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Status check up first
The UI group is tackling a few design things while Jane is performing some testing at South By South West. After the testing is completed, all lingering UI will be done for WordPress 3.0. Ryan Boren stated that themes needed to be finished in the GUI, land the big menu patch and tidy off custom background and header stuff. The UI group will soon have comps on the background/header stuff. Ptah Dunbar has been doing a good job tackling the menu items and they are almost there.

Mark Jaquith will try to sneak in additional post thumbnail support for WordPress 3.0.

Tickets That Were Discussed In Depth
The next part of the meeting focused on specific tickets that were brought up for discussion. I’m just going to link to the tickets and let you read the log file for in depth discussion on these items.

wpmuguru: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12357 high, blocker, 3.0, nacin->nbachiyski, new, Strings we need to hard code and WP_I18N prefix

miqrogroove: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9591 high, normal, 3.0, Denis-de-Bernardy->ryan, reopened, sanitize_title_with_dashes() and remove_accents() improvements for i18n permalinks

westi: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4739 high, major, future, einare->westi, closed, Some icelandic/Norwegian/Danish letters do not work in page slugs

miqrogroove: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10041 high, normal, 3.0, miau_jp->Unassigned, reopened, like_escape() should escape backslashes too

miqrogroove: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10607 normal, normal, 3.0, UnderWordPressure->westi, reopened, return variable $new_array in wp-includes/wp-db.php is not initialized

miqrogroove: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/11711 normal, normal, 3.0, miqrogroove->ryan, new, tag_id Doesn’t Work in WP_Query

miqrogroove: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/11845 normal, normal, 3.0, miqrogroove->Unassigned, new, mod_rewrite Should Not Be Used to Check Existence of index.php

miqrogroove: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12136 normal, normal, 3.0, nacin->wpmuguru, reopened, Improve MS rewrite rules

nacin: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12416 high, blocker, 3.0, Denis-de-Bernardy->ryan, new, “*_option(), *_transient() and *_meta() functions should all expect unslashed data.”

I also asked about the email that will be sent out to plugin authors in order to get a heads up on the changes which may effect compatibility. The email will be sent out before the release of WordPress 3.0 but the text of that email will also be announced on the WordPress developer blog.

To read the log file associated with this meeting, click here and scroll up.

How To Participate:

If you want to suggest a development oriented topic to be discussed at the next meeting, you can by visiting the WordPress development updates blog. If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.

chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 3:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.

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I’m going to be speaking at the March Portland WordPress User Group Meeting on March 18th at 6:00pm at Webtrends and demonstrating some of the features that are coming up in 3.0. I’m aiming for this to be beneficial for both users and developers.

Right now, I plan on covering:

• What the Multisite features mean to both users and developers
• How to enable Multisite once you’ve upgraded
• How to add and customize custom menus on your site
• How to add a custom post type

If there is anything else that you would like for me to cover, please comment on the post there. I hope to see you there!

This weeks guest was Andy Peatling of the BuddyPress.org Project. BuddyPress is a social networking plugin for WordPress which ads many of the features found on sites like Facebook to WordPress blogs in as few as 10 minutes. We discussed how BuddyPress came about, some of the ways its used, some tips on getting started, customizing it and most importantly the features it provides. In news, there were a few nice plugin releases/updates and as always quick update on the WordCamp schedule.

• PuSHPress: A PubSubHubbub Plugin For WordPress
• MySQL Profiler Plugin for WordPress
• WordCamp Schedule

Just today, I decided to run an impromptu experiment to test if visitors who come from search engines are really more likely to click on ads. It’s considered  ”common knowledge” by many bloggers who advise everyone to only show ads to search engine visitors (as a quick Google search will illustrate), but my own AdSense stats made me doubt that particular piece of advice. Hence the experiment.

So how does one show different ads to different visitors? Normally you could use the excellent Who Sees Ads plugin, but that doesn’t work for my site. I’m using the WP-SuperCache caching plugin which is incompatible with Who Sees Ads.

Instead, I wrote a JavaScript function that can analyse the HTTP referrer to distinguish between four types of visitors :

• People who accessed your page directly, e.g. by typing in the URL (no referrer).
• People who clicked an internal link to access the page (referrer from the same domain).
• Search engine visitors; people who arrived via Google or Yahoo! (referrer matches one of the most popular search engines).
• External visitors. This is basically a catch-all category for everyone who found your link on a third-party site that’s not a search engine. For example, this would include external forums and web directories.

Here’s the script :

function get_referrer_type(){
	var ref = document.referrer;
 
	if ( ref.length == 0 ){
		return 'none';
	}
 
	function getHostname(str) {
		var re = /^(?:f|ht)tp(?:s)?\:\/\/([^\/]+)/im;
		var matches = str.match( re );
		if ( matches ){
			return matches[1].toString();
		}
		return '';
	}
	if ( getHostname(ref) == document.location.host ){
		return 'internal';
	}
 
	var SE = ['/search?', '.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 
		'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.',
		'.ask.'];
	for ( var source in SE){
		if (ref.indexOf(SE[source]) !=-1) {
			return 'search';
		}
	}
 
	return 'external';
}

The function get_referrer_type() returns one of “none”, “internal”, “search” or “external” based on the referrer info.

And here’s the script that I used to show different  AdSense ads to different people :

function get_top_adsense_ad(){
	var default_slot = '1111111111';
	var code = '<'+'script type="text/javascript"><!--\ngoogle_ad_client = "pub-0000000000000000";google_ad_slot = "%ad_slot%";google_ad_width = 336;google_ad_height = 280;\n//--><'+'/script><'+'script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></'+'script>';
	var slots = {
		'none' : '2222222222',
		'internal' : '3333333333',
		'external' : '4444444444',
		'search' : '5555555555',
	};
 
	var ref_type = get_referrer_type();
	if ( typeof(slots[ref_type]) != 'undefined' ){
		code = code.replace('%ad_slot%', slots[ref_type]);
	} else {
		code = code.replace('%ad_slot%', default_slot);
	}
 
	return code;
}
 
document.write(get_top_adsense_ad());

Unlike get_referrer_type(), this script is optimized for my site/AdSense account. Don’t try using it without modification If you want to use it, replace “pub-XXXXXXXX”, the ad slot IDs and ad width/height settings with your own values (you can find them in your AdSense ad code).

As for the experiment, I’ll post the results sometime next week.

Titan is a fantastic theme, now available on WordPress.com. It’s a highly readable, clean theme, with lots of options: four widget areas, a customizable header, and more.

Behold Titan!

An enticing color scheme and loads of customization make Titan a wonderful theme for you blog. To start things off the header has some nice social networking and RSS links, making it easy for users to keep up with your blog.

Right below the title is a highly customizable header. There are options to turn on and off categories and pages, allowing you to choose how users navigate your blog.

Titan's Header Options

Aiding in even more customization are four widget areas, including a nice footer widget area.

Titan's Footer Widget Area

Titan was designed by Drew Strojny and is available in the WordPress.org Themes Directory. You can check out Titan for yourself at http://titandemo.wordpress.com

As of today, I am officially a fulltime Automattic employee! I’ve been contracting with Automattic for a few months now but didn’t want to talk about it for fear of cursing it. It really is a dream job for me as I’m working with some of the best people in the business and the WordPress community and I couldn’t be happier. I want to thank Matt and everyone else at Automattic for giving me this great opportunity.

(I’m 4th from the right in the back row.)

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The 2010 Google Summer Of Code program for WordPress is just about ready for prime time. The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. It was created in 2005 and continues to this day. Thanks to some willing students in 2009, we saw the creation of a new search API, and a theme framework in Elastic. When comparing the projects list from 2010 to 2009, they haven’t changed much although bbPress has been added to the list this year.

One of the project ideas that caught my eye was Template Versioning.

WordPress saves post revisions, but changes to theme files are not recorded, though the presentation layer is sometimes just as important. Build a versioning system for template files within the theme editor.

I wonder if any willing student will snatch up this project. This project idea also confirms that the built in theme editor isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

For any students who want to participate in the WordPress GSoC project, you’re encouraged to review the application template from 2008 as well as the ideas from last year. However, the best way to increase your chances of being selected is to start learning the WordPress code base right now and submit a few patches so the mentors can get a basic idea of your abilities.

Good luck to any student who pursues one of the listed project ideas.

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So I'm in Kilkenny, Ireland for WordCamp Ireland, and I'm having a complete blast, thanks in large part to the great organization done by Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan. The tech track is absolutely blowing my mind: it's really techy!

The people here are great: I met a lot of awesome people, basically to be separated in two groups. Group one are the Automattic people: Donncha, Jane Wells, Sheri Bigelow, Hanni Ross & John Godley. Some of the other people worth mentioning because they did cool stuff: Daryl Koopersmith gave a great talk on WordPress themes, Andrea Trasatti did another superb presentation on WordPress mobile plugins and themes (and got me to actually work on yoast.com and get me a decent mobile plugin going). Thank you, all!

Lastly, I'm always amazed that even though I mostly live in a Google world (actually, I had lunch with Fili Wiese and colleagues in Google's EMEA HQ last friday and Luisella Mazza from Google is here on WordCamp Ireland too), the people from Microsoft I meet on these conferences almost always turn out to be absolutely awesome people: Josh Holmes and Martha Rotter: you rock!

So I gave a presentation myself on saturday, which has been filmed and will probably appear on WordPress.tv, but these are the slides:

WordCamp Ireland: having a blast! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So, day one of WordCamp Ireland draws to a close, there is a dinner tonight but the talks and sessions are over for the day.

I briefly helped John Handelaar during his talk on WordPress MU, but my main talk was on WP Super Cache. Thank you Hanni, Jane and Sheri for recording the talk. Hopefully it’ll be available online next week. In the meantime here’s the OpenOffice slides of my talk.

I must extend a big thank you to Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan for organising a great day and to the sponsors who made the weekend possible.

Looking forward to the dinner tonight, and the rest of the conference tomorrow.

Update! I’ve added a few photos from Day 2. I was shattered tired though as I was up until 1.30am chatting with Donnacha!

Update 2! Sabrina has written a thoughtful post about WordCamp Ireland. I for one had a great time there and so did everyone I spoke to. I totally agree with her about child minding facilities. My son Adam had a whale of a time, and is still talking about it. (and for an almost three year old, that’s a very good sign!)

Oh, more photos on Pix.ie!

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This version requires PHP 5. If you’re getting an error on activation, it means you’re running PHP 4.

Two template tags have been added:

If you have posts in multiple categories, you can use get_referrer_category() to retrieve the category object, based on the referrer url.

get_referrer_url() returns the full URL of the referrer.

Also, there are two extra arguments for previous_post_smart() and next_post_smart(): $in_same_cat and $excluded_categories.

This is how the function prototype looks like:

previous_post_smart(
	$format = '« %link',
	$title = '%title',
	$fallback = true,
	$in_same_cat = false,
	$excluded_categories = ''
);

Recently, Aaron Jorb wrote “Commit: The Story of Writing a WordPress Patch” about a the process of submitted code to the core development of WordPress.

Hanging out in the #WordPress irc channel or on the wp-hackers mailing list, a question that comes up from time to time is “How do I get a bug patched”. I recently had a patch committed, so I thought I would detail the process from start to finish to help others get an idea of the process…

The process for me started by seeing a post by Jane Wells talking about a few UX enhancements she wanted to see handled during the recent patch sprint. One that I noticed hadn’t received any attention was showing the status of an admin attempts an e-mail change under the new multisite configuration. I took a quick look at the relevent code and figured this was something I could patch.

The step-by-step documented process shows a three to four step process from idea and submission to final approval, however it also proves how easy it is to get involved and help WordPress improve.

According to Aaron, it took four people along the way to make this happen, dispelling the confusion and complexity many presume about the WordPress development process.

The development team is working hard to improve the process and make it easier for people to not just report bugs but to see their fix through to the end, so why not jump in and help WordPress grow.

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It’s Friday once again! The WordCast network has been bringing you the best WordPress, blogging and social media news, tips, tricks, reviews and how-tos all week long, and we’re bringing the best of the best to you. From some important security details to the THEME TEAM!, look no further for the complete wrap-up of this week in blogging, WordPress and social media.

February 1 – 5, 2010

WordPress Hack Cloakes Itself to All But Search Engines

Automattic Hires Theme Developer Ian Stewart, Forms “Theme Team”

Donate to Your Favorite WordPress Project: Support a WordPress Developer Day

Learn to Write WordPress Plugins in 20 Minutes (video)

Around the WordPress Community: Dynamic Copyrights, Moving WordPress, Microformats, and Twitter to Blog

WordCast Conversations 7: WordPress and Blogging for Musicians and Bands

Our newest show, Plugin Picks premiered this week with Plugin Picks 1: Audio Player and Plugin Picks 2: Google Analyticator

Got comments, questions, ideas or suggestions? We live off your feedback. Call us up at 1-888-525-BLOG or send an email over to mail@wordcastnet.com. You can also chime in on our Twitter, @WordCast, or in the WordCast Forums.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

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ThemeLab is reporting that a new WordPress hack is making the rounds, potentially to your own blog. Like most security breaches, the worm links to all sorts of spam sites from your blog. However, what makes this little guy unique is the fact that he only shows himself to Google IP addresses.

Also unique to this attack is the fact that it seems to only be targeting blogs hosted on MediaTemple servers. The popular hosting company published a page on the issue on Tuesday, and have since updated it stating that all malicious content has been removed.

However, some bloggers have still found some rogue files, and it can’t hurt to check your self-hosted WordPress blog, just to make sure you’re clean.

According to ThemeLab’s blog post, MediaTemple’s page and a forum post from our friends at WPTavern, here’s what we know at this point:

1. Affected servers will often have PHP files with random names (examples given in the MediaTemple post include xkehy.php and xfami.php) in the document root (the HTML directory). These files can be removed with no detriment to your blog. Some say that some files designed to look like WordPress core files could be hiding in various folders as well.
2. Altered pages are only visible to spiders used by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
3. If people visit the links themselves from other (non search engine) IP addresses, they are redirected to a CNN RSS Feed.
4. If you click through to any URLs from a search engine, you are sent to a malware site.

If you have any further information about this WordPress hack, please post a comment below or join the discussion in the WordCast Forums.

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Yesterday, highly respected WordPress theme developer Ian Stewart announced on his personal blog that he has been hired by Automattic as a Theme Wrangler.

Ian informed readers that his once premium-only themes are now available for free (possibly due to employment agreements with the company):

• Travailler
• Acamas
• Thematic Power Blog
• Thematic Feature Site

He then dropped the information that will be most intriguing to members of the WordPress and blogging community: his blog, ThemeShaper, is also joining Automattic, as a front-end to what he calls a “theme team” being formed at the company.

ThemeShaper will become a public-facing blog for the Theme Team now assembling at Automattic. A place where we can help provide the best possible experience for everyone involved in WordPress theming; from the noobiest of beginners to the most powerful of WordPress wizards.

Because the founder of the WordPress project, Matt Mullenweg, is also the founder of Automattic, the company has always had a fair amount of influence on the WordPress community. However, up until this point, its’ role in the development and extensibility area of WordPress has always been extremely limited. How much will the new ThemeShaper shape the world of WordPress themes?

Ian’s description of the new blog and team in his post is fairly ambiguous. The Theme Team could be a support team, a community dedicated to helping theme developers innovate. Perhaps they will work on innovations in WordPress themes, developing components and coding features for other theme developers to use, or perhaps they’ll even be working on themes of their own.

What are your hopes for Automattic’s new foray into themes? Is it worthwhile, a waste of time, or could you care less? Post a comment below or join the discussion in the WordCast Forums.

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One of the both better and more annoying factors of WordPress is the huge amount of core features. Of course it is great to work with a platform which makes almost everything possible but this can also take away from your focus.

I am a big fan of taking out clutter, focusing on what really matters and love to simplify both life and working environment. The WordPress dashboard is well thought out, and popular, but I am the first one to launch an external writing application such as OmmWriter or WriteRoom, helping me focus just on content, especially when writing longer entries. For many smaller projects I am involved in, I prefer ’simpler’ platforms than WordPress, platforms focusing more on blogging rather than on being the awesomest, most complete or extendable platform.

Enter Zen, a distraction free writing environment for WordPress by Mohammad Jangda.

If you’re a fan of ‘anti-clutter’ plugins such as simple email notifications, you’ll love Zen for WordPress. More even, if you would have been on the verge of switching to a more writing focused platform such as Habari but on could not decide to ditch WP yet, Zen might be what you are looking for.

If you’re a fan of WriteRoom, OmmWriter, or similar tools that help you focus on your words instead of the tools you’re using, this plugin will soon make your wildest dreams come true (and give you a simple clean environment within WordPress to write to your heart’s content)! While Zen does not replace the existing Edit Post/Page screen, it provides a layer on top that will help you focus more on the quality of your words and less on the distracting fine-tuning of minuscule details.

Zen does not replace your editor or change the look of your dashboard but in the post editor you now can activate Zen with one click and call up the new layer. You can even set ‘Always write in Zen mode’ as standard (in Your Profile).

Zen comes with several themes (which can be selected in Your Profile) making Zen a little more noisy again but you don’t have to use these.

All in all Zen’s a nice and agreeable addition to WordPress and a new recommended plugin for me. Download Zen from the plugins directory or install it within WordPress (search the plugins repo for Zen).

WebWorkerDaily wrote an editorial, “The Future of Blogging” which stats that the recent Pew Research on the future of blogging on the younger generation implies that there is too much on the web that it dull and boring, and people are losing interest in the same old same old blogs.

A recent Pew survey revealed that the popularity of blogging among teens and young adults has declined dramatically from 28 percent to 14 percent from 2006 to 2009. While this wasn’t an exhaustive scientific study, it does reveal a trend that clearly shows that blogging is losing its luster with today’s younger generation. There are many factors that could have contributed to this drastic decline, such as the plethora of real-time communication platforms like social networks, the explosion of gaming platforms (Wii, Playstation, Xbox) and 24/7 access to instant entertainment such as Netflix and Hulu. Regardless of the reasons, the bottom line is that young people are getting bored of traditional blogging.

The editorial goes on to blame much of it on dull and boring web designs and the “shrinking down” of the web to smaller and smaller mobile devices. Research reports like this challenge those of us in the blogging industry to re-examine where we’ve been and where we are going to go, and which changes to embrace and which to shove aside.

The traditional media is moving quickly now into the blogging industry, leaving print and television practices behind, shrinking down reporting and film crews to those good with hand cams and ear mics, and moving their news and editorials out into the virtual world. For those who have been in the virtual publishing industry for years, big media is now our competition. Are we up for the fight? Can we hold out against their onslaught?

Blogging began as online diaries and moved slowly into the professional world. The social web created by these revealing “transparent” blogs embraced faster methods of sharing content and thoughts with the development of social media tools to amp up the social interchange through various networks like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and other peer-to-peer driven “sharing” sites. The blog didn’t die, it just got busier, and so did the bloggers as they spread their ideas beyond their blogs.

What’s the next step? What is the future of blogging? Have you been watching the trends? Where is blogging going?

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