WPCandy

Well, the launch date of WPInspiration.com (which has moved to November 1st), is quickly approaching and we’re really stoked about it. Dan dove into the development a little under a week ago and it’s been going great so far.

We want to make sure WPInspiration is in tip-top shape before it goes live, so we’re calling for all beta testers! If you’d like to help us make sure WPInspiration is pixel-perfect and every part of the site is working just right, then please reply in the comments. Once you’ve replied in the comments, we’ll send you an e-mail with a link to our development server URL and some information about the site. We’d love it if you could send us some decent feedback regarding any site bugs/errors, as well as your opinion on the design and functionality. If you’d like to participate in our beta testing, we need to have your comment by Saturday morning at 12pm EST, so reply ASAP.

Once WPInspiration launches, we’ll write a post here with more information about the site, including our upcoming plans.

WPInspiration Advertising Special

Last week we announced two new projects that will be launching in the next month or so: WPInspiration and WPBranding. Mike and I finalized the design yesterday and we’ve launched into the development stage, just over two weeks before our planned launch on the last Wednesday of October.

Today we’d like to make note of a special pre-launch advertising special for WPInspiration. From now until October 29th, we’re selling eight banner slots for just $35/mo for the first three months. After the site launches WPI ad rates for new advertisers will be bumped up to $50, so take advantage of this deal now to appear on the site on launch day when a large traffic surge is expected. E-mail us at hey@wpcandy.com if interested.

Advanced Developers Wanted

Do you consider yourself an advanced WordPress developer? We’re looking for some coders to appear as guest authors here on WPCandy and share some advanced WordPress techniques with our readers. Advanced loops, working with custom fields, or integrating advanced plugins are all topics that could be covered. All authors will be paid. Drop us a line at hey@wpcandy.com to discuss your ideas and rates with us.

What Do You Want to See?

Amidst this busy time for us of launching new sites and managing others, we want to focus more on the core of WPCandy that is content. Our articles and tutorials are the backbone of WPCandy, and we feel that it should be left up to you to decide what types of writing you’d like to see on this site.

More tutorials or a bit more advanced stuff? Another help sheet? More theme and plugin lists? Sound off in the comments - we’ll take all ideas into consideration when planning the next month of WPCandy content.

~The WPCandy Team

Last week we celebrated our first birthday, marking our one-year anniversary as a WordPress community site. It’s amazing to realize how much we’ve accomplished in the past year, and how much we’ve seen WordPress grow as both a blogging platform and a CMS in this time. We’ve done a ton of awesome stuff lately, and we though we’d take the time to share with you, our readers, some information on what we’ve got planned for the future. Read more…

Happy Birthday to us, happy birthday to us! Happy Birthday dear WPCandy, happy birthday to us! And many moreeeeee…….

It’s been a year since WPCandy was launched, and it’s been a great year at that. I’m pretty proud and excited that WPCandy has grown to where it is now. Let’s see what’s happened at WPCandy in the past year!

Some big stuff we’ve released/launched:

• The WordPress Help Sheet
• The Advanced WordPress Help Sheet
• The WordPress Template Hierarchy Diagram
• The WordPress Starter Theme Project
• Sample WordPress Content Collection
• WordPress Coda Clips Collection
• Unofficial International WordPress Day
• WPCandy v2 Redesign
• WPCandy v3 Redesign
• Launched WPCoder, our PSD-to-WordPress turnaround service

We’ve had a number of popular posts in the past few months. Here are some of the best:

• Automating My WordPress Workflow
• Five Ways to Familiarize Clients with WordPress
• Does WordPress Scare Your Clients?
• 10 Plugins to Better Improve the WordPress Admin

We’ve also seen an amazing surge in visitors since our whopping 2,681 uniques last October! Every single month since we launched we’ve seen a steady rise in traffic, topping 25,000 unique visitors in September. A few more notes on traffic…

• Alexa Rank: 139,183
• Technorati Rank: 5,311
• Delicious Bookmarks: 526
• Twitter Followers: 728
• RSS Subscribers: 2428
• 436,966 Total Hits
• 138,630 Unique Visitors
• Around 15,000 downloads on resources we’ve released
• We’ve also been mentioned and linked on sites such as Smashing Magazine, Noupe, Positive Space Blog, and Six Revisions.
• Gallery Sites: 159
• Total Published Posts: 366 (including this one)

I’d also like to thank kid genius, Dan Philibin. He’s been a huge help and great partner here at WPCandy. Even though he insisted I don’t mention him in this post, I did because he definitely deserves it! Most importantly, I’d like to thank YOU! We couldn’t have come this far without all our loyal WPCandy readers, subscribers, visitors, followers, etc.

To celebrate our first birthday, we’re holding a small contest for our readers. Leave us a congrats comment on this post and you’ll be entered to win a free turnaround from WPCoder! The winner will be picked at random and can give us one PSD to slice up into a theme at any time they want.

Anyway, it’s been a blast thus far - and we’re just getting started! Look for another announcement at the end of this month. Cheers to another successful year!

~The WPCandy Team

As we approach the end of August, we’re looking for a few people to help us out as WPCandy begins to grow even further.

We’re looking for one permanent blogger to write one article, review, or tutorial a week, and a few guest bloggers to write on the site from time to time. Payment options can be negotiated with the permanent blogger, and $50 USD awaits those authors who come out on the other size of the deep dark tunnel of intense review (which basically means that we’ll review your article and if we like it, you get money). If you’re interested, please e-mail us at hey@wpcandy.com.

We’re also looking for a WordPress developer or two to help us out with an upcoming project. You’ll need to be able to code valid XHTML and CSS and create a WordPress theme in a few days time. Any PHP and JavaScript knowledge - especially jQuery - is certainly welcome. You’ll need to be available for a good portion of the day, so while we aren’t particularly interested in students, if you can balance your studies with WordPress development, go for it. Again, e-mail hey@wpcandy.com if interested.

Thanks!

- The WPCandy Team

Today I’ve uploaded a new version of my WordPress Starter Theme, an empty theme that makes for easy copy-and-pasting from an HTML file into a new WordPress theme. Some of the changes in this release include

• Page navigation (’Newer Posts’, ‘Older Posts’) for archives
• ‘template_directory’ and ‘url’ tags in header.php for copy/paste
• Basic post structure (’post’ DIV, title in <h2>, content tag)

For the full run-down of the purpose of this theme, visit the WordPress Starter Theme Project post.

Download the new WordPress Starter Theme

We’ve recently made some small, but important changes around the site, beginning with adding our new Community page. We did away with our Discuss page, simply because we were having too many problems with spam entering into our main feed and it just wasn’t active enough.

Our Community page will display short posts, containing brief descriptions and a link. The sole purpose of this page is to spread some link-love without having to make full posts.

And in case you’re wondering, the Community News section of our homepage will show the last 5 posts from the Community page, previously powered by a Blogroll link system.

The main reason we created this Community page was so we could set up a feed for our users (you), to keep up-to-date with what we’re posting. And if you’d like to post your own links, just head over to our Submit page and use our form.

THE INTERNET - Popular WordPress community site WPCandy announced their monthly stats report today, the first report after their June 2008 re-launch.

In the month since the site was re-designed, stats almost doubled May’s total page views. However, unique visitors were only slightly higher, meaning visitors were digging deeper into the site than before. This is likely due to the site’s new structure, which introduced four different sections to the site - Articles, Themes, Plugins, and SItes - and greatly improved navigation features.

Top referrers for the monthly period were PositiveSpaceBlog, a design and technology blog, Google Reader, and Stumbleupon. WPCandy also sponsored the first unofficial WordPress day, an event to both celebrate the existence of WordPress and to thank the creators of the popular, free, open-source blogging system. Both the new site introductory post and the WordPress Day post contributed heavily to the site’s impressive stats.

“Our stats have been pretty hawt,” said Michael Castilla, lead admin of WPCandy, during an interview. “It’s great to see that our visitors are enjoying the new site and are using it to its fullest potential.”

By the end of the month, WPCandy exceeded 2,000 feed subscribers, the highest total throughout the site’s history.

Popular articles included the WordPress Help Sheet, a guide to assist WordPress developers, the new site introductory post, the WordPress Day entry, and a collection article listing 10 plugins to improve the blogging system’s administration area.

“We’re quite excited with our stats, but we’re also hoping this is just a glimpse of what’s to come,” explained Dan Philibin, lead developer and author at WPCandy. “We’re hoping to roll out some new features really soon that should expand the site even more.”

WPCandy has quietly promised a theme area to be announced in the future, where users can both download free themes and buy more advanced, “premium” themes. The release date of this new feature has not yet been announced.

Also of note in the stats report was the web browsers used to view the site. Mozilla’s Firefox led the pack with 71% of visitors, followed by Apple Inc.’s Safari web browser. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only took 11% of the share, and IE 6 was only used by 2% of the site’s total visitors during the month.

Ptah Dunbar, another author and developer at WPCandy, was not available for comment.

Stats recorded with Mint. This was originally a parody post Dan wrote but Mike forced him to post it. Sorry if you don’t get the humor in this.