WordPress.org

John James Jacoby’s crowd-funding campaign for development on WordPress’ sister projects is now closed and fully funded at $51,500. For the first six months of 2015, he will be working full-time to push the BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress projects forward.

Jacoby is essentially pioneering a new way of working as an open source developer funded by the community. There’s no prescription for how to tackle each project’s goals, but working remotely in the past has uniquely prepared him for this opportunity.

“Previous experience working mostly independently and remotely certainly doesn’t hurt, particularly for things like consistent communication and maintaining momentum,” he said. “It will be nice to get back into the swing of posting public status updates and more strictly planning out my days and weeks again. I appreciate the freedom I’ve had since July, but being completely without structure can be risky, too.”

Jacoby anticipates splitting his time equally between BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress. “In my imagination, fairly evenly in priority order for a few of the long standing issues that have been prohibiting enhancements to WordPress.org, specifically for the Rosetta sites,” he said. “GlotPress will require a little more time for me to start being helpful, so I’ll likely try to focus on the BuddyPress and bbPress queue first.”

What will a typical day look like for Jacoby when he starts working full-time on the sister projects? He plans to be involved in every aspect, from writing code to mentoring to adding codex contributions.

I think a typical day will look like a cup of coffee, reading Trac and Slack, providing feedback and mentorship, and shepherding as much activity as I can. That might mean committing patches and doing feature development, increasing unit test coverage and working on the codex, or helping with tools to enable others to contribute easier. There is no shortage of things to do, and I’ll be looking at ways to multiply my efforts to get the maximum value out of the time I have.

If the development project is successful, other developers may be inspired to create similar campaigns. Jacoby isn’t the only one with the capability to make a strong impact on these projects. He believes that there are many others who would be able to do that same.

I really hope people look at this campaign as something they can try, too. Stephen Edgar has been absolutely killing it all across .org, so removing that barrier for him is a priority of mine. Mathieu Viet keeps putting out comprehensive BuddyPress concepts that could make their way into core with just a bit more free time and focus. Ryan McCue already volunteers a huge amount of time; imagine if he was 100% focused.

Matt Gross (currently at 10up) is such a fast learner and can really crank stuff out quickly. Alison Barrett (also currently at 10up) is the same way; crazy fast at learning and implementing new things. I’d love to work with either of them on the bb’s again. A few of these individuals may not require outside funding, but it’s an interesting idea to use it as an option to reduce an employer’s monetary burden.

Working full-time on open source community projects without distraction, while still paying the bills, is a rare opportunity that Jacoby intends to maximize. If all goes as planned, the first half of 2015 will bring about the removal of the projects’ most pressing hindrances. The success of Jacoby’s campaign demonstrates that the WordPress community believes in the potential of BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress enough to invest in a trustworthy developer to make dedicated improvements.

If you’re brand new to bbPress, you may not know about some of the ways it can be extended beyond being a simple forum. Additional functionality can be added with plugins, its output can be manipulated through CSS, and development is easy to keep up with. Even though bbPress has a getting started guide available, I came up with my own mini guide. Here are some tips to get you started on building a bbPress forum.

Where to Find Plugins

bbPress is a plugin that was designed to be extended by other plugins. Once installed and configured, simply browse the plugin directory from the backend of WordPress and search for bbPress. There are at least 314 plugins that show up in the search results, not including the ones hosted on Github.

bbPress Plugins in The WordPress Plugin Directory

Even though bbPress.org has a section dedicated to plugins, it’s essentially an alternative to browsing the WordPress plugin directory. Instead of being able to view all of the plugins available, the pages only list bbPress specific plugins.

Similar to WordPress, bbPress has a list of feature plugins that may one day, be merged into core. The list contains plugins that offer features found in most forum software out of the box, so it’s a good place to start when adding features. Pay close attention to the Last Updated: information as I encountered a lot of plugins that haven’t been updated in over 2 years.

Altering The Look and Feel

bbPress comes with built-in theme support where all required elements such as front-end editing are included. If a WordPress theme doesn’t have support for the various elements that make up bbPress, you’ll still be able to use it. The built-in support makes it compatible with nearly every WordPress theme. However, I strongly encourage you to use a theme that is bbPress compatible as it almost always looks better than the default.

Free bbPress Compatible Themes

A search of the theme directory indicates four pages of free WordPress themes that are explicitly compatible with bbPress. If you’d simply like to override the default markup to give it a custom look, check out this Codex article.

How to Keep up With Development

While WordPress releases three major versions a year, bbPress averages two a year. So far in 2014, there have been no major versions released. Compared to WordPress, bbPress development occurs at a slower pace due to a smaller number of people contributing and spending time on the project. Not only does this make it easy to keep up with changes, it increases the opportunity to influence the project.

bbPress Development

bbPress uses Trac for development where user’s can submit bug reports and patches. If you use Slack, you can join the #bbPress channel where core developers and contributors hang out. This is a great way to get in touch with people and communicate in real-time.

Where to Get Support

The best way to get support is through the official bbPress forum. While not as active as the WordPress support forum, there’s still a good amount of activity that takes place. It’s also monitored by all of the core developers.

bbPress Support Forum

The bbPress support forums follow the same rules and guidelines set forth by the WordPress support forums. There are two documents you should read to familiarize yourself to how it works. Using the Support Forum and the Forum Welcome message.

bbPress Nomenclature

bbPress has a set of nomenclature that is different from forum software you may have used in the past. This small guide explains what each term means.

• Forums – Are segments of the main forum similar to categories.
• Topics – Topics are created within forums, they are the issues that are being discussed.
• Replies – Replies are made to topics, this is the actual discussion.
• Voices – Voices represent the number of individuals participating in a conversation

The Next Six Months

Although development has come to a crawl in recent months, it’s encouraging that John James Jacoby successfully reached his crowd funding goal as bbPress will likely experience a surge in development and community based contributions over the next six months. Hopefully, the next six months are among the project’s brightest.

Codex Volunteer

The documentation and organization of documents on the bbPress.org website leaves a lot to be desired. Several links point to placeholders or the incorrect pages. I’m working with the team as a Codex volunteer to try to clean up the mess so others can benefit by finding the information they need.

This guide is a Cliff’s Notes version of what’s available on bbPress.org. I hope it helps you as it did me when putting it together.

Brad Parbs and his colleagues at WebDevStudios have created a new tool for the thousands of developers out there who utilize Varying Vagrant Vagrants for WordPress development. As Vagrant development environments are a daily staple of work life at WDS, the team needed a faster way for setting up new WordPress sites with VVV.

Variable VVV is their solution, a script that automates the creation and deletion of new WordPress sites using VVV. The script is based on Alison Barrett’s VVV Site Wizard.

“The original site wizard hasn’t been updated in about half a year. I’ve designed this to be a drop-in replacement,” Parbs told the Tavern. “All the flags and commands from vvv-site-wizard function 100% the same, so you can just install this and start using it exactly the same.” Anyone who has used the VVV Site Wizard in the past will be comfortable using Variable VVV right away.

The new script has a few additional features beyond the original VVV Site Wizard, including the following:

• The ability to pass vagrant command through to VVV
• An easier way to set your VVV installation path
• The ability to clone a git-repo as wp-content
• The ability to set more installation options

While creating the script, Parbs went through the issues list at the vvv-site-wizard repository and fixed a number of issues. He sees Variable VVV as the spiritual successor to the original tool and has designed it to be a bit easier to use. He noted that it takes just 1/3 the time to type the commands and the command results have also been vastly improved. “One example is the list command to show you all sites. With vvv-site-wizard, it is a plain list of site names. vv list will show you a colorized output, along with URLs and marking VVV defaults,” Parbs explained.

The WebDevStudios team has an extensive roadmap of features for future implementation. Parbs is most excited about the idea of “blueprints,” which would offer the ability to install themes and plugins while setting up a new site.

A blueprint would define a list of plugins, themes, mu-plugins, and various site options. When installing, you could grab that blueprint and it would set it all up. I’m planning on letting you grab from Github, WP.org, a zip file link, etc. I’ve outlined the idea on GitHub. You’d setup multiple blueprints, and when you do an install, you could grab a blueprint and use that. For example, an ‘ecommerce’ blueprint might install WooCommerce, some other plugins, and _s, or whatever you like.

As the VVV Site Wizard doesn’t seem to be maintained anymore, Parbs plans to keep Variable VVV going and has also outlined a number of other enhancements in the project’s issues queue:

• Enable vv to auto-update itself
• Add deployment capability
• Delete site database during removal
• Add option to add dummy content when creating site
• Allow overriding of /htdocs install location

Parbs plans to add anything that will make developers’ lives easier at WebDevStudios, but he is also open to suggestions. “I’ve built the script to be extremely easy to add new functionality, so implementing features people request will be as easy as possible,” he said.

The script is now ready for public use. “Over the past few days, a few people here at WebDevStudios have been beta-testing it, and its really solid,” Parbs said. Variable VVV is now publicly available on GitHub for anyone who wants to use it or contribute back to the project. If you test the script, make sure to leave your feedback and suggestions in the project’s issues list, as WebDevStudios plans to consistently maintain and extend the tool to make it better.

One of the oldest and simplest ways of accessing public opinion is through an up/down voting system. When offered in a controlled setting where everyone has the chance to vote, the system causes the best ideas to float to the top.

Idea Factory is a plugin designed to make it easy for WordPress administrators to set up a voting system where users can submit new ideas from the frontend. The plugin was created by Nick Haskins, author of the Aesop Story Engine.

“Idea Factory was born out of necessity, and the frustration of the lack of plugins that did exactly what I wanted it to do,” Haskins wrote in the plugin’s description. His implementation is simple but built to be extensible, offering developers a number of filters, hooks, and actions. Idea Factory features the following:

• AJAX powered front-end submission and voting
• Voting is limited to logged-in users
• 1 vote allowed per user per idea
• Emails the admin with notification of a new submission
• Extensible with hooks and actions on events
• More ideas loaded with AJAX on front-end
• Mobile friendly

Logged-in users can enter new ideas via a modal submission box. The plugin creates an Idea custom post type and data is stored in post_meta and user_meta tables.

Ideas are displayed at yoursite.com/ideas. Users can only vote once on each idea before they are locked out. Up votes push ideas to the top and down votes send ideas further down the list.

The design is generic enough to drop nicely into any theme, but you can further customize it by copying the file from the plugin’s /template-ideas/ directory into your theme. Idea Factory’s settings also allow you to disable the core CSS file from loading so that you can take full control.

Each idea and its description can be edited in the admin. If you have a highly active voting board, you may want to turn off email notifications for new submissions. The settings also include an option to hold all new ideas as drafts to be approved before publishing.

After testing Idea Factory, I was impressed with how easy it was to set up and use. Both idea creation and voting are anonymous, but it might be nice to have an option to display users for each. However, one of the best things about Idea Factory is that it maintains a limited set of features in favor of keeping the plugin lean and extensible.

An idea voting system can help community managers or developers get a better idea of where to invest their time and how to prioritize new features. It’s a quick way to take the temperature of your user base, because it allows them to freely express their ideas and participate in voting up the best ones. It’s also far less time-consuming than conducting a survey. Check out Idea Factory on WordPress.org for a solid, simple way to bring new ideas to light.

In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss what it would take for WordPress to lose its dominant market share position. We both agree that WordPress isn’t going anywhere soon but it’s something to be mindful of.

We share our thoughts on the recommended plugins tab coming in WordPress 4.1 and whether or not it will help users discover new plugins. Last but not least, we discuss Google’s attempt to simplify reCAPTCHAs by replacing distorted text with a check box.

Stories Discussed:

What Would it Take For WordPress to Lose its Dominance?
Google’s New reCAPTCHA API Replaces Distorted Text with a Checkbox
WordPress 4.1 To Introduce Plugin Recommendations
nRelate Will Shutdown Its Service December 31st
Manage Multiple WordPress Sites with WPDASH, Now in Beta

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

StoryFTW by Patrick Shanahan, is a simple swipe based story engine that allows you to use any kind of media imaginable to create your own dynamic slide by slide story. The review is based on an Alpha copy as the plugin is not publicly available yet.

Test User Role allows you to quickly test other user roles from a super admin account to see what other users experience.

Grid is a container based landing page editor.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, December 17th 9:30 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #174:

Version 3.0.4 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

This update adds better compatibility with Apache 2.4, allows https author URLs to be removed from comments, removes the “Check for Spam” button from the “Trash” and “Approved” queues, and allows for automatic API key configuration when Jetpack is installed and connected to a WordPress.com account.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

photo credit: . Entrer dans le rêve – cc

WordPress made great strides in 2014 towards improving internationalization for the global community. WordPress 4.0 streamlined language management in the admin and brought language selection to the installation process.

In the State of the Word address this year, Matt Mullenweg highlighted the importance of internationalization to the project when he said, “If WordPress is going to be truly global, truly inclusive, it has to be fully available for other languages.” He also announced that fully localized plugin and theme directories will be available in the admin as of 4.1.

This week the WordPress Theme Review Team updated its guidelines to require all new theme submissions to be translation-ready. Theme authors submitting new themes to the official directory must ensure that all text strings are translatable. This also applies to any updates to existing themes.

Tips for Making Your Theme Translation-Ready

The WordPress Theme Review Handbook doesn’t yet contain a section with information about preparing themes for translation. However, you can find all the basics on how to internationalize a theme in the WordPress Theme Developer Handbook, which is still a work in progress.

The internationalization section also links to a number of videos and tutorials in its resources section. Many of these will be helpful in walking theme developers through the process of preparing themes for translation:

• GNU gettext utilities
• i18n: Preparing Your WordPress Theme for the World
• Samuel “Otto” Wood: On Internationalization: Plugins and Themes for the Whole World
• Use wp_localize_script, It Is Awesome
• Zé Fontainhas: Lost in Translation—i18n and WordPress
• Internationalization: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

If a WordPress theme isn’t translatable, then the site it is running on is limited to the theme author’s language. If you invest your time and hard work into creating a WordPress theme, why not make sure that it’s able to be used all over the world?

The new requirement from the Theme Review team is a major milestone in expanding WordPress’ global reach. The official themes directory is often the first place that self-hosted WordPress users look when shopping for themes. The new translation-ready requirement will help ensure that WordPress.org’s vast library of themes are ready for global use.

bbPress is a 10 year old project that’s supposed to make it easy to attach a forum to WordPress. On the day after Christmas in 2004, Matt Mullenweg spent an entire weekend coding an alternative to miniBB, from the ground up that at the time, powered the WordPress support forums. bbPress was stand-alone software until 2011, when the release of 2.0 transformed it into a WordPress plugin,

Over the years, I’ve kept a close eye on bbPress but I’ve never used it for a project of my own. Since I’m only a new user once, I decided to document my experience of configuring and using it for the first time.

Activation and Configuration

Locating bbPress is easy as it usually shows up as a Featured Plugin on the Add New plugin screen. Once activated, a welcome screen displays information on what’s new, credits, and a link at the bottom to visit the forum settings.

bbPress Welcome Screen After Activation

When visiting the forum settings screen, I’m presented with a list of options with checkboxes and numbers. While there are not a lot of things to configure, I think a better presentation of the various options would be to split each major section into a tab of its own. Although it was my choice to visit the forum settings from the Welcome screen, I think the Welcome screen is a good place to use Admin Pointers to help new users create a new topic, forum, etc. I don’t understand why the Welcome screen has a link to forum settings since a new install won’t have anything to configure.

bbPress Forum Settings Screen

While on the forum settings screen, I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to configure in order for the forum to display on the frontend. At this point, I visit the Documentation section of bbPress.org and locate a Getting Started guide. It turns out, the guide is of no use to me or anyone else for that matter.

Getting Started To Nowhere

The left hand sidebar has a list of related links which point to several different articles on user roles, conditional tags, and functions. It took some effort on my part, but I finally found the article on Getting Started with bbPress. This page should be linked to from the Documentation main page for the Getting Started link. This simple change will save users time and frustration.

Creating Forums

Using the Getting Started guide, I created my first forum. Since forums are Custom Post Types, the forum editor looks similar to the Post Editor. It would be nice if hints displayed above each field so users understand which part of the forum they’re connected to. For example, the title field should have a hint that says “Name of the forum” and above the editor, text that says, “A description of the forum”. Some of the items on the Forum creation screen make sense but it shouldn’t be assumed the user knows what each field corresponds to.

Creating a Forum in bbPress

There are two different types of forums, forum and category. Forums contain topics and can be the parent of other forums. Categories can only contain forums and are primarily used as a method of organization. The nomenclature used is enough to make anyone’s head spin.

Creating Topics

After creating a forum, I moved on to create a topic. Topics are similar to typical forum posts. Topics are one of the three Custom Post Types created by bbPress, which means the Topic editor uses the same interface you’d see when writing a post. Similar to creating forums, I’d like to see the fields labeled for consistency. Creating topics from the backend of WordPress is fairly easy after creating the first forum.

bbPress Topic Created From The Backend of WordPress

 

The Frontend of bbPress

Everything up to this point has been managed from the backend of WordPress. I’ve created a category, forum, and topic. It’s time to see how bbPress works on the frontend. Replying to a topic is straight forward. A form is supplied with quick tag support so visitors can easily style text. After hitting the submit button, the page reloads and the reply is shown. Sometimes, replies don’t show up immediately because they’re moderated by Akismet.

 

Replying to a Topic on The Frontend of bbPress

Once I got a handle for how bbPress is structured and what categories, forums, topics, and replies look like, I went back to the Forum Settings page.

Not Easy Enough

bbPress is a plugin, and because of that, I expect to be able to turn it on and have everything ready to go. As you can see from my experience, it doesn’t always work out that way, especially when using a theme that doesn’t support it out of the box. The Getting Started guide is important information on understanding how to configure bbPress. Without it, I’d be lost in the dark.

My initial experience is rough around the edges and at times frustrating, as I couldn’t easily find the help I needed. I can only imagine how many others have gone through the same experience. Hopefully, a few changes will be made to bbPress and its website to create a smoother new user experience.

If you’ve recently installed or used bbPress for the first time, tell us about your experience in the comments.

photo credit: contemplative imaging – cc

When WordPress 3.0 introduced the ability for developers to register their own custom post types, the software became far more flexible for use as a content management system. This was a major turning point for WordPress, as it gave developers a standard way to structure custom content with core-supported features.

Four years later, custom post types are so commonly used that folks occasionally need a way to switch a post from one type to another. A site admin may want to change how content is structured and presented, and switching content to a new post type can be a huge time saver in some instances.

The Post Type Switcher plugin, authored by John James Jacoby, was created for exactly this purpose. It’s one of those plugins that you may not have ever known about until you’re on the hunt to find a way to convert a post from one type to another.

The plugin adds a simple post type dropdown to the post editor, which allows you to reassign any post to a new post type.

The handy thing is that Post Type Switcher can convert nearly every combination of posts, pages, attachments, custom post types, etc:

• Page to Post
• Post to Page
• Page to Attachment
• Post to Custom

What happens when you change a post to a different type? Only the 'post_type' property of a post is changed. Categories, tags, and custom taxonomies all remain untouched. Featured images remain in place. The post’s URL will change to whatever the new post type uses. For example, if you change a regular post to a testimonial post type that uses /testimonial/ in the URL, your newly converted post will follow the pattern of its new post type.

The old post URL should 404 so that you can use a plugin to redirect to the new URL or add some custom rewrite rules to your .htaccess file. While testing the plugin with different post types, I only encountered one instance where a plugin didn’t properly 404 the original post, but most of the time you won’t have an issue with this.

Jacoby has purposely excluded invisible post types, such as revisions, menus, etc., but you can filter 'pts_post_type_filter' to change how this works if you need access to more post types.

Matthew Gerring, a contributor to the plugin, helped to add bulk editing so that you can select all posts in a certain type and convert them to a new type with one quick action.

Post Type Switcher is very useful if you started out putting content in regular posts but now want to move it into a portfolio plugin or testimonial plugin. Or perhaps you’ve been running bbPress on your site and want to extract a few of the most active posts to become regular blog posts instead. Another common use might be to convert a bunch of posts to pages in order to create a static reference section for your site. This plugin makes all of that possible.

If you’re planning to use the plugin, make sure to test your post type switches in a development environment first. It’s also a good idea to backup your live site before making drastic changes to content. You can find Post Type Switcher in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

BuddyPress 2.2 is shaping up to be an exciting release, packed full of new features for developers. Support for Composer will be included in 2.2, as well as a basic member type API, which will allow developers to create different user types.

The upcoming 2.2 release will also introduce the ability for new activity items to be generated when content is created by registered post types. This is a feature that already exists within the BuddyPress’ blogs component and will be extended to include custom post types that declare support for it. Developers will be able to add support for CPTs with one simple line of code:

add_post_type_support( 'book', 'buddypress-activity' );

This will publish updates to the activity stream for the post type that you specify, using generic strings. The BuddyPress codex has already been updated to show examples for how you can get more control over the activity attributes when you register the post type.

“This update is about the first step of it: ease the implementation of tracking the published post type items into the Activity stream,” BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet explained in the announcement on the BP development blog.

When post type support is added to the activity stream, you will also be able to sort the new items via the activity dropdown filters. This filter is available on the frontend and in the backend.

These improvements are all recent additions to BuddyPress trunk. If you want to test 2.2 alpha, checkout BuddyPress trunk via SVN or download the zip file. Activate it and then add support for a custom post type that is active on your BuddyPress test site.

The ticket that houses the discussion on this issue has been open for three years. BuddyPress 2.2 finally answers this request and gives plugin developers a beautifully simple implementation for adding post type support to the activity stream.

Several plugins are starting to spring up in the WordPress Plugin Directory to bring Google’s new No Captcha reCAPTCHA to WordPress forms. With public hatred for CAPTCHAs at an all-time high, Google finally put its efforts into redesigning the experience, replacing the distorted text with a simple checkbox.

photo credit: Google Online Security Blog

WordPress developers have been quick to take advantage of the new No CAPTCHA API to add it to WordPress forms. So far, the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA plugin, created by Nigerian web developer Agbonghama Collins, provides the most flexibility for specifying the forms where you want to add the protection.

• Option to activate CAPTCHA in either login, registration, comment or combination of two or all
• Choose a theme for the CAPTCHA (light or dark)
• Auto-detects the user’s language

Once activated and configured, you’ll see the new reCAPTCHA added on the frontend:

The plugin is easy to configure – simply paste in your Google reCAPTCHA keys on the settings page:

Select the login, registration, or comment forms, or any combination thereof, for adding No Captcha reCAPTCHA protection.

Further down the page you have the option to force the plugin to use a specific language via a dropdown, or leave it on auto-detect. You can also set a custom error message for when the user fails to solve the CAPTCHA and select a theme for the CAPTCHA display.

I tested the plugin and it works as advertised to add the new No Captcha reCAPTCHA. I discovered that it is not compatible with the Jetpack Comment module, so you’ll want to uncheck that box for comments if you’re using it. The No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA plugin is available for free from WordPress.org. It’s not yet known whether Google will create an official implementation for WordPress, but in the meantime, this plugin makes it easy to add reCAPTCHA to the WordPress forms that are the most vulnerable to spam.

Developed by Mike Jolley, Download Monitor is an eight year old plugin with over 600k downloads. Download Monitor provides an interface for uploading and managing downloadable files including support for multiple versions, inserting download links into posts, and logging downloads.

It has been rewritten 4 times, seen well over 100 releases, and been downloaded 600,000 times. The latest ‘v1’ reboot has been praised and I often receive nice comments from users even though development has slowed of late.

Due to time constraints, Jolley placed Download Monitor up for adoption. Barry Kooij, a coworker of Jolley’s, adopted the plugin. Kooij is already working on the next version and users should see an update soon. Regarding the plugin’s future, Jolley states, “I’m really excited about its future and I’m happy that Download Monitor is in safe hands.”

How to Put a Plugin up For Adoption

The Download Monitor plugin has a happy ending but there are several plugins that are abandoned every year. If you’re thinking about abandoning your plugin, consider putting it up for adoption instead.

When a plugin author adds the ‘adopt-me‘ tag, it shows up in a list of other plugins using the same tag. Currently, there are 19 plugins available for adoption. Simply get in touch with the author and ask if you can take over development.

Coen Jacobs, who works as a backend developer, published a short video explaining why he doesn’t work with WordPress full-time anymore. It’s not that he doesn’t like the project but rather, he’s gained a fresh perspective since stepping outside of the WordPress bubble.

WordPress used to be the holy grail for me, I made everything with WordPress, even things that weren’t really suitable to be built on WordPress. I was an absolute fanboy who used WordPress for everything.

WordPress isn’t going away anytime soon but it’s a risky move to place all your eggs in one basket.

Instead of using WordPress for everything, he’s now using the best framework or tool for the job. I think this is a key lesson that a lot of WordPress developers need to be reminded of from time to time. WordPress is capable of handling a lot of different types of websites but it’s not suitable for every project. Use the right tool for the job.

WP Stagecoach has been in beta for the past few months and the team behind it is busy planning for an official launch in early 2015. The startup, created by Jonathan Kay, came in second, behind WP Curve, in the first round of Matt Report’s WordPress Startup Challenge.

The new service aims to create the most convenient way to stage a WordPress site, with 1-click copying from production to staging and 1-click to merge the changes back into the live site. WP Stagecoach offers a plugin that hooks your site up to the service with an API key. Staging sites are hosted on WP Stagecoach’s servers.

The beta version of the service currently includes the following features:

• Create a staging copy of your live site with one click.
• Copy changes from your staging site back to your live site.
• Choose which changes to import. You can import some or all of your file changes, and/or your database changes.
• Password-protect your staging site.
• Staging site runs on WP Stagecoach’s server – no need to set up hosting for your staging site.
• Revert file changes if importing from your staging site doesn’t go as expected.
• Staging sites can be accessed via SSL-encryption

After testing the beta on a simple blog, I found that the build process took several minutes. Once the site is created, you’ll be given SFTP/FTP login credentials and URL for your staging site. The site that WP Stagecoach creates is instantly public, which has me worried about duplicate content. If you use the service, you’ll want to log in and install a maintenance plugin to hide the staging site from the public.

If an import gets interrupted, the plugin can pick up where it left off, which is helpful for larger sites. It also includes an advanced debug mode for tracking down problems.

All of the staging sites are hosted on a standard LAMP stack, and users will not be able to reproduce their exact hosting environment with the service when it launches. For many people, the stack will be similar enough to their host and will cause no issues. However, if you are running on a more customized hosting environment, WP Stagecoach will likely not be suitable for creating your staging site.

WP Stagecoach has plans to make it possible for users to create a staging site on their own servers, but this feature will be further down the road. When the team is able to add this, it will make the product a much more versatile tool for WordPress developers.

At the moment, the service is very promising and offers a highly convenient way to create a staging site for a simple WordPress site on a standard LAMP stack. Those with a more customized server environment will have to look elsewhere for the time being. If the tool adapts to become more flexible, it will be better positioned to reach a larger audience with a wide range of hosting environments.

WP Stagecoach pricing will be $12/month or $99/year for basic support. The beta is free and the team plans to add a few updates before the official launch. If you want to test the service, sign up on wpstagecoach.com to download the plugin.

Earlier this year, CEO and Envato Co-founder, Collis Ta’eed, spoke at The Sunrise conference in Sydney, Australia. The Sunrise is a conference where founders of Australia’s iconic startups describe the early years of their business. The presentation is 15 minutes in length with 30 minutes dedicated to questions.

There’s a lot of great information in the presentation, especially if you’re running a bootstrapped business. I also admire Ta’eed’s delivery as he comes off as a straight shooter. He reminds me of myself when I tried to launch a business several years ago.

Presentation Highlights

Envato began as a stock Flash template marketplace called Flash Den. Flash Den was eventually renamed to Active Den due to Adobe owning the trademarks associated with Flash.

Envato started with $30k and is still a bootstrapped company. Ta’eed receives numerous offers every year from venture capitalists looking to invest in Envato. So far, he has not accepted any outside funding.

AppStorm was the precursor to the Apple App Store. Before Ta’eed could turn AppStorm into an app marketplace, Apple released the App Store crushing his idea.

At 32:26, Ta’eed is asked how he came up with the name Envato. He bought it from Brandbucket for $1k.

At 38:50, Ta’eed is asked to describe how massive the Envato marketplace is. His response, “We sell something every 6 seconds, we sell a million WordPress theme per year, and we have the largest stock music marketplace by volume with a million tracks licensed each year.”

At 42:52, Ta’eed is asked about Envato’s relationship to WordPress. He admits to the licensing challenges and mentions that, when Envato started selling WordPress themes, he didn’t know what the GPL was. He describes the relationship as symbiotic.

WPDASH is a new service that launched in beta today, created by a group of WordPress developers in Poland. It joins the ranks of ManageWP, WP Remote, InfiniteWP, and a handful of others that provide a centralized WordPress dashboard for managing multiple sites.

With the popularity of WordPress on the rise, many users have more than one site in operation. Those who work in development often have hundreds, if not thousands, of WordPress sites to look after, all of which require regular plugin and theme updates.

The automatic background updates introduced in WordPress 3.7 certainly ease the burden of maintenance for many WordPress agencies, but centralized dashboards are becoming critical for successfully managing backups, site uptime, and updates to themes and plugins for multiple installations.

WPDASH is entering beta with an impressive array of features for managing sites, including the following:

• Add and modify posts and comments
• Install themes and plugins
• One-click updates
• Generate reports
• Create manual and automatic backups
• Monitor server uptime and user browsing habits
• Monitor accessibility of linked pages and inbound link statistics
• Two-factor authentication with Rublon

Here’s a look at an example WPDASH overview of activity across all of your WordPress sites:

WPDASH also includes a number of advanced SEO-related features, such as integration with third-party tools for keyword monitoring and analytics services.

Since the beta period is just now starting, we’ll be monitoring users’ experiences to see how reliable the service is. WPDASH has not yet detailed its pricing, because the team is still ironing out features that will be added before launch. Beta testers have the opportunity to vote from the Features tab in the dashboard for new features that will be implemented.

If you’re curious about the new service and want to join in the testing period, you can sign up for free at WPDASH.io.

Jetpack has been downloaded more than 13 million times. The Contact Form module is one of its most popular features, as nearly every site requires a way for visitors to get in touch. The module is reliable and easy to use but fairly basic in terms of features.

Fortunately, Jetpack makes it easy for you to extend its features with a plugin. Hugh Lashbrooke, who has authored more than a dozen plugins hosted on WordPress.org, has just released Jetpack Contact Form Auto Reply to make it easy for site admins to issue an automatic message in response to a contact form submission.

The plugin adds a new Auto Reply sub-menu item under the Jetpack menu, with settings for two useful features:

• Craft a custom reply message using the WordPress WYSIWYG editor
• Set a unique from name and address for auto replies

You can even add rich text or images to the custom reply message, which makes it easy to brand your communications for your company or organization.

The auto reply message could be something as simple as “We have received your request and will contact you shortly.” Or perhaps it’s a holiday and you want to update the auto reply to notify people of any delays in response time, i.e. “We will be out of the office until January 3, 2015.” This plugin provides an easy way to do that in the WordPress admin, without having to set up an auto-responder in your email.

Lashbrooke originally created the plugin for his own use, because he was receiving numerous messages from people asking for support for his plugins hosted on WordPress.org and WooThemes.com. His custom auto reply message is designed to help point people to the appropriate forum, in case they contacted him for support-related questions.

After testing the plugin, I can confirm that it works as advertised. The only tricky part is the last setting on the page, which calls for the label of the field in the contact form that contains the email address to use for the auto reply. You have to correctly identify this label or it won’t send. In my case the label was ‘Email,’ which is likely to be a common one.

While an auto reply might seem redundant, since Jetpack already displays a confirmation of the message sending successfully, that extra note in your visitor’s inbox can be reassuring, especially since it allows them to reply to the email if necessary. You can never underestimate the importance of communication in a customer’s decision-making process.

Jetpack Contact Form Auto Reply is a handy add-on for the millions of Jetpack users out there who use the Contact Form module. Download it from WordPress.org. If you’d like to contribute to make it better, feel free to fork the plugin on GitHub.

photo credit: pasukaru76 – cc

WordPress is 11 years old and used on over 20% of the web. Its popularity is made up of many facets including, the community, themes and plugins. In the realm of open source content management systems, nothing comes close to what WordPress has accomplished. Although it’s the market leader, its dominance won’t last forever.

Mike Johnston of CMS Critic asks, “What It Will Take to Dethrone WordPress?” In the article, Johnston explains why WordPress is on top and why Ghost is on the right path to possibly achieving similar success.

We’ve seen some successful upstarts come out of the wood work to try to take a piece of the pie and some are doing quite well in gaining momentum. One particular contender that comes to mind is Ghost.

While Ghost is doing well in its own right, I don’t think it will knock on WordPress’ door anytime soon. Johnston lists four things contenders must do in order to dethrone WordPress.

1. Focus on marketing to developers
2. Offer a migration path
3. Offer hosted and self hosted options
4. Build up a community

The four steps he lists are a good start, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to take a chunk out of WordPress’ market share. In 2009, I outlined six ways WordPress could die and named Habari as a viable competitor. Five years later, WordPress is bigger than ever and no one seems to remember the Habari project.

A Combination of Factors

I don’t think any one thing will put WordPress in second place. Instead, a combination of factors would likely need to take place. In no particular order, here are a couple of things that might lead to the project’s demise.

1. Project leadership routinely ignores the majority.
2. It becomes a large, bloated, legacy project that blocks innovation.
3. A competing CMS comes along that does everything WordPress does, except better.
4. The community in mass disappears or loses interest in favor of a competing product.
5. A huge scandal takes place involving Automattic, the WordPress Foundation and those close to the project.

I doubt any of these things will happen and WordPress will continue to be the market leader for at least the next 10 years. What risks or series of events do you think would lead to WordPress losing its dominance?

Minnow is a beautiful, ultra-minimalist blogging theme from Automattic that just landed in the WordPress.org directory this week, bringing the company’s total free theme contributions to 54. It was designed by Mel Choyce, co-author of the popular Flounder theme.

Minnow features a single-column blog homepage, with a prominent social links menu at the top. The theme has support for all the standard post formats, with unique grey icons for each. The post meta design is tastefully simple and understated so that your content stays in focus.

Quotes, galleries, asides, etc. are all uniquely represented with subtle variations. Minnow also includes matching styles for threaded comments.

The theme has just a handful of customization options for changing the background image and/or color. It’s the type of theme that you can activate and have it looking like the demo in under two minutes.

The theme is mobile friendly, and the 660px main content area sizes down gracefully for mobile devices. Minnow also includes a slide-out sidebar widget area. The primary navigation menu is pinned to the top of the sidebar, above any widgets.

Check out the live demo to see Minnow in action. You’ll have to install the theme on your site in order to see the slide-out sidebar and navigation menu, as it is currently omitted in the demo.

If you’re looking to jump start your blog for the upcoming new year, Minnow is an excellent choice. The clean design offers visitors a pleasant reading experience. Download it for free from WordPress.org.

photo credit: Buzz Hoffman – cc

Major changes are coming to the Roots starter theme for WordPress. Roots has appealed mainly to developers, because it incorporates modern build tools into its workflow. The theme was first released in 2011 and now counts more than 70 contributors to the project.

Roots currently utilizes HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, Grunt, and Bower in the starter theme but will will soon be moving to Gulp. The project’s GitHub repo has a Gulp branch with the relevant discussion and commits.

“Gulp is faster, has nicer configuration files, allows us to easily compile both Less and Sass to the same stylesheet, and more,” Roots creator Ben Word said, regarding the upcoming changes.

This will also include an update to Roots’ asset pipeline, which will allow theme developers to take CSS and JS from WordPress plugins and have it compiled into the single CSS and single JS files that the theme builds. The new asset pipeline brings changes to project folders, removes differences between dev and production tasks, and adds a JSON-based asset pipeline.

Build a Roots-based Theme Using Any Framework

Additionally, the starter theme will be moving away from including Bootstrap in order to become framework agnostic. “We’re going to have a Yeoman generator that will allow you to build a Roots based theme however you want,” Word said. “You’ll be able to pick from any framework, Bootstrap, Bootstrap Sass, Foundation, and more.”

While Bootstrap still has a very large user base, the Roots community has shown more interest in other frameworks such as Semantic UI and Google’s Web Starter Kit.

“A lot of people over the years have expressed that they like Roots, but don’t like Bootstrap,” Word explained. “We’ve even seen some forks pop up (Roots Foundation, for instance) to accommodate other frameworks. By becoming framework agnostic, the starter theme should be able to appeal to a wider audience.”

Word and his team plan to have the generator ready for the public in the first quarter of 2015 and are currently working to incorporate work from other Yeoman generators.

Last year, the Roots community introduced Bedrock, a modern WordPress stack that uses Composer for managing WordPress along with Capistrano for deployment. Bedrock can be used with any theme. Since its launch, the project has struggled with branding issues. When all the new changes are merged into Roots’ master branch, Word plans to rename the starter theme and keep Roots as the organization name.

The Roots starter theme has always had a somewhat narrow audience due to the fact that it has a steeper learning curve than other starter themes. Making the change to be platform agnostic should open it up for more theme developers, but it will continue to cater primarily to those who are interested in using build scripts.

“Roots has been at a point where you can’t use it if you’re not using npm, Bower, and Grunt, and we’ve completely stopped supporting users who don’t want to adapt to the better workflow we’ve created,” Word said. “I struggled in the past with choosing to support the average Joe WordPress developer or to push for WordPress devs to learn tools that make them better at their job. Workflow efficiency is definitely the ultimate goal.”

photo credit: slimmer_jimmer – cc

The content recommendation service nRelate, announced it will shut down its service December 31st. Launched in 2009, nRelate has provided billions of recommendations to over 100k sites. The service is shifting its assets to support its internal reference-style content properties. If you use nRelate, there is a farewell FAQ available which has instructions on what to do.

YARPP and Jetpack Related Posts as Alternatives

There are three alternatives that come to mind with regards to related posts, YARPP, Related Posts for WordPress, and Jetpack Related Posts. For several years, I used YARPP on WP Tavern to handle related posts and it performed flawlessly. However, at one point, it gave me performance problems because of the resources used on a shared webhosting server. The webhosting provider at the time pointed out that YARPP was taking up too many resources on the server. If you have a limited amount of posts or a beefy server, YARPP is a great alternative because it offers a variety of ways to display related posts.

After encountering performance problems, I decided to go without related posts. Jetpack 2.9 released in early 2014, contained a new module called related posts. Unlike YARPP, all of the processing and server resources were used on Automattic’s servers instead of my own and eliminated my performance issues with related posts. Keep in mind that when you use the Jetpack Related Posts module, the content is mirrored on WordPress.com for indexing and processing.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the module will use the featured image attached to a post in the module. If a featured image is not detected, it uses the first image in the post which may or may not be optimal. You might also see a mix of related posts with and without images.

Related Post Without an Image

I’m of the mindset that if you can offload the processing required to determine post relationships, then do it. We’ve used the Jetpack Related Posts module on the Tavern for some time and haven’t experienced any issues. It’s also pretty good at being somewhat relevant. What do you use to handle related posts?

If you run a WooCommerce store with a lot of products and want a nice way to tell customers whether an item is new, on sale, or sold out, check out the Woo Stickers plugin by Webline. Created by Webline India, Woo Stickers makes it easy to provide visual cues on products. Stickers indicate whether a product is new, for sale, or sold out and comes in two styles, ribbon and round.

Notification Stickers and Styles

The plugin’s settings are modular in that you can configure stickers to display for some products while not appearing for others.

Woo Sticker Settings

Woo Stickers uses image sprites so they should look fine for most WooCommerce store designs. Perhaps in the future, the plugin author can provide the ability to control the sprite and font colors for maximum theme compatibility. I tested the plugin in WordPress 4.0.1 and WooCommerce 2.2.8 and experienced no problems.

photo credit: rchlnwnhm – cc

WordPress 4.1 hasn’t yet been officially released, but child themes for the new Twenty Fifteen default theme are already popping up. The minimalist, blog-focused theme has so far been well received and users are already eagerly testing it out.

WordPress developer Chris McCoy has created a Twenty Fifteen child theme with a unique twist. At first glance, Five Beers appears to be a colorless variation of the default theme, but under the hood you’ll find a set of powerful AJAX additions.

One of the most impressive features is the way Five Beers handles media display. It incorporates the Strip.js lightbox to slide images and videos out from the side of the page. You can see a live example of it on the Five Beers demo site.

The child theme includes all of the customization options of Twenty Fifteen plus several extra features:

• AJAX Live Search (still working out the bugs)
• AJAX comments
• AJAX archives
• AJAX A-Z Alphabet post loading
• AJAX infinite scrolling with SEO as a factor
• Custom tag page listed by letter
• Lightbox to adapt to galleries and video oEmbeds
• Unlimited widget area creation

Additionally, when you publish a YouTube or Vimeo link, the theme will use the cover image (click to play) as the featured image. If no featured image is set, Five Beers will use a default click to play thumbnail.

Building all of this functionality into the theme is a bit unorthodox, as most theme authors would opt to put these items into separate plugins. I asked McCoy why he opted to do it this way. “I’m trying to keep all functionality as the theme, because I prefer not to use a plugin if I don’t need to,” he said. If you use the theme, you could opt to use McCoy’s Strip Lightbox plugin instead and then simply remove the include in the functions file for the lightbox.php file.

Ultimately, it’s a theme McCoy built for himself one night while having five different brands of beer, hence the unique name. I’d like to see each piece of functionality pulled out and supported as a separate plugin, but this isn’t something he intends to do. McCoy originally planned to create it just for himself but will be adding more features next week.

This child theme is particularly useful if you want to highlight your archived content by including alphabetical sorting and live search, making it easy for users to discover content as they are typing.

Five Beers currently requires WordPress 4.1 Beta 1+ to use until 4.1 is officially released. The WordPress 4.1 project schedule has the release targeted for the week of December 8. McCoy does not plan to add the theme to WordPress.org, as the Strip.js licensing is not supported in the official directory. You can download the Five Beers theme for free on GitHub.

When Google Reader was laid to rest on July 1, 2013, many users flocked to Feedly, one of the most popular alternatives. Even if you don’t use Feedly, it’s likely that many of your blog’s readers do. Therefore, if you want a true picture of the number of your RSS subscribers, digging into Feedly’s numbers should be part of your research.

Find Your Feedly Subscriber Count on Mobile

Feedly’s UI is notorious for being less than intuitive and confusing to navigate. If you poke around, you can find a rough number of your subscribers. If you’re using a mobile device, simply search for your blog (even if you’re already subscribed), in the top search bar and it will display a rough count.

Find Your Feedly Subscriber Count in the Web App

If you’re looking for your subscriber count in the web app, click your site in the left sidebar among your subscriptions and then look for your total subscribers under the title.

That’s not too difficult, but what if you want to know the actual count of your Feedly subscribers? After all, there’s quite a difference between 3,001 and 3,999, especially when you are looking at setting goals. Once you pass 2,000, it seems that Feedly resorts to fuzzy rounding to the nearest thousand instead of reporting actual figures.

Feedly Insight Plugin for WordPress

WordPress sites can install a plugin called Feedly Insight to get an exact subscriber count. It utilizes the Feedly Cloud API to tap into more exact data about your feed(s). Once you install the plugin, you’ll notice that it adds its own top level menu where you can click on the “Feedly Insight” submenu item. Scroll down to the search bar and enter your URL. It will return a few interesting stats, including languages and an exact subscriber count.

You can also search your competitors’ URLs in order to see how well they’re doing at attracting subscribers. After performing your research, you can keep the plugin if you want to keep track of your Feedly stats via its dashboard widget, or you can uninstall it and check back again later.

Having a full picture of RSS subscribers is important for publishers who want to tailor their content to appear better in feed readers. For example, if you find that you have a large number of Feedly subscribers, you will want to make sure that each post appears with an image. Feedly doesn’t have the ability to fetch your featured image. Instead, it grabs the first image displayed within your post to show as the thumbnail in its reader. If your post has no images, it will show a blank as the thumbnail, which isn’t ideal. Adding an image to each post will help you to avoid this.

You can also claim your own Feedly hashtag using this Google form, which allows you to have more control over what people find when they search for your brand or your #name.

If you’re a publisher, you cannot ignore Feedly, even if you’re not a fan of the product. Feed readers are still going strong and Feedly seems to be leading the pack after Google Reader died. If you have never checked to find out how many people are reading your blog through Feedly, you may be surprised. To get a rough idea, just log into the app. The Feedly Insight plugin offers a more detailed look and an easier way to monitor your stats.

Performance As Design, by Brad Frost. Great thoughts and links. Performance is going to be a big focus for me in 2015.

In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week and interview the founder of HappyJoe.org, James Dalman. Happy Joe is a 501 c3 non-profit organization that helps U.S. veterans with entrepreneurship and employment opportunities.

Dalman shares what inspired him to create the organization and the role WordPress plays in helping veterans secure jobs in the web technology industry.

Stories Discussed:

WordCamp Maui, HI Set For February 13-14th, 2015
DawnPatrol Gives Fringe WordPress Communities a Voice
JP Bot: The Silent Bot Behind the Jetpack Module Extraction Plugins
InfiniteWP Client Plugin Releases Security Update

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

Before deleting the posts backs up posts into an XML file before they’re emptied from the trash. The XML file is stored in the same format same as the Export from WordPress. If you want to restore the post, you can use the WordPress importer.

Gravity Forms Google Analytics Event Tracking provides an easy way to add Google Analytics event tracking to Gravity Forms, allowing you to properly track form submissions as events and conversions within Google Analytics.

WP Voice Recorder allows you to record audio and play it on the frontend of WordPress within a post. It saves the recorded audio file to a Dropbox account instead of saving it to the server.

WPWeekly Meta:

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Listen To Episode #173:

On the Add New plugin page in WordPress 4.0, there are two different tabs to help users discover new plugins: Featured and Popular. What if WordPress could recommend plugins based on the ones you have installed? Thanks to a recent update to the API, users will be able to access a list of recommended plugins in WordPress 4.1.

The recommendations take into account the plugins you have installed and suggests plugins based on which ones are commonly used together. It’s similar to an e-commerce shopping cart that recommends products other customers have purchased based on what’s in the cart.

Recommended Plugins To Get its Own Tab

In today’s WordPress 4.1 developer meeting, the group reached a consensus to create a new tab for Recommended plugins instead of replacing the Popular tab. I’m in favor of this decision because they each have a different definition. Also, the Popular tab shows which plugins are doing well across the directory. Another benefit to keeping the Popular plugins tab is for fresh installs of WordPress, as it gives users a good foundation to start looking for plugins.

In my tests, I noticed that some of the plugins recommended to me are 5-8 years old. I’ve reported the behavior to Alex Shiels and it will be addressed before 4.1 ships. If you are testing WordPress 4.1 and come across any oddities with plugin recommendations, please report them in the ticket.

The Recommended plugins tab exposes new and useful plugins to users instead of limiting them to the Featured and Popular categories. Since recommendations are based on actual data, they should get better as time goes on. Do you think a recommended plugins page is a useful addition to the plugin discovery process? Let us know in the comments.

For the past several years, Google’s reCAPTCHA has verified a user’s humanity by forcing you to decipher warped, nonsensical text. reCAPTCHA’s method of protecting websites from spam has long put the burden on the user to prove that he is not an abusive bot.

This is all about to change as a result of Google’s most recent research, which indicates that smart bots are able to solve even the most distorted text puzzles with more than 99% accuracy. Since the CAPTCHA puzzles are often infuriating to humans and ineffective at stopping bots, Google put its efforts toward developing a better user experience.

Today, Vinay Shet, Google’s Product Manager for reCAPTCHA, announced a new API called “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.” This API utilizes an Advanced Risk Analysis engine that is capable of discerning between users and bots. The best part is that the interface has been simplified to a checkbox, a vast improvement over reCAPTCHA’s alphabet soup scramble.

photo credit: Google Online Security Blog

WordPress.org is already using the new “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” API and, according to the announcement, is providing users with a faster registration experience:

Early adopters, like Snapchat, WordPress, Humble Bundle, and several others are already seeing great results with this new API. For example, in the last week, more than 60% of WordPress’ traffic and more than 80% of Humble Bundle’s traffic on reCAPTCHA encountered the No CAPTCHA experience—users got to these sites faster.

Several dozen WordPress plugins integrate reCAPTCHA in one way or another to protect sites from bad bots. Plugins that integrate the new “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” API will allow many users to pass through by simply checking a box. However, it does provide a fallback to the scrambled letters in cases where the Advanced Risk Analysis engine isn’t able to confidently assume that a user is human.

A cursory examination of the changelogs on several reCAPTCHA plugins shows that plugin authors have not yet updated their extensions to indicate compatibility with the new API. Given that the user experience of the checkbox is far superior to distorted letters, we’re likely to see more developers take advantage of reCAPTCHA’s new API in the coming days. Does the new API make you more likely to use reCAPTCHA?

The very first WordCamp Salvador is set to take place in Brazil this weekend on December 6th, bringing together approximately 160 attendees who are excited about connecting through WordPress. The more developed south and southeast regions of Brazil have had WordCamps in the past, but WordCamp Salvador will be the first in the northeast.

Co-organizer Leo Baiano is the founder of Salvador’s first WordPress meetup group and has been instrumental in growing the local community over the past year. He discovered WordPress nine years ago, which led him to get involved in fostering his local community.

“The idea of holding WordCamp Salvador was born in early 2014. Many people have left the city to work in more technologically advanced cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where there are many events happening and more companies value employees,” he said. Baiano became determined to bring WordCamp to Salvador. “I did not want to leave the city that I love to participate in important events and be valued as a professional; I prefer to fight to make things better here,” he said.

When Baiano started the WP Salvador/Bahia meetup group, he focused on bringing people together for small events with lectures on basic topics, as well as social gatherings. They hosted approximately 10 meetups before sending in an application to start organizing a WordCamp.

“Without the meetups and the local community support, it would be almost impossible to make this WordCamp happen,” he said. “Now I have a team of five local co-organizers and lots of others willing to volunteer at the event.” Baiano also received help from friends who organized previous WordCamps as well as support from the WordPress Brazil User Group.

WP Salvador Meetup Group Helps Seniors Learn WordPress

One of the unique things about the local WordPress community in Salvador is its desire to work together to help more people benefit from the software.

“Local Brazilian communities are all similar in essence, but what differentiates the Salvador community from others is the willingness we all have to get the group together and work on related projects,” Baiano said.

“An example of that is this work we just started with this elderly group. Other group members already showed interest in running some workshops for them, without any financial return, just for the pleasure of working together.” The meetup group partnered with UNEB (State University of Bahia) and the UATI, a support unit for seniors.

“We are teaching seniors how to create blogs with WordPress, and update and promote their blogs. This is a wonderful initiative because these seniors are looking for an occupation, something to pass the time, and they are very smart and interested in the lecture,” Baiano said.

“I was surprised by their enthusiasm, all the time asking questions and wanting to learn more about it. In 2015 we will begin a series of workshops where this group of seniors will learn how to create a WordPress blog, how to produce content, basic SEO techniques such as promoting posts on social networks, how to increase the audience of the blog by interacting with readers and other blogs in the same niche.”

WordCamp Salvador Signifies an Important Milestone for the Local Community

The local WordPress community in Salvador is just starting to take off, as meetup members gather around collaborative projects like the initiative to help seniors with WordPress. WordCamp Salvador will be an important milestone for solidifying the community.

“My hope for this WordCamp is that it allows the community to grow even more, resulting in more people attending our future meetups and inspiring new collaborative projects,” Baiano said.

“The event happening this year is very important if you take into account the momentum of the digital market in the city of Salvador right now. It’s a special moment, where many other groups have begun to organize and get together. The WordCamp will help foster future debates and help the market grow as a whole.”

Baiano reports that current registered attendees are comprised of 75% locals and 24% from other regions in Brazil. He hopes that the WordCamp will connect local members to the wider WordPress community.

“We are here to stay and we are available to help the WordPress community,” he said. “We hope to encourage our members to start contributing and engaging more in the global community, by helping on the official forums, translations, and on WordPress core.”

photo credit: Karen Apricot New Orleans – cc

jMonkeyEngine is a game engine made for developers who want to create 3D games following modern technology standards. The framework is programmed entirely in Java aimed at wide accessibility and quick deployment to desktop, web, and mobile platforms. Established in 2003, the jMonkeyEngine community forum has gone through at least four migrations.

phpBB → SMF → BuddyPress Forum → bbPress 2.0 → Discourse.

In late October, the jMonkeyEngine community hub went offline. When the site came back online, the team discovered performance issues. Due to performance reasons and a change in philosophy, the jMonkeyEngine project is migrating its community and forum from BuddyPress and bbPress to Discourse. This marks the fifth different forum migration in 10 years.

Why BuddyPress and bbPress Were Initially Chosen to Run The Community Hub

In a post announcing the change, jMonkeyEngine Community Manager, Erlend Sogge Heggen, cites the biggest mistake he made is using the forum component bundled with BuddyPress. In his grand vision for the site in 2010, Heggen envisioned the community site to have the following features:

• Forums
• Social
• Galleries
• Wikis
• Files
• Advanced user profiles
• Unified search

BuddyPress was chosen because it offers many of these features out of the box and integrates seamlessly with WordPress user tables. Over time, two particular problems arose.

1. No one on the community management team would touch the BuddyPress code because of its complexity.
2. Even though BuddyPress has the features Heggen wants, it doesn’t do any of them particularly well.

This brought about the realization that his community didn’t care for the galleries, wikis, or the advanced user profiles. Heggen says it’s the forum user’s cared about most, “So now we were stuck with a sub-par forum that everyone used, and a bunch of other sub-par features that no one used. In pursuit of the all-encompassing solution, I had downgraded the heart and soul of our website, and by extension our community: The forum.”

Separate Software For Specific Tasks

Heggen says they’ll continue to use WordPress for now, but only for blogging. “The only users WordPress will handle is our small team of authors; it really isn’t designed well for anything other than administrative use anyhow.”

Instead of using software that fulfills multiple purposes, Heggen will use software specific to the task at hand and use APIs to bridge them together. “In the age of JSON APIs and SPAs, you don’t need that ‘one foundation to rule them all.'”

When is bbPress The Right Choice?

jMonkeyEngine has determined that BuddyPress and bbPress are no longer the right choice to build its community on. In a follow up post, Heggen asks, is bbPress even right for anyone? According to Heggen, the custom post type is a lie and the project never gets the attention it deserves. “It’s under the official WordPress umbrella, but it’s not part of their product strategy, so in effect it’s just another plugin developed by hobbyists in their spare time.”

Unlike bbPress, Discourse has a team of paid developers working full-time to create the best community engagement/discussion software on the web. In less than two years, it looks and feels light-years beyond what bbPress offers. It’s worth noting that, like bbPress, Discourse is GPLv2 licensed.

Heggen recommends using bbPress only if it’s going to be a small subset of the site’s entire offering but says, “You should strongly reconsider whether it’s worth having a forum at all, because in my honest opinion a forum is an ‘all or nothing’ sort of deal. It’s either a key component of your website, or it’s going to become a graveyard quicker than you can say ‘Welcome to our community!'”

Still Hopeful For bbPress’ Future

Despite moving the jMonkeyEngine community off of bbPress to Discourse and his gripes about the project, Heggen believes it can still be a viable competitor, “I still firmly believe in bbPress as a competitor to the likes of Muut and Disqus. It hasn’t lived up to its potential yet, but with a full-time developer, it very well could.”

If John James Jacoby’s Indiegogo campaign is successful, there will be at least one paid full-time developer to work on both bbPress and BuddyPress for the next six months. With nine days left, he still needs over $5,700 to reach his goal.

Community Engagement Crossroads

Automattic, the WordPress project, and bbPress are at a crossroad. The comment system in WordPress leaves a lot to be desired and could use some serious improvements. Meanwhile, Automattic is sitting on a dormant commenting service that hasn’t made any progress in years. bbPress development continues at a snail’s pace since it doesn’t have a committed team of developers and there are no signs of improvement on the horizon, outside of Jacoby’s campaign.

One of my favorite quotes from Matt Mullenweg is from 2008, when Automattic acquired IntenseDebate. In the announcement, Mullenweg said the following:

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.

I realize 2008 was a different time on the web, but in six years, I’ve seen very little innovation with comments. Instead, large sites are shutting them off or moving to third-party services such as Disqus and Livefyre. Jetpack Comments isn’t the solution because it’s just an iframe that is not easily extendable by other plugins.

I don’t know what the answer is to having a great community engagement/discussion experience in WordPress but Jetpack Comments, bbPress, IntenseDebate, and the native comment system isn’t cutting it.