We’re having a bunch of fun at the moment testing out some variations of the WPMU DEV theme using the AB theme testing plugin (one of my favorite, but I think our least appreciated, plugins).
What does the plugin do? Well, put very simply it allows you to run two or more versions of a WP theme side-by-side and then, using Google Analytics, Custom Vars track how folk act differently, based on what theme they are using.
Hallo WPMU.org readers,
Over the next few weeks we’re going to be featuring a whole new bunch of posts from new writers… who have expressed an interest in joining the crew here.
And, it’s up to you guys and gals who works out… you are the panel!
What’ll we be judging these new posters on, well:
Quality, interesting, relevant topics – so if you like a post, share it, click on it (that’s you RSS readers out there :) and let us know!
Engagement and comments – get stuck in there with articles that interest ya, we’ll be keeping a close eye on that
I’m nothing but impressed by the folk behind the upcoming WordCamp Cape Town – and bloody upset that I can’t make it.
What are they doing right, well, where to start?
Insanely inclusive
There’s no picking favorites here – this is a WordCamp that has reached out to everyone!
I just did a count, and they literally have 32 sponsors – there’s some good work there.
Including WPMU DEV, of course :)
And it’s not just badges
Not only are there great write-ups on each sponsor, but there’s also interviews with them – here’s mine.
We’ve got an opening at Incsub for another writer to join the Incsub crew.
What’ll the role involve?
Well, in rough order of priority:
Writing daily/bi-daily articles here at WPMU.org on super interesting WordPress, and WordPress related stuff
Knocking together great tutorials – written and video based (ooo, video!) for here and WPMU DEV
Helping out with general Incsub copy writing stuff, like plugin descriptions, landing pages, Edublogs stuff…
Is Drupal, in many respects the main ‘competitor’ to WordPress, in crisis?
According to Daniel F. Kudwien, it most certainly is, and it makes interesting reading when comparing and contrasting with the current status of WordPress.
Kudwien outlines the development of Drupal over the last couple of years, specifically pointing out that:
in January 2011, Drupal 7 was released with some 300 unresolved major bugs
200 previously critical and major bugs were then demoted to normal
as of August 2011 Drupal has 4153 unresolved bugs (22,181 total)
a vast number of users are stuck on Drupal 6, with no progress on Drupal 8
Looking through the Analytics stats for this site, WPMU.org, for August (our biggest ever btw with 188,290 visits and 304,541 page views!) I figured I’d take a look at the Search engines traffic sources.
Which are (he says, congratulating himself ;) rather good – but more of interest to your guys, demonstrate the absolute paucity of use of Bing for search in our area (one I’d guestimate reflects 19-40 year old, mostly male, early adopters).
In case you didn’t see the caption – that’s Bing with a woeful 0.4% of referrals.
And Google with a 98.5% share.
I’ve been meaning forever to sort out my SEO / Marketing bookmarks folder, but am never able to get motivated :(
However, it occurred to me that if I could both do that and share it with other folk here on WPMU.org that’d could actually make it fun… plus it’d save me going through the list again and again picking out articles for friends… I can just email them this :)
One of the ‘benefits’ of running a massive blog hosting site like Edublogs is that you get a lot of day to day content with sploggers – general no good scumballs who use up your resources, waste your time and try to pollute your site.
In fact I’ve been dealing with the swine since the inception of what was WordPress MU, so I know a thing or two about their ways.
Woh, check out the size of the new Google first listing I just pulled up.
Pretty big implications for folk in terms of SEO – that second place is looking a lot less valuable.
Incidentally, we’re fairly focused on various SEO stuff here at Incsub, would you WPMU.org readers be interested in a few posts on various practices / approaches that we take to our various sites?
We just passed a bit of a milestone at WPMU DEV, over 100,000 downloads of our plugins freely released at WordPress.org.
Sure, there are plenty of individual plugins on the repository with numbers well over that individually, but the fact that we’ve done that in the space of a few months and clearly met some pretty significant needs within the WP community, while we’ve been at it, is surely cause for some celebration :)
The numbers
Our top 5 downloaded plugins have been:
Membership – currently with 24,367 downloads, it’s our only slightly limited version of the best hotdamn membership plugin on the planet
