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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.
Posted on Twitter by Brad Williams:
These WordPress dashboard header warnings are starting to remind me of annoying browser toolbars: awesomescreenshot.com/0ef59q573
Dang. I see what he means.
A couple of weeks ago we talked about Weaver II, the brainchild of Bruce Wampler, on The Weekly Theme Show. I finally completed my little side project I mentioned on that show.
Weaver II might have the largest set of options in any theme I’ve ever seen, and its only when they’re all laid out on one screen that you can really feel the heft of it. Weaver II is available on the WordPress.org theme directory.
Screenshot posted just after the jump, as well as a link to the full image.
My 82 year old grandmother heard that I was writing an article and her first response was “You should write it about sex. That’s all anybody talks about these days.”
I won’t be talking about sex. Instead I’m going to talk about why I include PressTrends in all of my themes and the problems that it has brought to the surface.
The bounce rate on this post just skyrocketed, didn’t it?
A few weeks ago Dustin Curtis (designer/blogger/self-described Villain) wrote about his experimental new blog network called Svbtle. Svbtle is the codename of both the network and the content management system running he created to run it. Curtis said that he decided to create his own blogging solution after being “irritated by the complexity and uninspiring nature of most blogging platforms.” Along with a minimalistic design and approach to blogging, Curtis is also (currently) only allowing those bloggers onto the network who he has invited on board.
Since the announcement in March, Svbtle has seen a bit of attention. 1 Soon after someone else released an open source clone of Svbtle on Github, which itself caused a heated discussion on Hacker News. 2
There are 23 members of Svbtle right now. A number of them have run their blog on WordPress before. A handful of the Svbtle members were using WordPress to power their blogs immediately before switching to Svbtle. It’s easy to write that off as little more than excitement over something new and exclusive, but perhaps there’s more to it.
Notes:
At WordCamp Phoenix a couple of weeks ago I presented a talk on WordPress and journalism. Specifically, I talked about how WordPress can empower those in the field of journalism. I’ll have the slides up soon, but the specifics of the presentation aren’t necessary at the moment.
My presentation was a part of the “My WP” track, a track that featured presentations on WordPress in various verticals. One talk focused on how creative people use WordPress, another focused on real estate, and another on non-profits and government. I don’t mean to say that Phoenix is the only camp to organize presentations on these kinds of topics, but walking away from the event, particularly after speaking within that track, I find myself excited about the possibilities that WordPress verticals bring.
As someone studying and writing a good deal about this particular industry, it is difficult to find inspiration sometimes. I think it happens, at least to me, when I spend a little too much time reading and absorbing the talk within the community itself. WordPress professionals talking to other WordPress professionals is a lot of fun, but it’s also a bit of insider talk. It’s not representative of the full influence that WordPress has on the world.
Magazine themes are quite alluring. Sliders, pictures, columns, unique blocks of different content on demos. But beyond the perfectly crafted demo marketed to entice you to purchase what you’ve convinced yourself you must have, you probably don’t need it at all.
I’m willing to bet almost no content driven website actually needs a “magazine” layout. In fact, for those that utilize them, it may hurt what’s most important to their bottom line — me, the reader. My page views and my time on their site.
A subject finally getting some attention in the WordPress community is i18n, or internationalization.
Internationalization is the process of making an application ready for translation. Often this gets confused with localization, which is the process by which the text on the page and other settings are translated and adapted to another language and culture.
Both internationalization and localization are equally important within WordPress, but there cannot be any localization if the theme or plugin has not been internationalized first. Therefore it is of utmost importance for WordPress theme and plugin developers to internationalize their software, regardless of whether it ever actually receives a translation into another language.
In the past couple of months we have seen more and more articles being published on the subject of internationalization. Some are even dripping with frustration!
I must admit that I have left frustrated comments on sites like WPCandy, WPBeginner, WPMU and the like, whenever something is promoted that is not properly internationalized. It seems I finally got someone’s attention as Ryan is the one who asked me to write this editorial after I left yet another frustrated comment on one of the articles published here.
For those whose native language is not English and who want to develop websites in more than one language, it is very frustrating to read any news about Fantastic Hypothetical Theme A or Cool Plugin B that were just released, only to realize after downloading that it is actually completely useless since it hasn’t be internationalized!
And do you know what is even worse? When said theme or plugin costs money (often called premium). Not only is that frustrating, it’s just wrong. Despite the number of features your theme or plugin has, if it has not been internationalized it shouldn’t be sold in the first place.
This is just not open for discussion. Internationalization should be common practice, not a feature!
Most theme authors have their own habits. Most habits will have a positive effect on themes, or least on the time it takes to develop themes. Developers sometimes forget, though, that there are Theme Development Standards everyone should use while coding themes. Some are more obvious than others, but none of them are that hard to stick to.
In the last few months I’ve heard of theme developers making silly mistakes. To name a few:
header.php instead of using proper functions,header.php instead of using sidebar.php (via Ryan Duff),header.php instead of using WordPress menus.For these mistakes and others popping up, consider this a reminder: there is a Theme Testing Process you can use to test your theme. Yet many themes out there aren’t even close to checking all the boxes on that list. Even on massively popular marketplaces like ThemeForest, there are themes that fail in the first few steps.
The WordPress.org and ThemeForest theme review team are already using the Unit Test to limit the number of poor quality themes out there. The next step is for theme developers follow these coding standards by default. With WordPress improving every single day, it’s time to improve the quality of all the great looking (but poorly coded) themes out there.
So with the new year closing in pretty quick, what are other New Year’s resolutions for theme developers? Just how high are we going to set the bar for WordPress themes in 2012?
WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” is out now and (hopefully you’ve noticed) we’ve gone through all the noteworthy features in a big blog post. But noteworthy is a relative term. The real question is: which feature is the noteoworthiest to you? Or, a better question using real words would be: which feature in WordPress 3.3 is your favorite?
Vote in the poll below, and stop by in the comments to let everyone know why you voted the way you did. You can pick up to two features when you vote.
For extra bonus points this post, check back on the results of our similar poll when 3.2 was released. Do the most popular features in that poll still effect your use of WordPress?
