Monthly Archives: February 2012

Aftertaste #4: After WP Late Night 03

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Jake Goldman and Brad Williams hung around for a few minutes after the end of WP Late Night episode 3, and we chatted casually a bit more. Aftertaste is, of course, our podcast for the after show. Listen to this one for episode title debates, some amount of inside baseball, and to find out why I start cursing at Brad toward the end.

Listen now, if you like:

If you’d like you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or directly to the RSS feed.  If you would like to download the podcast in MP3 format directly, you can do so here.

WP Late Night #3: “BruddyPress” edition

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In episode 3 of WP Late Night, the “BruddyPress” edition, Jake Goldman of 10up joins Brad and I as guest host. Dre Armeda was feeling under the weather this week, so we wish him well and a speedy recovery. In this episode we discussed upcoming WordCamps, the BuddyPress codex, version control, complex themes, and — well, at this point you’d be best just listening to the episode. It’s a good one.

Check out the various ways to listen after the jump, or get straight to listenin’ below:

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Automattic releases new _s starter theme

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The folks from Automattic just this week released the _s theme, pronounced “underscores”. It’s their team’s attempt at a better and more flexible starter theme. The new theme is a fork of Toolbox, which was the starter theme used to build the free and premium themes on WordPress.com.

Toolbox worked, but the fact that people had used it as a parent theme meant that making drastic improvements would break things up. As Theme Wrangler Ian Stewart explained, this meant a change was worthwhile:

Unfortunately, we wound up in a situation with Toolbox where we wanted to make some more drastic improvements to it as a starter theme but got a little stuck. We had people using it as a Parent Theme and that meant that the simplest id or class change could become a problem. Simply changing an id of #branding to #masthead in the template is enough to break most CSS.

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WP Late Night Episode #3 records live tonight at 8PM EST

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The WP Late Night crew (that’s myself, Brad Williams, and Dre Armeda) are recording episode three of the show tonight live on the WPCandy Stream. The show will start at 8pm EST, so don’t forget to set those alarm clocks fancy iPhone alarm apps whatever the cool kids are using nowadays.

Until then, why not catch up on WP Late Night episodes one and two? Episode two is part of the current WPCandy Stream playlist, so you could just hang out there too.

If you have WordPress questions or comments to send in to the show, you can do so by:

  • Commenting on a show post (like this one)
  • Leaving a voicemail at (815) 322-WPLN
  • Emailing us at wplatenight@wpcandy.com
  • Tweeting using the #wplatenight hashtag.

Hope to see you in the chatroom tonight!

Aftertaste #3: After The Weekly Theme Show 01

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This Aftertaste episode was recorded after recording the first-ever episode of The Weekly Theme Show. It’s mostly a rehash of what was discussed, what could be done better, and a bit of thinking for future shows. It is just what the Aftertaste specializes in: casual conversations on any topic whatsoever.

Jump right into listening:

Subscribe to the show on iTunes (coming soon), or directly to the RSS feed.  If you would like to download the podcast in MP3 format directly, you can do so here.

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Crowd Favorite takes a day, switches from SVN to Git

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With our ongoing clients we are commonly engaged in building new features and functionality while also needing to be able to make smaller changes (hotfixes) that are pushed up immediately. With Git it is easy for us to maintain development of more involved functionality in feature branches and still being able to push up quick changes as needed.

Alex King’s blog post explains their thought process, and a bit about their new setup.

The Weekly Theme Show #1: Probably won’t air edition

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This is the Week of New PodcastsTM, is it not? The Weekly Theme Show is a brand new audio production featuring myself and two people you probably don’t know. This show will discuss WordPress themes, weekly, from a user’s perspective (and not a developer’s).

Justin Jones and Nicholas Weaver, who I can now proudly call co-hosts as well as friends, are both WordPress users here in my city. You’ll get to know them better as the show goes on and they post here more often, but right now all you need to know is that they use WordPress and WordPress themes a lot.

Jump straight into listening:

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Obox Themes attempts to solve complex theme setup process with color-coded widgets

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Commercial themes are sometimes a bit on the complex side. WordPress theme shop Obox is attempting to improve their own theme setup process, or what David Perel calls “a nightmare“. Perel says Obox is working on a number of different ideas now, but their first is just recently out the door: color-coded widgets.

He explains:

Since our theme home pages use widgets for flexibility we have decided that that is where we should focus our attention. The result is color coding our widgets. […]

This way we can explain items in their simplest form. No longer do we have to come up with documentation to fix a fundamental problem in theme design. We can now say, “Put blue in the blue box.”

Perel and his team hope that color-coding their widgets (pictured above, larger version at Obox) will help reduce the documentation and steps needed to set up their themes. Right now they are available in their selecta, Casual, Handmade, and Handmade eCommerce themes.

Personally I’m not sold on the usefulness of this yet, but I’m intrigued by the idea. What do you think?

BuddyPress and bbPress Codexes see big updates

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Last weekend, when everyone else was taking a break, John James Jacoby took the time out to refresh the BuddyPress Codex along with creating the new bbPress Codex too. Both are running on WordPress.

In the announcement made on the BuddyPress.org blog Jacoby said:

You may not know it but we’ve had a codex here at BuddyPress.org since the early days. It’s mostly made life really difficult and forced everyone into the forums or to other sites for help. Today, I’m really happy to report that the core team has spent some time this weekend to finally refresh the BuddyPress Codex.

No official announcement was posted on the bbPress blog, but it was mentioned on Twitter.

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PliablePress closes its doors

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Michael Martin, founder of PliablePress, announced that they’ve closed their doors. Martin didn’t provide a reason why they are closing their doors, but said:

I’m sorry to say that PliablePress is now closed. If you’ve been with us for a while, this likely comes as little surprise. It’s been a long time since I was able to put a lot of time into our themes, and lately, even the support has suffered badly.

I think that’s the clearest sign that it’s just not fair to keep accepting new signups, so PliablePress is closing down for good now.

Martin has offered up some “lite” support for any users that are having major issues. Additionally, he is refunding anyone that made a purchase in 2012. Lastly, he’s also made all affiliate payments to make right with them.

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