WordPress.org

WP Super Cache 0.9.9.2 has just been released! This version works with WordPress 3.0 and adds a number of new features and bug fixes:

• Cache Preloading will cache every post on your site.
• A cache tester that will check if your homepage is cached.
• Much better support for mobile plugins.
• Mod rewrite rules can now be updated from within the admin page.
• Lots and lots of bugs fixed. See the changelog for more details.

Preloading creates lots of files on your server so if you have many thousands of posts please be aware of this. Filesystem limitations may cause problems if you use a flat permalink structure. For example, ext2 or ext3 only allows 32,000 directories in a directory. If you have more than that number of posts you may run into problems.

The plugin does not preload category or tag pages but because your single posts will be cached you’ll find the load on your server will be reduced. Uncached pages will be served more quickly and your visitors will have a quicker and better experience on your site.
You may also see an increase in site traffic if your server was previously underpowered!

Related Posts

• WP Super Cache 0.8.4, the garbage collector
• WP Super Cache 0.8.7
• WP Super Cache 0.9.9

This may be kind of short notice, but those of you near Atlanta might be interested in the Business of WordPress Conference, taking place next week (June 22-23, 2010). The venue is the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Conference Center, on 14th Street (Midtown). This conference is aimed at non-technical users who are interested in learning more about the benefits of using WordPress to drive a business web site.

Over the past few decades the web has become an essential tool for business yet until recently it’s been very costly to continuously embrace the benefits the web has to offer business. Most small-to-medium sized businesses, departments in larger companies, non-profits and local and regional government agencies have just “made do” and not gained most of the benefits the web has to offer. Fortunately, WordPress changes all that. WordPress has emerged as the defacto-web presence platform for business and not learning what WordPress has to offer presents a huge opportunity lost cost.

This conference bills itself as having a “curated” agenda, meaning that the topics were chosen first, and presenters chosen based on the topics, rather than the other way around. Some of the talks will cover subjects like: eCommerce, choosing a consultant/agency, social media, membership sites, and incorporating photos and video.

Keep in mind that this is a paid, professional conference, not a WordCamp or other low-cost un-conference type of event. However, as professional conferences go, admission cost is pretty reasonable ($299 for the main conference day, $399 if you also want access to the “Boardroom Pass” roundtables on both days).

Disclaimer: there is a paid ad on this site for the conference, but I had planned to write something about it before I ever knew that the ad was going to be placed. Also, I would have liked to attend the event, myself, but will be unable to do so, due to timing issues.

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Related posts:

1. Book Review: WordPress for Business Bloggers
2. WordPress for Business Bloggers sample chapter
3. WordCamp Atlanta

Exciting news that Levi’s has just launched a new site, Pioneer Sessions, using WordPress to showcase “pioneering musicians from rock, pop, soul, and rap to re-craft the classic songs that inspired their sound”:

Conceived by Cornerstone and designed by Wieden+Kennedy, this site is definitely worth checking-out.

[ Visit levispioneersessions.com ]

The tickets for WordCamp Boulder 2010 went on sale today. The discounted early bird tickets have been flying off the shelves – it’s great to see such an enthusiastic response from our local tech community.

I wanted to publish a quick Q & A to answer a few things I’ve seen circling around:

What is included in the ticket price?

Your ticket gives you access to all event sessions, the Genius Bar (staffed in part by WordPress HelpCenter) the after-party as well as lunch and a snazzy t-shirt.

Will the event sell out?

It’s hard to say for sure, but last year’s WordCamp (the first in the Denver/Boulder area) sold out and we sadly had to turn folks away at the doors if they didn’t have a ticket. We’ve already seen that this year’s event has a lot more inertia than last year’s did. I do expect we will sell out and recommend buying a ticket ASAP.

Where can I buy a ticket?

Right here.

How can I get the latest news about WordCamp Boulder on Twitter?

Follow @WordCampBoulder

What happened to WordCamp Denver?

We’ve moved it to Boulder this year. There are great tech communities in both Denver and Boulder, it just made sense to have it in Boulder this year since we had it in Denver last year.

Does this mean it will be in Denver next year?

That’s the current thinking, though we are always happy to hear feedback from the community about location, venue, content, etc. for the event. After all, it is an event for the community – we want your help in shaping it.

How can I provide useful feedback to help shape this year’s WordCamp?

We have a survey you can fill out. Also, feel free to get in touch with any thoughts, idea and/or concerns you want to make sure we take into consideration.

I want to help, what can I do?

We can aways use more great volunteers, speakers and sponsors. Please get in touch and we’ll be glad to work with you.

What can you tell me a little about the venue?

We’re going to try something a little different this year. Our main stage will be at the Boulder Theater. This will be the location for morning check in and for the larger presentations. We will also be having smaller discussion and technical sessions at the TechStars Bunker and Atlas Purveyors. We are hoping that the addition of these smaller venues will allow for those some sessions to be more interactive and hands-on.

Is the WiFi going to work this year?

We sure hope so. We can’t promise anything, but we have already taken steps to try and ensure we have great connectivity this year. Also, we should have better cell signal available in these venues.

Will there be a live stream of the event?

Probably not. We do plan to have videos posted on WordPress.tv after the event.

I’m quite looking forward to the event. We learned a great deal last year and received a bunch of valuable feedback – hopefully that will manifest itself in a stellar WordCamp Boulder 2010.

As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to Montreal for about a month and a half, maybe two months. I posted to my moblog about packing and Hanni asked what the final manifest would look like. Hear is a breakdown of everything I’m taking for the 1.5-2 month trip, which is about 4x what I normally travel with.

The Twitter Devolution questions some of the assumptions we all had about Twitter’s role in the “green revolution” of Iran. For the record, I didn’t shade my Twitter picture green because it’s pink and they would combine to make brown.

I didn’t post many details in my previous update, and I’d like to visit some of them now. At the time that post was written, it looked like the user experience for Twitter Tools was going to look something like this:

1. Download, install and activate Twitter Tools.
2. Click a link to twitter.com where you would have to register your WordPress site as an application.
3. Take the two keys provided to you and go back to the Twitter Tools settings page. Copy-paste those keys into fields in the Twitter Tools admin page.
4. Click another link to again visit twitter.com, this time to do the OAuth handshake and get your authentication tokens.
5. Return to your WordPress admin and continue tweaking your settings, etc.

If you were able to succeed in these steps, everything would be set up.

The fact that I as a developer look at those steps and groan was an immediate red flag to me. I know all too well from years of email support questions that not all WordPress users are highly technical and a 4 step process with 2 steps that make you change sites and one that includes a copy-paste dance isn’t something that is going to make people happy.

Some people have suggested that this is just how it is and I have to deal with it. I disagree. When I see something that’s too hard I want to fix it, not perpetuate it. I sent an email outlining my concerns to the Twitter API team. They are smart folks, clearly they had been working on solutions for this situation as well. They have posted a proposed outline of a different workflow that looks to be an improvement over the previous situation. It’s an improvement, but it’s not enough.

I added the following to the thread:

This is excellent news and sounds like a much better user experience than the previously discussed options. I would like to suggest it be taken one step further. Could the encoded string with the keys be returned programatically to the Open Source application instead of asking the user to copy/paste? This way the user experience would be very similar to a standard OAuth transaction.

I really hope they make this change and provide the string with the tokens via a callback method/URL and allow us to completely skip the copy-paste step.

I don’t pretend to have thought through every situation that the Twitter API team is having to consider here. I’m focused squarely on my own little use case. My goal is simple: make the process of installing and configuring Twitter Tools as easy as possible for my WordPress users.

With what they have outlined and my suggestion above, I am hopeful that I will be able to support a user experience that looks something like this:

1. Download, install and activate Twitter Tools.
2. Click a button in the WordPress admin that registers your site with twitter.com and returns the necessary tokens to Twitter Tools.
3. Click another link to again visit twitter.com, this time to do the OAuth handshake and get your authentication tokens.
4. Return to your WordPress admin and continue tweaking your settings, etc.

The OAuth step is going to be required – there isn’t a way around that (and shouldn’t be). However I want the rest of the connection stuff should be as painless as possible for my users.

If you care about this, you might want to drop the Twitter API team a line (api@twitter.com or @twitterAPI) and encourage them to go one step further in their proposed implementation so that Twitter Tools can give you the easiest possible configuration experience.

My guess is that the OAuth deadline will be extended while this new API is being implemented and tested. I am currently holding off on my Twitter Tools integration until I see where things end up.

Good morning everyone. Hope you are having a great weekend. For your Sunday morning reading pleasure we bring you the latest installment of WordPress Theme Releases. Enjoy!

Tumblelog Reloaded

Tumblelog Reloaded is the 4th theme from UK-based Polaraul Themes that we’ve featured here at WLTC. This theme is a rework of the Tumblelog theme by Safirul Alredha. Some of its features include:

• custom page to post photo, quote, link, chat and video
• automatically format each post based on post type
• automatically resize large images/photos
• microformats hAtom and xFolk friendly

It also comes with a theme uninstaller.

The Daily Edition

The Daily Edition from Theme Sheep is a magazine-style theme that comes shipped with a whopping 7 different colour schemes to choose from. It has built-in pagination and breadcrumb navigation as well as “related posts” and features some cool animated social bookmarking icons. From the theme’s options page you can do all sorts of things such as:

• Include links to your RSS feed, Feedburner feed, Facebook page and Twitter page
• Include some custom CSS
• Include some custom footer content
• Select your colour scheme
• Select how many large posts to display on your front page. You can also decide how to display those posts – either full content or excerpts. If you choose excerpts you can even decide what length of excerpt you want.
• Select how many small posts to display on your front page. As is the case with the large posts, you can decide if you want to show full content or excerpts including the desired length of excerpts.

These are just a few features. There are many more.

Intention

Intention is a sharp-looking 2 column theme with a widgetized right sidebar and sports a horizontal navigation drop down menu for displaying pages.

Minimal Xpert

Don’t let the name or appearance of this theme fool you. It may have a minimalistic look but contains oodles of goodies under the hood. From the theme’s slick options page, some of the things you can do are:

• Include a custom favicon
• Enable/disable thumbnails on both the home page and individual post pages
• Enable/disable the home page slider
• Exclude pages/categories from the horizontal nav menus
• Enable/disable the “related posts” feature
• Activate/deactivate the sidebar advertisement block

You can even elect to activate/deactivate the “extended footer” feature. When activated, your site will display a 4 column footer containing an “about me” section, a list of recent posts, a blogroll and your Twitter stream.

We hope you have enjoyed this edition of WordPress Theme Releases. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts with us. We value your feedback.

Good morning everyone. Here are the latest and greatest (as well as updated) WordPress plugins.

New Plugins

CMS Tree Page View
Inserts a menu heading under Pages in the backend where you can see a tree-like view of your pages ala Windows Explorer.

Simple Fields
Replace the WordPress default custom fields with your own such as textareas, check boxes, radio buttons, files etc. Requires WordPress 3.0 to function. (has been tested on WordPress 3.0 RC 1)

Content Audit
Create a content inventory where you can mark content as redundant, outdated, trivial, or in need of a review for SEO or style. Requires WordPress 3.0 to function.

Contemplate
Insert custom content in posts, pages, widgets, and comments via a shortcode. Handy for managing commonly used blocks of content.

DynamicWP Image Cube
Show off your images as an animated cube.

Updated Plugins

Author Exposed
Displays author info in a cool pop-up.

SEO Ultimate
All-in-one SEO plugin that lets you set title tags, meta, no index/nofollow, canonicalization, 404s, slugs, autolinks, and more.

Table of Contents Creator
Not just another sitemap plugin. Sort results by Menu Order, Alphabetically, Post Date or Author. Show only titles or include a short excerpt. Comes with a choice of 5 different icon sets or choose to not display icons at all.

So Apparently WordPress Can Guide Missiles, some WordPress Javascript makes a guest appearance on-screen in a British TV show.

Financial Times: Given the choice, how much choice would you like? A refutation of the “so-called paradox of choice [that] is one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences” according to Tyler Cowen. Hat tip: Ryan Holiday in Tim’s comments.

On Monday I’m going to be leaving San Francisco to spend some time in Montreal, about a month and a half. I really enjoyed my time there last year for the Jazz Festival hence the extended stay this year. I’m looking forward to seeing all the bloggers, WordPress users, friends, and entrepreneurs there. I’m also hoping a WordCamp can happen while I’m in town again.

A weekend present, in haiku:

Last call; final bugs
Itch, scratch, contort; calmly wait
For now: RC3

That’s right. What will hopefully be the final release candidate, RC3, is now available for download and testing.

Plugin developers: test your plugins!

There are 119 plug-ins in the WordPress Extend site that have the words backup and database in the descriptions.  That in turn makes for a lot of options when it comes to backing up your critical data for your WordPress based website.

A recent addition to the mix not only offers you a backup solution but they offer you a backup solution in the cloud.

The IDrive WordPress plug-in allows you access to your IDrive backup account and it works with either the free basic account or a paid account.  The free account offers up to 2GB of storage which should accommodate most sites.  If you need more space you can get their entry level paid account for less than $5 per month that allows you to store up to 150GB.

Here is a description of the plug-in and its features from the developers:

IDrive Plug-in for Wordpress is an easy to use backup utility, designed specifically to backup Wordpress blog data into your IDrive online backup account. It provides scheduled as well as immediate backup of Wordpress blog data including files and MySQL database dump.

Features

• Immediate backup of Wordpress blog data, both files as well as MySQL data dump, into your IDrive online backup account
• Scheduled backups occur after 12 midnight every day
• Immediate restore of backed up data from your IDrive online backup account
• Smart backup – Only the first backup transfers entire Wordpress content, subsequent backups are incremental where only the modified data is backed up
• Automatic notification via email on backup / restore status
• Secure transfer of data to IDrive server using SSL. Non SSL transfer option is also available for non SSL servers
• Detailed logging of backup / restore operations

System Requirements

• Wordpress 2.8.5 or higher hosted on a Linux / Unix system. Wordpress blog hosted on a Windows system is not supported
• Javascript enabled web browser – IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome
• Admin access to Wordpress dashboard to activate the Plug-in
• PHP 5.1 or higher

Installation is just like any other plug-in.  Once installed and activated look under the Settings menu in your WordPress Admin site and click on IDrive.

The main IDrive screen. If you have already signed up for your account just enter your username and password. If you need an account click the Create New IDrive Account link.

Fill this form out to create your new account and once it is submitted you will be signed in and able to setup your backups.

This is a very self-explanatory form to setup your backup periodicity as well as just a couple of options. The backup triggers after midnight on the days it is scheduled.

The second tab on the main screen allows you to see the logs related to any activity with your backups and account.

I started up an initial backup of WindowsObserver.com and 7,460 files were identified for backup. After 10 minutes only 80 of those files had been backed up.  At that pace 480 files will be backed up an hour and that means it could take over 15 hours to do this backup process.  I will post a note in the comments to verify how long this back up actually took once it is done!

At least subsequent backups will be incremental and only effect data and files that have changed.  I did not notice any impact browsing on my site while the backup was in progress.

We’ve just added a new api into WordPress 3.0 to make plugin writing that bit easier – #13829

It is now really easy to get the url for a plugin page that you have registered to make it easy to link between different plugin pages. You use the new function like this:

add_options_page('Best Evar Menu', 'Best Evar Menu', 'manage_options', 'best_evar_menu', 'best_evar_options_page');

menu_page_url( 'best_evar_menu' );

The function will by default echo the url out but if you want you can get it returned for processing by setting the second argument to false.

I’ve finished researching the changes needed to integrate OAuth into Twitter Tools. The code changes are pretty straightforward and there is plenty of prior art and examples out there to reference. The technical implementation isn’t a problem.

My concern is with the user experience of the initial install and set-up of the plugin. This would take a pretty big hit if I implement OAuth according to my best understanding of the required guidelines. I’m exploring some other options to see if I can find a good way to reduce the required steps and keep a nice simple user experience.

Regardless, I still plan to have something ready for public release before the deadline – though time is getting a little tight.

When I was a kid my dad used to practice his typing skills (on a real typewriter no less) with the phrase:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

For some reason that has stuck with me all these years. Today I’m going to rephrase and re-purpose that line:

Now is the time for great theme developers to come to the aid of their community.

The theme directory has been chugging along for more than a year now. During that time we’ve tinkered with the review process and some of the management tools, but haven’t really opened it up as much as we’d like. It’s time to rip off the band-aid and take some action; to that end, we’re looking for community members to help with the process of reviewing themes for the directory.

Right now this is a bit like a New Year’s resolution to exercise every day: it’s what we need to do, but we’re still figuring out exactly how it will all work. That’s part of the community involvement as well — we expect that those who pitch in will also help shape the process.

What’s involved in reviewing themes for the directory? There are some obvious things, such as being familiar with PHP and WordPress theme code (and the theme development checklist), with an eye for security issues. You would also need to have the ability to set up a separate install of the latest version of WordPress for testing theme submissions.

Hopefully a few talented theme developers are reading this right now and saying to themselves, “I’d love to help! How do I to get started?” Just join the new theme reviewers mailing list and we’ll get you up to speed on this new opportunity to come to the aid of your community.

Been looking into ways to send personalized letters and postcards through the mail system, old school style. Mail is the new email! The best option seems to be Postful in terms of pricing and API. Wondering if anyone has any experience doing custom mailings like this, and if so what tips and experience you have.

Dear Microsoft, every time you reboot my computer overnight without me having any interaction I lose unsaved documents and messages. It completely breaks my trust in a way that’s irreparable. It’s been six years since I first wrote about this. At the time Robert Scoble saw my entry and apologized on his blog in a really heartfelt way. This meant more to me than you will ever know; it was the day I went from being a childish Slashdot-reading Micro$oft-hater to having great respect for a large company made up of individuals who made mistakes but had changed the world. Six years later, though, the bug is still there. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… well, you can’t fool me again.

Great to see that all the blogs on blogs.independent.co.uk are now powered by WordPress:

In a blog post from Online Editor Martin King, the reasons for the switch from Livejournal included the following:

* to continue pushing forward a site that is ever more social-media-friendly, incorporating our recently improved and well-received comments functionality;

* to enable our posters to add quicker views and analysis more easily.

The last point will be especially beneficial to The Independent’s overseas correspondents, with their busy and occasionally perilous lives. As long as they can send an email, that can be posted immediately, including any image.

Mark wraps up his post with a very insightful point, saying “We are demonstrating that globally standard programs can free mainstream journalism from the complex bespoke set-ups of the past.”

[ Visit http://blogs.independent.co.uk/ ]

Recently, Arlen Beiler created a proposal for a WordPress Answers site on the in-progress StackExchange network, which is part of StackOverflow. If you aren’t familiar with StackOverflow or any of its sister-sites, it’s a sort of Questions and Answers forum where good answers are voted up, and float to the top. There is also a reputation system which rewards users for being active and providing quality feedback. I was not previously an active member on any of the sites, but I had run across answers to some of my own questions in the past when using Google to search.

I signed up on the WordPress Answers site, which is currently in a ‘discussion’ phase, where it needs sample questions to help define the scope. I provided some questions of my own, voted on the ‘on-topic’ or ‘off-topic’ status for the sample questions, and provided feedback on many questions when I thought it was necessary to explain my opinion.

Meanwhile, back on the wp-hackers mailing list, there was a flurry of responses, including some people concerned that catering to this additional site might “splinter the development community” between the official and unofficial sites.

When I first started looking at the StackExchange site, I mentioned it to my wife, Susan. She likes WordPress, but she uses Drupal a lot at work. After noticing that nobody else had set up a Drupal proposal yet, she started Drupal Answers. Shortly after, someone asked why such a site would be needed, when there are already Drupal forums, and asked, “Is it good to splinter that effort?”

Again with the “splintering” talk? Why does this particular project invite claims of dividing the community? I know that in the WordPress community, there are many other places besides the official support forums where users gather to ask questions and share information – Weblog Tools Collection, WP Tavern, and StackOverflow just to name a few, and many plugins and themes have their own support venues, hosted by their creators. And I’m sure the same is true in the Drupal world. Why are these different, why no cries of “splintering the community” over these?

So, what do you think? Is there really a problem with a support site for questions and answers, separate from the “official” support forums? What features make you want to use one over the other, or both? What is your favorite place to find answers?

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Related posts:

1. Dougal on WordPress Community Podcast
2. Open Source Community Personality Spectrum
3. Drupal shop gives props to WordPress

I love spotting WordPress in the wild!

(This is not an endorsement of Go Daddy Hosting. Click here for recommended WordPress hosting.)

A very quiet day, wasn’t feeling well, basically just lunch at Brasserie in Ni?anta??, and dinner at Naz.

Good morning everyone and welcome to the latest edition of WordPress Theme Releases. I hope all of you are enjoying the weekend. I know I am. So, grab a cup of coffee and have a look at the latest offerings from the WordPress community.

Folio

Folio is a dark theme aimed at those wanting to create a showcase-type of site such as one that features wallpapers, backgrounds etc. It automatically creates custom fields for preview, image, download and more information links. Supports the WP-PostRatings plugin. This is a child theme of Aurelia which of course means Aurelia must be present in your theme folder for Folio to work. Aurelia can be found in the WordPress Theme Repository.

Diabolique Spring

Diabolique Spring is the second theme of Diabolique Design we have featured. This is a sharp-looking dark theme which comes packed with 4 different background images as well as 3 types of backgrounds for your headlines. Some of this theme’s features include a large footer, cool looking social bookmarking icons and drop-shadow effect for both the sidebar and post area boxes.

Vibefolio teaser

Vibefolio teaser is a clean-looking theme which sports a horizontal navigation menu for pages, a widgetized right sidebar and a widgetized 5-column footer. From the theme’s option page you can do all sorts of things such as upload a custom logo and favicon, include links to Feedburner, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, insert your Google Analytics code and even disable excerpts. Comes with the TimThumb script.

Political Campaign WordPress Theme

This is a crisp and clean-looking theme perfect for, you guessed it, sites dedicated to political campaigning. For that matter it can be used on any type of political site. It sports a horizontal navigation menu for displaying pages and a widgetized 2 column footer.

FunDay

DynamicWP has been on a tear releasing new themes regularly since arriving on the scene. Their latest release FunDay is a bit of a departure from their previous work as it has a lighthearted feel to it. It has 2 horizontal navigation menus, one for displaying pages and the other for categories, a widgetized right sidebar and built-in Flickr and Twitter streams. From the theme’s options page you can upload a new logo and Gravatar, exclude pages and categories from the nav menus and include links to Twitter, your RSS feed and RSS email among other things.

Wedding Bells

Wedding Bells is a crisp, clean and neat looking theme released by Finnish designer Lauri Liimatta. It sports a horizontal navigation menu for pages and a widgetized right sidebar as well as a large header image which can be changed from the backend.

We hope you have enjoyed this latest round of theme releases. As usual, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions feel free to drop them in the comments section below. We value your feedback.

VideoPress now gives you the option to only use Free formats, which means Theora and Vorbis played via HTML5.

One year of After the Deadline.