John James Jacoby, lead developer of bbPress and BuddyPress, published a 35 part tweetstorm sharing his thoughts on leadership in the WordPress project, the community, and the WordPress economy. A tweetstorm is a series of tweets linked together in chronological order around a particular topic. There are a number of useful nuggets of wisdom in…
Last week, Dan Cameron, creator of Sprout Invoices, received an email from the WordPress.org plugin review team stating that his plugin was in violation of the repository guidelines. Sprout Invoices was promptly removed from the directory and all of its 5-star reviews were also removed. Cameron had been discounting the professional license of his plugin…
PluginsCon is a conference dedicated to WordPress themes and plugins scheduled for September 8-9 in Salt Lake City, Utah, organized by Janet Thaeler and Joel Otterstrom. The event is geared towards developers, users, and marketers and was announced in April but has been pushed back to September 8-9 of 2017. I reached out to the…
WordPress the open-source software project is licensed under the GPLv2. This license grants users and developers the following freedoms. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can…
For the first time in history, more Americans are working for online publications than for traditional print newspapers. In his report on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, NiemanLab’s Joseph Lichterman succinctly summarizes the slow death of the American newspaper: It’s safe to assume that newspaper jobs will continue to evaporate. Most small…
We’ve recently installed some new plugins on the Tavern and one of them generates an admin notice that can not be dismissed without disabling it. Not only is this frustrating, but it makes it less likely that I’ll give the developer money to purchase the pro version. Here’s what the admin notice looks like. I’ve…
This post was contributed by guest author Peter Suhm. Peter is a web developer from the Land of the Danes. He is the creator of WP Pusher and a huge travel addict, bringing his work along with him as he goes. If you run a typical WordPress agency, I will be bold enough to…
Whether you manage WordPress plugins, themes, or a service, a key component to keeping users happy is communication. Users and especially paying customers want to know what’s going on. Going an extended period of time without communicating leads to doubt, a feeling of abandonment, and speculation. Communicating is not hard and these days, developers have…
In 2014, we wrote about the trend of more people receiving commit access to WordPress core. Fast forward to the beginning of 2016 and a total of 35 people can commit code to the core of WordPress. Helen Hou-Sandí, WordPress Lead Developer, published the stat on Twitter and notes that 22 out of the 35…
When I founded WP Tavern in 2009, comments were an important part of the site’s initial success. After six years, the site has published its 30,000th comment. At a time where large websites such as Copyblogger and the Toronto Star are closing down comments in favor of social media, the Tavern continues to be a…
Later this week, nearly 2,000 people will be in Philadelphia, PA to attend WordCamp US, the annual conference devoted to WordPress. One of the event’s highlights is Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word presentation. In it, Mullenweg shares data on WordPress’ growth throughout the year and gives insight to where the project is heading. About…
A few days ago, I offered advice on how non-developers can contribute to and influence core WordPress development. Communicating online is hard but where and how you communicate affects the likelihood of making an impact. CMS Critic is a site I’ve read for years as it routinely publishes articles on a variety of content management…
This post was contributed by Tom J Nowell. Tom is a VIP Wrangler at WordPress.com VIP, lead of the WP The Right Way project, blogger, and community moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange. Tom will be speaking at WordCamp New York later this month on escaping and security. This is a story about my job as…
In the past 4-5 weeks, I’ve moderated every comment submitted to WP Tavern. Not only was it an experiment to see what would happen but a new way for me to use WordPress. The experiment introduced me to several drawbacks in WordPress’ comment moderation system. Lack of Context Comments that are pending moderation in the…
At Prestige over the weekend, I heard a presenter say that family comes first. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this advice but it’s becoming more prevalent. I generally hear this advice from those who are living comfortably, have two kids or more, and/or have gone through the startup process more than once. I’m…