The infamous Otto Wood joined the WP Late Night crew this week to discuss WordPress.org, WordPress plugins, PressNomics, Code Poet, and all sorts of other stuff. If you enjoy WordPress discussion, particularly if you’re a WordPress developer, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.
This week the show had no sponsors. If you’d like to support WPCandy podcasts, and get your message out to thousands of interested WordPress users and developers, see the advertising page for more information.
If you spend any time on the WordPress.org plugin directory (or heard us talking about it on any of WPCandy’s podcasts last week) then you likely noticed a few updates. Matt Mullenweg described the tweaks himself over on the WordPress.org news blog, which is worth reading if you want to know the thinking behind the changes.
Briefly, the updates included:
If you’d like to take a look at these updates in action, check out the BuddyPress plugin page for an example, complete with header image.
The WordPress.org team completed the updates last week (along with the latest addition to Audrey Capital) during a BBQ week in Memphis. As Matt said in his post:
This is why WordCamps usually have BBQ – it imparts magical coding powers.
Had you noticed the updates to the plugin directory before seeing the announcement, or this post? Let us know what you think of them in the comments.
Developer Jason Bobich:
Why should you be limited to whatever features the theme author has stuffed in that may or may not be relevant to you? You should be able to choose your own SEO plugin to accomplish what you want.
Joe Flood pitches the advantages of using WordPress and assorted plugins as your Intranet, in place of more bloated systems:
By using WordPress, you turn “add this information to the Intranet” from a frustrating task into something as simple as blogging. And just think how good your Intranet could be if people actually wanted to contribute to it.
Chris Wallace at UpThemes has generously offered up 10 copies of his Typecase Pro plugin (usually $19) for giveaway, in addition to one grand prize of a year’s developer club membership at UpThemes (usually $99) and an UpThemes t-shirt.
To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on this post or tweet at @wpcandy and @upthemes on Twitter and tell us your favorite font — bonus points for linking to an example of the font in use in a cool way. We’ll randomly select the winners from those who comment and tweet.
We’ll be collecting entries for the next week, and announcing the winner next Wednesday on the blog.
It’s been a while since we did a giveaway here, so this should be fun! Have at it in the comments.
WP App Store, the project aiming to make plugin and theme purchases easy within the WordPress dashboard — and which we previewed a couple of months ago — quietly launched yesterday (complete with slick intro video). Their plugin is downloadable on their website, which once installed will give you a new top-level menu item for browsing commercial themes and plugins recently added to their system.
Seventeen theme and plugin partners are in place at launch, a few more than announced when the original teaser page went up. Brad Touesnard, the developer behind WP App Store, said that a couple of the vendors that originally showed interest haven’t been responsive, while others just aren’t in the store yet. Developers interested in bringing their own theme or plugin products to WP App Store can request an invite.
Touesnard’s certainly not on his own with this project. In addition to the vendors partnering with WP App Store, his advisors include prominent WordPress business owners Adii Pienaar, Carl Hancock, and Jason Cohen.
Mark Jaquith wrote an awesome blog post describing how he went about building a website called Have Baby. Need Stuff! He used _s from Automattic, Bootstrap, Posts 2 Posts, and a handful of other goodies to pull the site together.
Episode #32 of the WPCandy Podcast sees Brian Krogsgard and I (yeah, seriously!) running down the most important WordPress news of the week in just about 30 minutes. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it here again: if the other podcasts we produce here overwhelm you, the WPCandy Podcast proper is likely the show for you. Very little discussion, but quite a bit news and links.
If you only listen to one WordPress podcast this week, make it this one.
This episode is sponsored by the Typecase plugin by UpThemes and the upcoming WordPress service Raft.io.
You might have noticed a new addition to the primary blog navigation above: Labs. WPCandy Labs is just a section of the site where I can tuck away fun little ideas and projects and test them out. Initially the WPCandy Labs page was empty, but I added it up in the navigation regardless as a reminder that I need to spend time on new ideas and fill that section of the site up.
I’m happy to point you to two new, simple additions to the Labs today. First is the WordPress Theme CSS Header Creator, and second is the WordPress Plugin Header Creator.
Those names just roll right off the tongue, don’t they?
Andrew Nacin announced the news on the WordPress development blog last week: plugins in the WordPress.org plugin directory can now be plugins licensed under the GPL version 3 or a compatible license. He does mention that developers are still encouraged to stick with “GPLv2 or later”, however:
The guidelines still encourage use of “GPLv2 or later,” the same license as WordPress. However, we understand that many open source libraries use other licenses that are nonetheless compatible, such as GPLv2 only, GPLv3, and Apache 2.0.
This update means the WordPress plugin directory is now identical to the theme directory when it comes to licenses.
At the very least, take this as a reminder to make sure your plugin has the proper licensing information included with it. Will this affect any of your plugins, or any plugins you’ve previously considered adding to the WordPress.org plugin directory?
(And if you’re really into WordPress and GPL stories, check out our old GPL timeline post.)
