Let’s just assume you’re a procrastinator. Let’s assume you intended to attend WordCamp Philly but you didn’t pick one up before they sold out for the year. It’s probably safe to say that’s the case, since you’re still reading this post. No worries, we have a few tickets available if you’re looking for one at this, the last possible minute.
For details about how you can grab one of the five tickets we have to give away click past the jump.
The folks at AppSumo are running a big deal on Premise today. Premise is the landing page plugin from Copyblogger Media, the same team of folks behind StudioPress since they all joined forces. Premise is normally $165 for unlimited API usage and support, but in today’s deal it’s just $95.
That’s cool, but that’s not really what you want right this second is it? You’re looking for the free stuff.
Thanks to AppSumo and Premise, we have five of these Premise memberships to give away. Instead of $165, or $95, or even $2, these five memberships are completely free. If you want one, here’s how to get it.
At WPCandy we love giveaways. Technically speaking, you (the reader) love giveaways, and we just love giving you what you want. Semantic issues aside, everyone’s happy today.
In addition to powering WPCandy the last few days, the team at PressCoders has been kind enough to offer up five copies of their recently released Big Shot WordPress theme. Big Shot is a business theme packed full of things like content sliders, page templates, and sidebar controls.
AppSumo is running a deal for Themify themes on their site. More specifically they are running a deal wherein a bundle of 17 Themify themes could fall into your lap for just $75. Your metaphorical, digital lap, of course.
That’s a savings of $510 (or 87%) on those themes, which is a good deal. But we have an even dealier deal for you: a free bundle, for 10 of you, just for commenting on this post.
Shortcodes were introduced into WordPress back in version 2.5, and clever developers are still finding ways to take advantage of them. At the very least you’ve probably inserted galleries into your posts, which are driven by a built-in gallery shortcode. Perhaps you’ve used shortcodes for other things too.
In any case, shortcodes can be extremely handy. A new plugin called Shortcodes Pro (available on CodeCanyon) from Matt Varone hopes to make the process of creating and managing shortcodes even easier. Instead of requiring the editing of PHP code, Varone’s plugin enables the creation and editing of shortcodes within a plugin settings screen. And we all know shortcodes belong in plugins, not themes, right?
Shortcodes Pro will allow you to create as many shortcodes as you want, and then connect them to custom TinyMCE buttons in the visual editor. You can check out the key features in screencasts that Varone put together on his site.
Lucky for you, we have two copies of the Shortcodes Pro plugin to give away today.
In order to win a copy of this plugin, all you have to do is leave a comment describing your favorite use for shortcodes. Do you use them for your clients, or just to make your own blogging life easier? We’ll select two comments in 24 hours and send the plugins on over.
Our friends at AppSumo have a special 24 hour deal for lovers of WordPress. Until 12:00 a.m. CST May 4th, you can get the pdf copy of Digging into WordPress, fully updated for WordPress 3.1, for only $15. It’s a $27 value.
Digging into WordPress is a book masterfully crafted by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. The book is very user friendly with clickable links, colorful graphics, built-in searchability, and of course plenty of WordPress goodness for beginners and advanced developers alike. Digging Into WordPress 3.1 even has a nifty ‘wide-screen’ feature so the pdf displays on the screen just like the book would in your real live hands.
When Jeff and Chris aren’t self publishing WordPress books, they can often be found dropping knowledge at their blog, DigWP. So if you want to get a sampling of the quality of content to expect from the book, check it out.
In order to promote the deal, AppSumo kindly offered WPCandy three free copies for you, our readers. Our giveaway is running the same 24 hours as the AppSumo discount. Three comments from this post will be randomly selected to win a copy of the book. So comment if you’d like to win a free copy, and please share why you want the DigWP book.
But if I buy it and win, then what?
If you win our contest and buy the book, AppSumo will refund the money from your purchase. So, nothing to lose! It’s a great opportunity to get an incredible book for dirt cheap (yep, dirt, I checked), and if you win the contest too, it’ll put an extra skip in your step.
What are you waiting on?
Congratulations to Robert Thompson, Free and Easy Blog, and Maor Barazany on winning! The book has been emailed to you from AppSumo.
I should say multiple winners. Yep, we’re giving the choice of swag from the official WordPress Swag Store to two people for guessing what MassivePress is.
The intent of MassivePress was announced at WordCamp Phoenix. There was only one problem. There ended up being two announcements, and both were guessed. You WPCandy readers are so smart. But of course, that’s why you read WPCandy.
Drumroll please… The winners are Joachim Kudish and Scott Reilly. Joachim guessed most accurately what MassivePress is and Scott absolutely nailed the WordCon surprise announcement. You can view their exact comments by following the name links.
Congratulations to both of you! Head on over to WPSwagStore.com and pick out your item!
And remember, the more you help power this community, the more fun stuff like this we can do!
You probably know by now that Release Candidate 3 has been released for WordPress 3.1. Andrew Nacin announced the release on the WordPress.org blog on January 22nd.
Unfortunately, RC3 brought some bad news: the abandonment of the AJAX list tables. Nacin said they will come back in a later version, but “in a form that is properly and fully implemented.” Fortunately, column sorting is still going to be implemented, just not in the sexy Ajaxified way. This change means that RC3 is significantly different than RC2, and users and developers are encouraged to test as much as possible.
Nacin and others had a WordPress meetup in Washington DC to test, but now would be a good time to do your own testing as well. If you think you find a bug, report it to the alpha / beta forum, the WordPress testers mailing list, or in a ticket on trac.
In light of the many recent changes, and my previously awful guessing as to when 3.1 will launch, we thought it would be fun to start a little pool to guess the 3.1 release date. And because we are in such a giving mood, the closest guess will get their choice of one item in the WordPress swag store.
Feel free to guess the week, day, hour, or minute. The most accurate guess will win the prize. I’m going to make my guess Valentine’s Day, February 14th, at 11:11 a.m. Eastern standard time. You better beat me because I probably won’t look very good in a onesie, even if it bears a WordPress logo.
Not much is known about MassivePress. A teaser site went up a few months ago, and the MassivePress Twitter account tends to link up WordPress stuff intermittently, but not much more than that. The word on the street (or on Twitter) is that the kimono will be opened, so to speak, and the project itself will be fully revealed at WordCamp Phoenix this coming weekend.
A number of high-profile WordPress folks are a part of MassivePress: Lisa Sabin-Wilson (of WordPress for Dummies fame), Grant Griffiths (of Headway), Cory Miller (iThemes), Carl Hancock (Gravity Forms), Jason Schuller (Press75 and Theme Garden) and Michael Torbert (All in One SEO). We know who they are, of course. But exactly what they are up to: no one really knows.
We’ll find out this weekend at WordCamp Phoenix, and you can bet that WPCandy will be first on top of it with the full story.
But let’s have some fun with this, aye? Launches, and more specifically mystery, is always fun to play around with.
Today was Matt Mullenweg’s 27th birthday, and in a reflective post he listed off his big launches of 2010: VaultPress, the new Akismet, his Ma.tt WordPress themes, a number of WordPress mobile apps, Audrey Capital, and the WordPress Foundation. We don’t typically cover other people’s blog posts like this; we just link them up in our weekend WordPress community links posts. But there was something else said in Mullenweg’s post, when he was listing his goals for 2011:
Launch secret new thing, code abbreviation JP.
Naturally, that has us thinking. Just what could “JP” stand for? What is the secret thing Mullenweg wants to launch in 2011? We don’t know, but we figured we can have some fun with it. Take your best guess in the comments, and whenever that project of his launches (whether next week or December 2011) we’ll revisit this post and award the closest guess with their choice of WordPress swag from the WordPress Swag Store.
Think you know what it will be? Just to recap:
Keep in mind, “JP” could be a personal project, or another core Automattic product like ValutPress. There’s really no way to know right now, except that Mullenweg is excited about it.
So what do you think “JP” could be?
