WordPress Wins CMS Award

I was just informed that WordPress, in head-to-head voting against Joomla and Drupal, has won this year’s Open Source CMS Hall of Fame award.

We have to be careful because if this trend continues people might think WordPress is a real CMS, useful for more than just a blog. This would ruin our stealth campaign and might bring dozens of new users to the WordPress community. If you could keep this on the DL we’d appreciate it.

We don’t want WordPress to develop a reputation.

Summer of WordCamp

It’s been summer for about a week now. Whether you’re on vacation or burning the midnight oil, attending a local/nearby WordCamp is a great way to spend a weekend. Meet other WordPress users, developers, designers & consultants, learn a little something, maybe share a little of your own experience and knowledge, and break bread (or raise a toast) with new friends and collaborators. Here are the WordCamps scheduled for this summer, along with what I know about them.

July 3: WordCamp Germany – Berlin, Germany. I love it that they’re using BuddyPress for their event site. They have multiple tracks, and what looks to be a nice variety of sessions. It’s only a few days away, so if you’re thinking of going, get your tickets now!

July 10: WordCamp Boulder – Boulder, Colorado, USA. This was WordCamp Denver last year, but the organizers have decided to mix it up and go back and forth between Denver and Boulder, which also has a thriving tech community. This year the venue is the Boulder Theater (so pretty!), and there will sessions for bloggers and devs alike, plus a Genius Bar to help people get their WordPress sites all fixed up. The speaker lineup looks good, and I hear they’re pumping up the wifi this year. I’ll be there, likely hunched over a notebook with Lisa Sabin-Wilson (author of WordPress for Dummies and BuddyPress for Dummies) to talk about the WordPress User Handbook project, and/or hunched over a sketchbook with Kevin Conboy (designed the new lighter “on” state for admin menus in WordPress 3.0) to work out a new default WordCamp.org theme (using BuddyPress). You can still get tickets!

July 17–18: WordCamp UK- Manchester, England, UK. The roving WordCamp UK will be in Manchester this year, and is probably the closest to BarCamp style of all the WordCamps, using a wiki to plan some speakers/sessions and organizing the rest ad-hoc on the first day of the event. I’ll be attending this one as well, and am looking forward to seeing WordPress lead developer Peter Westwood again. I’m also looking forward to meeting some core contributors for the first time in person, like Simon Wheatley and John O’Nolan. Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, is on the organizing team of WordCamp UK. Tickets on sale now!

July 24: WordCamp Nigeria – Lagos, Nigeria. Their site seems to have a virus, so no link from here, but if you’re in Nigeria and interested in attending/getting involved, a quick Google search will get you to the organizers.

August 7: WordCamp Houston – Houston, TX, USA. Houston, Texas, birthplace of WordPress! Fittingly, Matt Mullenweg will be there to give the keynote. WordCamp Houston is running three tracks — Business, Blogger and Developer — in recognition of the fact that people who are interested in using WordPress for their business may not actually be bloggers or developers themselves. This used to get labeled as a “CMS” track at previous WordCamps (including NYC 2009), but with WordPress 3.0 supporting CMS functionality out of the box, “Business” is a much more appropriate label. Who wants to bet on if there will be BBQ for lunch?

August 7 : WordCamp Iowa – Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Another placeholder page. Happening, not happening? I’ve emailed the organizer and will update this post once I know more.

August 7–8: WordCamp New Zealand – Auckland, New Zealand. They haven’t announced this year’s speakers or topics, but they’ve been running polls to get community input into the program. Of note: in 2011 WordCamp New Zealand will be shifting seasons and will be in February instead, when the weather is nicer.

August 20–22: WordCamp Savannah – Savannah, Georgia, USA. Disclaimer: I am completely biased about Savannah, since I’m one of the organizers. This will be the first WordCamp in Savannah, and it’s being held at the Savannah College of Art and Design River Club, an awesome venue that used to be a cotton warehouse or something like that. Since Savannah doesn’t really have a cohesive WordPress community yet (though a fair number of people from Savannah attended WordCamp Atlanta earlier this year), this WordCamp is aimed squarely at building a local community. We’ll have a local meet-and-greet, regular sessions with visiting speakers (lots of core contributors coming to this one, plus Matt), and on Sunday it will be combination unconference/genius bar/collaborative workspace. Oh, and a potluck! We’ll also be running a pre-WordCamp workshop for people who have never used WordPress but want to get started, so that they’ll be able to follow the presentations and conversations littered with WordPress-specific vocabulary over the weekend. Ticket sales just opened, so get your tickets now.

For a schedule of all upcoming WordCamps, visit wordcamp.org. The autumn schedule is already packed! If you don’t see WordCamp in your area and are interested in organizing one, get more information and let us know.

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Community links: Open source motivations edition

What’s more fun to do over the weekend then catch up on WordPress community links? Set up the Christmas tree? Clean out the gutters? Shovel the driveway?

Alright, if you have to. Chores are chores. But when you’re done, reward yourself with a hot coffee and a good dose of WordPress reading. We have a truckload of links for you, so settle in.

The full list of links is after the jump.

In blog posts this week:

• Alex King, a well known WordPress plugin developer and entrepreneur, posted his thoughts on what motivations exist for WordPress plugin developers today. Chris Olbekson followed up with his own thoughts, as did Joost de Valk. Jeff Chandler started up a commentary at WBTC as well.
• WooThemes posted a preview of the upcoming launch of WPBundle. They also shared a few thoughts on the increase in support time that’s required of them with so many themes released.
• Dev4Press redesigned their site.
• James Dalman at WP Design Coach is now accepting themes for review on his new blog.
• Jeff Chandler wrote up how anyone can contribute to the WordPress.org theme review process. He also started a discussion around the legacy that plugins leave behind when they are deactivated.
• ThemesForge has decided to post 24 theme tips throughout December. I love the attitude and initiative behind the posts so far.
• WP Plugins has an interview with plugin developer Jonathan O’Shea.
• Matt Mullenweg was on The Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman.
• Dre on the Sucuri blog wrote up yet another WordPress security post. These posts are always good reminders to secure your WordPress site. While we’re on the topic, WPZine has a collection of WordPress security plugins this week too.
• Brandon Cox wrote a really interesting post on how one particular WordPress theme ad depicted developers.
• 9seeds’ plugin WP Event Ticketing seems to have a few issues with the popular WordPress theme Thesis. They’ve posted a fix that should take care of the problem, though.

There were a few WordPress resources posted fresh this week too:

• DBS>Interactive created and released the Template Tag Reference Guide this week.
• Sarah Gooding at WPMU.org listed myself and WPCandy in their list of 50 people to follow for WordPress news on Twitter. Thanks Sarah! They also put up a collection of plugins to use with Foursquare.
• Paul Andrew posted a collection of plugins for integrating Flickr into a WordPress blog.
• Jean-Baptiste Jung posted a solid roundup of WordPress code snippets.
• iThemes has released the video tutorials in their Builder Basics series for free online.

Finally, in WordPress tutorials this week:

• WPEngineer has been laying into the tutorials this week, with a custom login page tutorial and a walkthrough of the upcoming post formats feature.
• WPBeginner has a new tutorial up showing how to add the official LinkedIn share button to your WordPress blog. They also have a nice roundup of plugins for managing images with WordPress.
• Vladimir Prelovac posted about how to disable post revisions and delete them from your database.
• Scribu showed how to insert a banner between posts, without editing the theme files.
• Chris Coyier put together a tutorial showing how to make the WYSIWYG editor really WYSIWYG.
• Sumeet Chawla at Nettuts+ put together a tutorial showing how to create an FAQ page with custom post types.

Wow, that may be a record for number of WordPress related links in a roundup post (for us). Who gets the plaque?

That’s it for links this week. If you run across something link worthy, don’t hesitate to let us know about it. If it’s worth a story we’ll jump on it, and if it’s best suited for a community news post it will show up in this space next week.

Time to start your Christmas lists: the WP Swag Store is open

The WP Swag Store, which we first noticed a couple of months ago, has launched today as the new home to official WordPress gear.

The store has launched with shirts, an iPhone skin, drinkware, embossed moleskine, a fleece jacket (my favorite), and (of course) baby onesies. New items will be added in the coming months, according to the Jane Wells in the launch post. Small items like stickers and buttons are being reprinted, and will be available soon.

An interesting technical note: originally the WP e-Commerce plugins was to be used to power the Swag Store, but after a few bugs (don’t worry, all is well) the PHPurchase plugin was chosen.

Now, be honest. Who’s going to be gifting WordPress gear to confused cousins and grandparents this year?

*Raises hand*

I propose a Theme Design Review Team

Anyone who has ever submitted a theme to the WordPress.org Theme Directory has, in one way or another, run up against the theme review guidelines. I have. While it can be a pain in the butt sometimes (Why must my theme use widgets again? Hulk smash!), it’s understandable why they are there. Standards need to be maintained, or else craziness will ensue. (See also: cats, dogs, living together.)

It’s important to keep the quality of the code up, and to meet expectations when it comes to how a theme behaves on the backend. Sure, okay, I can buy into that.

But why don’t we have a set of guidelines and a review team for theme design?

First hand experience

A month or two back we launched something called Theme Finder. It’s really cryptic, what it does: it helps you find themes. We’re still improving it, but one thing that we do weekly is add new themes. Typically 50-100 each week. And our favorite thing to do is add free themes to it. After all, who doesn’t love free WordPress themes?

Like anyone else, we save hard things for last. Sue us, we’re human. And there are a few directories of themes that we put off at first, because the size was a bit daunting. One of those directories was the WordPress.org Theme Directory, which is currently sporting about 1,295 themes. That’s more themes than we have in Theme Finder right now. That’s a lot of themes.

But we’re not a group to shirk hard work (at least not forever) so recently we rolled up our sleeves, cracked open the .org directory, and…

We were completely, totally underwhelmed.

After compiling all sorts of awesome themes of all shapes and sizes, all colors and prices, we’d like to think we have a pretty good eye for solid theme design. And the themes in the directory, we learned, are mostly awful.

A special kind of awful

I’m sure the code of the themes in the directory are all top notch, or at least up to code. But I wouldn’t know, because you couldn’t make me click download on 90% of those theme pages. I won’t do it. The designs, the concepts behind the themes, are just awful.

It’s not just the design, but the originality that’s the issue. So many themes are clearly just tweaks of Kubrick, Twenty Ten, Sandbox, or another widely available (and perfectly fine) theme. Beginning theme developers should still use these themes to practice, but perhaps they should keep the downloads to only their own blogs, instead of WordPress.org.

There are a few really well done themes in there. But these are the exception, not the rule.

But maybe they should be the rule.

Maybe we need a Theme Design Review Team: a crew of highly qualified theme designers (perhaps volunteers from commercial WordPress theme shops?) to screen and approve theme submissions for quality and originality.

Just think about what that could look like.

I'm not saying this is what we need. But if we do, then I get to be the sexy one. Yes, Simon.

If it’s important that WordPress.org users can download and use themes without trouble, it should be important that the themes they are getting will give the best experience to those user’s sites as well.

A brave new world

Instituting this sort of review team and process would no doubt result in the removal of the majority of themes on the WordPress.org directory. But that’s okay.

Which would you rather have: 1,200+ themes that you couldn’t be paid to use, or 100 highly original, cornerstone themes?

Introducing the WPCandy iPhone app, and our reverse-launch deal

Today’s a big day for us. After much planning and work, I’m proud to introduce you to our iPhone app, WPCandy WordPress News, available in the App Store right now.

Now you can, if you wish, take WPCandy with you in your pocket (and who doesn’t love candy on the go?). The app will bring you a bite-sized WPCandy, with tabs for all of our top-level content, with options to reorganize based on your preferences.

The new app brings you the latest posts, our most popular content, WPCandy interview, theme and plugin reviews, tutorials, and our editorial and feature posts.

It’s available right now as part of our reverse launch deal for $5.99.

Handy mobile version of the site

Reading webpages on iPhones and iPods is doable, but hardly ideal. Instead of squinting and pinch-zooming, our app serves up exactly what you’re after (the posts!) nice and big. And in your pocket.

Organized to give you what you care about

Only the most important categories on our site are served up, using tabs to help you find what you’re looking for.

Customizable, tabbed app

Don’t let our app boss you around. Tap “customize” and choose the tabs that you want to show up in the front. It’s your app, after all.

About our reverse launch deal

Typically, when something new launches there is a special deal for early adopters. Usually the new thing is cheaper in the first few days. We like that idea, so we’re doing it.

But we’re doing it in reverse.

Our new app is regularly available for $0.99 in the App Store. For the next two weeks, though, the app will be listed for $5.99 in the App Store.

I’ll say that again: for the next two weeks our app will cost $5.99. At the end of the two weeks it will drop back to its normal price at $0.99.

Why would we do this? We want to give you, the awesome WPCandy readers and community members, the chance to support what we’re doing here. We run an ad-free site, with regular, high quality content containing zero affiliate links. We publish things that are of community interest (tutorials, comprehensive WordPress news, editorials) and we do it every single day. Many have called us crazy for not allowing advertising. They say we can’t make any money without ads. They say a community-driven site just doesn’t work.

We want to prove them wrong.

To show support, to help fund this project, and to make it possible to do even bigger, awesome-er stuff, buy our app for $5.99 in the next two weeks.

Now, for everyone else: if the cost bothers you, please wait and grab it for $0.99. We will still love you the same. The app will still be equally minty in two weeks’ time.

Feedback welcome

Often releasing something marks the beginning of something, and not the end of anything. We’re in this for the long haul, and we have really big plans for this app beyond version 1.0. We’re open to any ideas and your feedback in general!

Be sure to check out the WPCandy iPhone app in the App Store, and let us know what you think!

WPEngineer gears up for their own WordPress Advent Calendar

In the spirit of Christmas, WP Engineer is cranking up their second annual advent calendar of tips and tricks.  They will be publishing new tips every day from December 1st through December 24th.

Last year provided all sorts of good stuff, from an interesting discussion on working with WP 2.9 post thumbnails, to extending user info, managing multiple excerpt lengths, and more.

Check out their blog post about it, and be sure to keep up with WP Engineer throughout December to open new doors to WordPress knowledge.

Also, Merry Christmas.  Was I the first to say that to you this season?