How Renku works
Renku is a service, yet in beta, that will offer a plugin purchasing experience through the WordPress dashboard. Ryan McCue explained how Renku works in a recent blog post.
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My PressNomics invitation
I’ll definitely be attending this year’s PressNomics event in November. Who else is planning on attending, either by invite or standard registration she€n it’s available?
If you haven’t yet, be sure to read over the PressNomics feature I published when they announced the event.
About a month ago I began accepting podcast sponsorships for the WordPress podcasts we publish here on the blog. This week is the first available sponsorship slot since that announcement.
If you’d like to support the shows on WPCandy and want to reach a very interested community of WordPress users and developers, see the advertising page and get in touch. That page also includes up to date statistics on episode downloads.
Speaking of podcasts, there will be a slew of them going up later today. We rescheduled WP Late Night to tonight, and we also have the standard Weekly Theme Show and WPCandy Podcast recording times. I’d say it will be a good day for fans of WordPress audio.
If you spend any time on the WordPress.org plugin directory (or heard us talking about it on any of WPCandy’s podcasts last week) then you likely noticed a few updates. Matt Mullenweg described the tweaks himself over on the WordPress.org news blog, which is worth reading if you want to know the thinking behind the changes.
Briefly, the updates included:
- Support forum threads are now pulled into their own tab, complete with the plugin’s header graphic at the top (assuming your plugin uses one of these).
- Logged in users can now favorite plugins, which will display on their WordPress.org profile page.
- Plugin authors are back in the right sidebar, and styled a bit nicer than before.
- The plugin sidebar also includes the number of forum threads resolved in the last couple of weeks to help and point out active plugins.
If you’d like to take a look at these updates in action, check out the BuddyPress plugin page for an example, complete with header image.
The WordPress.org team completed the updates last week (along with the latest addition to Audrey Capital) during a BBQ week in Memphis. As Matt said in his post:
This is why WordCamps usually have BBQ – it imparts magical coding powers.
Had you noticed the updates to the plugin directory before seeing the announcement, or this post? Let us know what you think of them in the comments.
WordPress theme SEO marketing gimmick
Developer Jason Bobich:
Why should you be limited to whatever features the theme author has stuffed in that may or may not be relevant to you? You should be able to choose your own SEO plugin to accomplish what you want.
A couple of months old, but still worth linking up. It’s great to see theme sellers on ThemeForest speaking out against others there following bad practices.
If you’ve awaited news on WordCamp Edinburgh UK 2012 and when ticket sales start, then today is your lucky day. You can now get your hands on an early bird ticket for £35, as long as you order it before June 1st when it increases to £45. The ticket price entitles you to two days worth of speakers and a social event on Saturday night. What more could you want?
Sponsorships are also available, ranging from £75 to £1,000 (which covers the official social event on Saturday night).
So are you looking forward to WordCamp Edinburgh UK and your visit to Scotland?
WordPress developer and self-described “prolific plugin developer” Scott Reilly has joined Audrey Capital, Matt Mullenweg’s angel investment and research company. Reilly joins Audrey’s other developers Andrew Nacin and Samuel (Otto) Wood to work on WordPress.org and whatever other special projects come their way.
Reilly has contributed to WordPress since 2004, both by contributing patches to core and by developing and releasing many, many plugins. Odds are you’ve used at least one of his slew of plugins at one point or another — I’ve certainly praised his plugin work time and time again.
Developers at Audrey Capital, put simply, work on whatever projects Mullenweg assigns. Their work often includes work on WordPress.org (the website) and other community initiatives. The work often coincides with the consumption of barbecue, as it did this past week.
WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Austin are happening this weekend. Actually, they’re happening right now. Since it’s far too late to snag a ticket and run over there (far, far too late), I suggest you attend the events in whatever way you can:
- WordCamp Seattle: #wcsea hashtag on Twitter and the livestream of all three stages
- WordCamp Austin: #wcatx hashtag on Twitter
Just because you can’t be there doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy (part of) the show. And hey, while you’re here in this post, why don’t you share the next WordCamp you plan to attend in the flesh. Visit WordCamp Central to see the events happening all over planet Earth in the near future.
“I’m just a huge supporter of having all these small businesses built around WordPress, whether individuals or small companies,” Pete Davies told me over the phone. “And I know there’s stuff that people struggle with everyday, and stuff you can’t help them with in the WordPress forums.”
Davies is the Premium Services Lead at Automattic, and the lead on the latest Code Poet project. He and his team have expanded CodePoet.com from a directory of high-end WordPress consultants into a resource site for anyone building website — or ”making things” — with WordPress.
The new CodePoet.com, or rather build.CodePoet.com, offers two free ebooks, interviews with WordPress professionals, and a collection of resources the team has curated that they think other Code Poets would find useful. The listings, or Code Poet Directory, can now be found at directory.codepoet.com.
I’m happy to present episode number two of the WPCandy Roundtable Podcast, this time with the BuddyPress Core Team of John James Jacoby, Boone Gorges, and Paul Gibbs. They spoke for just over an hour about issues of interest to them within the BuddyPress community, and where things are going in the near future.
This episode is sponsored by the upcoming WordPress service Raft.io and the Typecase plugin by UpThemes.
- MP3 file (41.8 MB)
- Subscribe on iTunes (coming soon!)
- Audio RSS Feed
The gentleman also wanted me to say that if there were further questions you had about BuddyPress after listening, you’re welcome to leave them here and they will stop by and have a look at them.
