Author Archives: Brian Krogsgard

Page.ly wants every theme and plugin shop to be a SaaS platform

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Pagely is announcing a number of new partnership opportunities today for their managed WordPress hosting service. They’ve spent months prepping their in-house API in order to offer a revamped reseller program, and even cooler, a partner program that allows theme and plugin shops to offer seamless hosting services to their clients.

The underlying infrastructure is the same for both the reseller and the partner API programs, but how Pagely partners with users of each program is different. The partner API program is especially exciting, and I’ll explain more about it later in this post. But Pagely is offering more today than the new API. They are also running a birthday deal.

Pagely is turning 3 years old in September, and to celebrate they are offering a really low price of $19 per month for six months of service, for any plan. That’s $30 off the basic plan and $780 off for their pro plan. If you’ve ever wanted to try Pagely, then you should do so now.

Now, let’s talk about this API

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WordPress.com got a facelift

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The WordPress.com homepage has a purrty new look for logged out users. The team at Automattic created a more modern look that targets potential new users directly. The post image above is from one of the new slides letting users know that WordPress.com is a perfect place to blog your cat pictures. There are a few other slides for other… umm, niches.

The new design also shows a couple of random themes from the .com theme showcase (which also just got a small redesign and some performance enhancements) as samples of what is available. And there’s a fancy graphic for all the networks you can share content on from within the platform. The option to enable a custom domain is also highly visible.

In case you are wondering, the headline font on the new design is Lato Ultra-Light, which in my non-designer-and-therefore-worthless-opinion, looks delicious.

Go give it a look if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s likely many WPCandy readers are logged into WP.com most of the time, but now you know what your friends will see when you recommend to them the easiest way to get started with a blog.

edit: I’ve learned (thanks Matt Thomas!) Joen Asmussen was primarily responsible for the redesign. Go say hi to him on Twitter if you liked his work!

Raven releases free schema generation plugin for WordPress

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Periodically, I hear about a plugin that just makes me say, “Yes!” Today is one of those days. Raven Internet Marketing Tools, the company behind some incredibly popular SEO and internet marking tools, has released a free WordPress plugin that makes creating schema data dead simple.

Raven worked with well known WordPress developer Andrew Norcross to create the plugin, aptly named Schema Creator. Though the announcement for Schema Creator is not yet live, the plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository for your consumption. I’ve given it a spin myself, and considering I already knew Andrew Norcross was a great developer (seriously, follow him on Twitter or something), I’m not surprised that it works exactly as advertised.

How to use the Schema Creator plugin

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Making the most out of WordCamp

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People are descending on San Francisco from around the world as I type. I leave tomorrow morning earlier than I go to bed some nights. WordCamp is an excellent opportunity to meet a ton of people in the WordPress community. Most normal people (myself included) only get to attend one or two a year at best. Let’s make the best of it!

Here are some ways to make the most out of WordCamp:

Don’t be afraid

Introduce yourself to people around you. There’s a chance you use one of their themes or plugins. Maybe the person next to you wrote the code for your favorite WordPress feature. They’re right next to you! Talk to them.

Do you know someone you admire in the community will be at WordCamp? Track them down! Maybe not in a weird stalkerish way, but make sure you find them and let them know that you appreciate what they do, or let them know you use their stuff. I bet it’s hard for anyone to get sick of hearing that. Don’t be intimidated!

Here’s the attendees list for WordCamp San Francisco so you’ll know who’s going.

Get out of your personal boundaries

“I’m a designer.” Or, “I’m a developer.” Or, “I’m a marketer.” So what! Check out a couple of sessions that make your head spin.

You’re probably pretty good at what you do, and there’s likely a lot to of good subject matter on that at your WordCamp. But if you’re a developer, you don’t have to stay in the development track all day. Crawl over to a design session, or better yet, a user session. Sometimes seeing what’s important to other types of people will open your eyes to how you can do your own job better.

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Wireframes emerge for a new WordPress media management interface

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photo via Daryl’s slides


Wireframes for a new WordPress media management interface have emerged on the Make WordPress UI blog. Daryl Koopersmith posted the wireframes, and noted that he worked very closely with Dave Martin, Andrew Nacin, and Mark Jaquith on the project. I should forewarn you that they are amazing. You really, really need to check them out.

The presentation is a complete walkthrough of managing media, including the a proposed process for adding and editing both images and galleries. And much more. Really, read it.

A few things in the proposed workflow are especially interesting to me:

  • The entire interface would be overhauled
  • With the new system, you’ll likely be able to insert multiple galleries into a post via the UI
  • Galleries should be able to include images not attached to the current post (the idea of “attaching” media could change entirely)
  • The window would not be a new pageload of WordPress. It would operate similarly to the link manager. Aka, it will be very fast.
  • Intuitive drag and drop sorting
  • Consistent “Add Media”, “Edit image”, and custom header UI
  • Images could be dragged straight to the editor to add them

Please remember that these are wireframes, not code. Some or all or none of this could be included in WordPress 3.5/6/7. However, as any WordPress development armchair quarterback could tell you, a media overhaul has been in high demand for a while. It looks like the team is really dedicated to it right now.

Go read the post. And read the comments. There is a great discussion going on. Also, there will likely be a lot of discussion about this at WordCamp San Francisco, especially for the Sunday hack day. There are two relevant tickets to the project on Trac: #21390, and #21391.

Major kudos to the UI team. I’m quite happy about this, and I bet most of you are too!

WP Engine launches seamless integration with git

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WP Engine announced on their blog today that they have launched seamless git integration into their platform for WordPress developers. Up to this point, version control has seen relatively little integration in the WordPress community, despite it being common practice in many software applications. Seeing a major player in the WordPress hosting business integrate version control directly into their systems is pretty exciting.

If you aren’t familiar with version control, check out this visual guide to get familiar with the concept. However, most of us have probably had at least some experience with it, and projects like Github (recently funded for $100 million), are completely focused on version control, have absolutely exploded in popularity.

WP Engine has guided documentation for creating your initial repository based on their built-in snapshot feature, so that developers who didn’t previously use version control (and should) can quickly get up to speed. Of course, some customers don’t need version control, and can continue to utilize WP Engine’s staging and production setup as they always have. Version control offers considerable power, but it can get very messy if you don’t know what you’re doing. I recommend you check out these resources if you are new to the concept of working with git.

Those of you familiar with git will feel right at home. The integration they’ve developed from the git codebase is based on git-push-to-deploy, and operates similarly to other services like Github and Bitbucket, except that it is integrated directly from your local install to your hosting environment. Users can deploy to a staging environment or directly to production.

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Dear theme developers, this is how you add scripts in WordPress themes

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properly enqueue scripts in WordPress themes
There are a lot of themes out there. And a ton of them are not including javascript files properly. So theme developers, please pay attention: this is how to include scripts in your themes properly. And guess what? It’s really easy.

Let’s lay some groundwork:

  1. This example would go in your functions.php file.
  2. This example assumes your theme is a parent theme.

In this example, I’m registering four scripts, and enqueuing two. I’ll explain it afterward.

Now let’s break it down

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ZippyKid wants to be your development playground with MyZippyKid

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ZippyKid introduces MyZippyKidZippyKid, a managed WordPress hosting provider, wants to be the go-to host for WordPress developers. They’ve launched a beta project called MyZippyKid, which offers a suite of apps to help developers create, manage and clone websites, all for free. The only time you have to pay is if you launch the site and want to stay with ZippyKid in a live environment.

Vid Luther, the owner of ZippyKid, let me have a look around MyZippyKid beta, and I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far. The project is still in development, so I haven’t been able to fully manage a project, but once they get ready it’s going to be a very nice environment for developers. He’s also got quite a bit planned for the future of MyZippyKid, including the ability to integrate Google Analytics, manage SSL certificates, custom domain name integration, and commercial theme management, all in one place.

The beta program is currently available to existing ZippyKid customers, but for the rest of us, they’ve released a video preview of what you can expect. You can view it after the jump.

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Joost de Valk wants to know about your host

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Joost de Valk is running a survey to inquire about your WordPress hosting setups. He plans to run some testing on different hosts and show which hosts are properly supporting WordPress customers. He’s specifically wanting more samples from any Europeans out there. Go give his survey a couple minutes of your time, and let’s all sit back and see what he does with it. I know I’m interested.

Pressbit 008: Thinking out loud about WordPress business models

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Pressbit 008 is ready for your listening ears. In this Pressbit I talk about WordPress business models, giving a proof of concept that (I hope) helps get across the point that there are a lot of business models in our industry that are still untapped.

Listen here:

If you would rather download it directly you can do that, or subscribe to this show via RSS or on iTunes. If you would prefer a written summary, you can also read that just after the jump.

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