Video Stream

3
responses
by
on
November 11th, 2009
in
wordcamp

This weekend will be packed with WordCamp goodness starting with WordCamp Phoenix on Friday the 13th and WordCamp New York on Saturday the 14th as well as Sunday the 15th, both of which still have tickets available. However, if you can not make it to WordCamp Phoenix, the great news is that it will be live video streamed in its entirety thanks to their sponsorship with GoDaddy. Simply point your browsers to their Live Video page and the event will be streamed starting at 9AM Mountain time. Also check out the schedule of events in case you only want to tune in during a certain session. Because of a lack of WiFi and bandwidth at WordCamp New York, there will be no live audio or video streams. *UPDATE* Just found out that WordCamp Victoria in Canada is also this weekend.

[Continue Reading...]

For Our Canadian Friends

6
responses
by
on
November 9th, 2009
in
LinkyLoo

Just wanted to pass along another WordPress resource site to put in your bookmarks or RSS feed, especially if you’re Canadian called WordPress Canada. The site is managed by Len Kutchma, the same person who has been doing a great job providing feedback and even testing some of the themes being submitted to the New Theme release section of the WeblogToolsCollection forums. The site aims to bring you all the goodness happening throughout the world of WordPress albeit with a Canadian twist. If you feel like traveling a bit of Canada through WordPress news, be sure to check out Planet WordPress Canada which Len is a member of.

[Continue Reading...]

Watch Out For The Gumblar Botnet

6
responses
by
on
November 6th, 2009
in
WordPress Security

According to the blog Unmask Parasites, there is a new version of the Gumblar botnet making the rounds on PHP based websites. Back in May of this year, this malicious botnet was responsible for infecting a large number of websites in a short period of time. This time around however, the Gumblar botnet has buggy code which is leading to a number of infected WordPress sites breaking. WordPress is a complex web application that comprises more than 200 .php files. When you open any page, WordPress loads index.php which, in turn, loads many other .php files using the require() function. WordPress admin interface also relies on multiple .php files. In all cases, WordPress loads wp-config.php file which contains database credentials and other important information required for normal operation. So what happens if both index.php and wp-config.php are infected with the gumblar backdoor scripts? Since Gumblar injects identical backdoor scripts into […]

[Continue Reading...]

WordPress 2.9 Revamps Hello World

17
responses
by
on
November 5th, 2009
in
WordPress

During the WordPress development chat today, one of the topics of discussion centered around the suggestion of changing the Hello World post that is seen with every new install of WordPress to something that contained useful WordPress specific information such as links to the release mailing list, the codex and other helpful material. I’d like to break down how this change came about to show how easy it is to contribute to the WordPress project without writing a line of code. It first started out as a discussion on the WordPress Hackers mailing list concerning the addition of email notifications to the core of WordPress to keep administrators abreast of new versions of WordPress as they were released. The discussion became long winded but a response by Lynne Pope provided one of those why didn’t I think of that moments. Change the sample data – instead of, “this is a […]

[Continue Reading...]

WordPress 2.8 Visual Cheat Sheet

3
responses
by
on
November 4th, 2009
in
LinkyLoo

Antonio Lupetti of Woorkup.com has created and released an awesome visual cheat sheet for WordPress 2.8. The cheat sheet contains a practical reference guide to 2.8 with references to WP Template Tags as well as sample code. Definitely worthy of being added to your resources bin. Check out the live demo before you download the guide.

[Continue Reading...]

WordPress Warriors From Across The World

9
responses
by
on
November 3rd, 2009
in
WordPress

How cool would it be to take a look at a Google map to see if there are any WordPress fans near your location? Thanks to a new site called WPWorldmap.net, now you can. The site is made up of a Google map with a draggable window that contains the options to sign up or to apply filters such as fans, core developers, users/bloggers, etc. The other neat thing about this site is that it shows upcoming WordCamp events across the world. Signing up was a breeze and if you use Twitter, you can use your account to sign up while also following anyone who has registered to the site already. Of course, WPWorldMap is only as helpful as the amount of people who decide to signup and appropriately apply their approximate location so if interested, sign up and leave your mark. You might be surprised by the number of […]

[Continue Reading...]

How Would You Leverage The WordPress Community?

36
responses
by
on
October 30th, 2009
in
WordPress

One of the most difficult tasks I see for the WordPress project in the next 1-2 years is creating a place to harness the power of the WordPress community into a central location. In my opinion, the WordPress community is like peanut butter, spread across the web really thin. You have to be subscribed to a bunch of different blogs throughout the community in order to get a grasp as to what is happening with the WordPress project. Other than enthusiast sites, you have to know which mailing lists to subscribe to, the developments prologue site, attend the developer chats, and occasionally read a WordPress centric blog post or two from one of the core developers in order to figure out what is going on. I don’t like this situation. Instead, I would love to see a community portal developed on the WordPress.org site that contains the tools necessary to […]

[Continue Reading...]



Obviously Powered by WordPress. © 2003-2013

css.php