WPCandy

Hey guys, Michael Mistretta here. I’ve just arrived at Wordcamp Toronto 2008. The place is alive and buzzing full of blogging geeks from across the GTA. The intro speech is going on now, as we thank all of the sponsors that made Wordcamp Toronto possible. Stay tuned throughout the day as we update this blog with info and photos from the event.

10:00

Joseph Thornley opens up talking on Blogging as a Cornerstone of Social Media. He touches on the concept of the Internet moving from other people creating content that we consume to a medium where anyone, anywhere can create content on many different levels.

Blogging has gone mainstream to the point where the British Prime Minister updates a blog regularly. An important part of choosing a blogging platform is the community around the platform. Wordpress has over 3000 plugins and 500 themes, along with a thriving support forum. “That’s a sense of community”.

10:25

Talking to WP plugin developers in the audience. The developer of WPhone for the iPhone, OpenID commenting, along with others who have developed Top Links, WPDiso plugin. Lots of developers contributing to the development of Wordpress and it’s extension. Some of the developers utilizing Wordpress in innovative ways from the audience:

• Pv3 World
• SGT Splatters
• Phug
• Live Conference
• Nevada Law Foundation
• KSM Law
• MIT EF Link
• Cherry Vale
• Garth Weblog

Taking a quick 20 minute break to get a bite to eat. Back with Matt Mullenweg in a few.

11:00 - 11:30

Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress is giving a talk on the State of The Word. There is now 6 million Wordpress.org blogs with over 1000 posts per day. Akismet blocks 5 billion spam comments a year, and Matt and the WordPress team are working towards a WP theme repository that will make finding WP themes as easy as plugins.

Some of the more popular WP plugins being activated: Adsense (#24), Hello Dolly (#12), OpenID (#145). Top 10 plugins: cforms, wp-polls, wp automatic upgrade, wp-cache, wp database backup, stats, nextgen-gallery, google sitemaps, all-in-one-seo-pack, with the number one being akismet.









11:30 - 12:30

Matt gives us a preview of WordPress 2.7 due in November. This update includes a dramatic dashboard redesign that makes it easier to navigate and access different aspects of the Wordpress backend. The navigation bar runs against the left side of the window, and expands different categories. It can be collapsed for more workspace.

One of the coolest demos was the customizable write panel. You can simply drag and drop sections around, hide certain boxes that you use infrequently, and move boxes you use all the time to the top. These preferences are all user-customizable, and are saved as cookies which remember your settings.

Finally, WordPress is having a big push towards modal and media blogging, making it easier to post pictures, videos, and linked lists, that have a visibly different style than regular articles. Matt mentioned that they put a lot of resources into usability testing, and make user interface elements more intuitive (like placing a proper ‘edit’ button on the comment moderation section).






1:15 - 2:00

Rannie Turingan details the power of WordPress galleries, and taking blogs beyond simply text. With a good Q&A session and a walkthrough on how to setup and customize your own Wordpress gallery. The audience was “wowed” by the power of galleries, especially with the demo of Rannie’s own personal photography portfolio site.

Lots of dropped hints to Matt Mullenweg about requested features during the session.

If you remember, a little over two weeks ago, we were looking for a WordPress developer for an upcoming project. That project is here. Today we’d like to announce WPCoder, the most affordable and quality-ensured PSD-to-WordPress turnaround site on the net. Read more…

Developing a theme for public release isn’t an easy task. When you’re the only one using your theme you don’t have to worry about expanding it, but put it into the hands of other users and it better be ready for any content they throw at it. Blockquotes, lists, and floating images - there are plenty of elements that are common to blogs that need to be supported in every theme you release. Cue our new sample WordPress content. Read more…

Ian Stewart has been hard at work experimenting with WordPress - first with the Thematic framework, and now with some awesome child themes. He’s also played with custom hooks and filters, and now includes some pretty helpful ones with Thematic. Confused? You probably are. Let’s get down on a more basic level and learn what Ian is doing, and then you’ll see why his latest work has been so influential. Read more…

A few weeks ago I got the idea of creating a “starter theme” to work from when I’m beginning to port an HTML template to WordPress. After I’ve finished the mock-ups in XHTML and CSS, it’s always the same process: copy the style.css to the theme folder, chop up the HTML into various PHP files, tweak some stuff, and ship off the theme. During that process I often find myself going back to the default theme for various tags, formats, and templates. Read more…

WPForSale is a new site that is focused on providing WordPress users with premium products and resources, and helping WordPress designers and developers sell their work.

Many WordPress users are not aware of many of the valuable products out there. That’s where WPForSale comes in. They showcase the latest and greatest premium products, so users have only one-stop place to check.

WPForSale was built by and currently managed by Bernadot Studios, based in La Crosse, WI, USA. They’re passionate about WordPress and use it as their premier platform, “because the flexibility, community and ease of WordPress is unmatched”.

Scott, the site manager, says they’ve “personally found the premium themes and plugins very useful in our buisness, as it saves tons of time getting a project started and eases management for our clients”.

WPForSale also provides valuable WordPress tips and tricks to help users with their sites. Their site is new, but Scott says there’s much more to come and to expect some new (top secret) additions to the site.

The other day when I was checking my e-mail, I found a nice little surprise in my inbox from Tung Do, aka Small Potato, the previous owner of WPDesigner.com. He said he had just got back from Thailand, which was a fun and an eye opening experience.

He also mentioned he was disappointed with how WPDesigner turned out, and although the Themes Club is Pawel’s responsibility, if WPDesigner remains inactive and Pawel does nothing with the site until January 2009, he’ll personally refund the current paying members (only to the customers in his PayPal records). So if you’re worried about your $5, fear not.

What do you guys think is going to happen? Do you think Pawel will come back from the grave and bring WPDesigner back to life?

Twitter is awesome. It’s a great tool for quick communication and an even more awesome tool for social networking. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know I’m quite active and love to tweet (update my status) with funny and random things, but still talk about news on WordPress.

Anyways, Twitter is only fun when you’re following certain people. If you follow boring people who tweet about boring stuff, your timeline gets backed up with boring crap. That’s boring, obviously.

Here’s a list of the Twitter users, that I follow, that tweet most about WordPress news.

Read more…