Yep. That’s my column, all self promotion and the like. Paid in chocolate kittens, remember?

Joking aside (right…), I think the WordPress community summit is a great idea. For those of you who find posts on wordpress.org to be scary, here’s the lowdown.

Wait. You find posts on wordpress.org scary? That’s just plain stupid, go read it, battle your phobia, then come back here.

Pretty nice huh? From core developer meetup, to something that sounds like a great opportunity to inject new ideas and point of views into the WordPress project. There is definitely a need for the core developers to be able to sit down and discuss things all by themselves, but just like regular human beings they are not all-knowing, without fault, or well-versed enough in the greatness of single malt whisky.

WordPress have come a long way, really. It is a great platform and I’m personally grateful to everyone who’s helped make it this wonderful over the years. That includes people I’ve had spats with, people who need to work on their manners, and people who are just plain nice. Sometimes I criticize and question these people, Automattic, the WordPress Foundation, and WordCamp Central, but I’m counting on that they all understand that this is just to point out flaws and make sure that I appear in better light.

Someone actually suggested that was the case. Yes, I was taken aback. Seriously? Then again, maybe it is just because these columns are published on WPMU.org, which some people have a hard time with, I don’t know and I don’t particularly care.

Obviously I want WordPress to thrive. Anything negative I say about the platform and/or the people and organization around it is because I want WordPress to thrive even more. To evolve even further. I think we all share that trait, at least I like to think so, although I know it is hardly true. But that’s OK, the open source spirit is optional.

This is why I’m thrilled to read about the WordPress community summit. It is a great opportunity to make sure that even more points of view are discussed with the core team. I’ll be sure to nominate people I think could help. The summit definitely need some Europeans to attend, because things are slightly different here and internationalization is way more important to us than to Americans for example. There should also be representatives from commercial theme and plugin businesses, because that’s a part of the ecosystem that we need to not only come to terms with but actually start think about how to handle.

I could go on but I won’t, because it is, well, the end of the column. Nominate people you think should be at the WordPress summit, do it now.

Did I mention you should nominate?

Nominate.

Nom.

Om nom nom nom?

Photo by woodleywonderworks (CC)

Paydirt helps you manage three very important aspects of your freelancing business:

• Clients
• Time
• Invoices

Your recent work is shown in the dashboard with color-coded clients, projects and recent time spent.

If you want to have a successful freelancing business, it’s absolutely imperative that you find a way to manage your time and gain a good grasp of how many hours you’re spending on a project. That’s where the Paydirt Time Tracking feature comes in handy. There are extensions available for both Firefox and Chrome that put time tracking right at your fingertips.

One of the most unique features of Paydirt is the built-in smart reminders for logging your time. The application keeps an eye on the sites you’re viewing and offers timely, contextual, unobtrusive reminders to track your time. It even works well for recognizing when you’re tracking time spent reading and writing emails.

As much as time tracking can be a hassle, it’s necessary for your development as a professional. It will help you to be able to accurately estimate projects in the future. Not only will it help you plan your time better, but you’ll also have a better understanding of what your hourly or project rates need to be.

PayDirt helps you stay organized so you can focus on completing the work that keeps you in business. Take the hassle out of managing your time and projects without sacrificing a professional approach to your work. For $10/month you get:

• Unlimited Clients
• Unlimited Jobs
• Unlimited Invoices
• Unlimited Timesheets
• PDF Invoices
• SSL Security
• Chrome and Firefox Extensions

Pricing at $10/mo per user is very reasonable for an app that keeps you organized and tracks your time to make sure you get paid. Start your 30 day free trial to test drive Paydirt today.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

1. What inspired you to create ThemePivot?

It was inspired by a couple of things actually.

I run a digital agency and we have built a few WordPress sites for clients. Sometimes after a project has been finished clients come back wanting small things changed. Often the changes are fairly trivial but the admin cost in doing it is really high – like finding their server details, getting into the codebase and then invoicing them some tiny amount of money. It’s almost not worth the job – and ideally I could pass that onto someone who was setup to process a lot of these kinds of jobs quickly and effectively.

I’ve also used a few premium WordPress themes in the past. The thing that has bugged me about this is trying to find a theme that suits my needs – you end up spending a lot of timing going through thousands of themes to find the one that is just right. With ThemePivot I can choose one which is almost right and then get it customised cheaply and easily.

2. Will ThemePivot focus only on theme customization or will you be open to requests for plugin customization as well?

ThemePivot can customise pretty much everything about your WordPress site from the theme itself, custom plugins through to changes to your database. The only thing we’re not looking to do is creating complete themes from scratch like .psd to HTML conversions – we’ll leave that kind of work to the thousands of sites already doing that work.

3. How does the “Create Pivot” function work?

When you create a pivot you give us a brief of the things you want to tweak on your website. This goes to our marketplace of professional WordPress developers.

Developers then break your job down into a series of tasks with each task being $50. This creates a fixed point for you to be able to compare different developers – so you can get an understanding of how well they understand your project.

Once you’ve agreed on a set of tasks to be completed the developer gets to work on your site.

4. Is there an option to make pivots private for members of the site only?

This is in our development roadmap but it’s not a priority at the minute. However if you’re interested in posting a project to ThemePivot but need it to be private send me an email and I’ll make it happen for you.

To learn more, visit http://www.themepivot.com/ and sign up to be notified when it launches.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

All of the themes utilize the UpThemes Framework options panel for easy customization. This panel gives you the ability to upload a logo, add a Nivo slider, add social media accounts, customize typography, and even export your options to another site.

The pricing structure is very simple: $49 for a single theme or $99 per year for the Developer Club, which includes all current themes. ThemeFurnace aims to deliver at least one new theme to its collection every month.

Like what you see at ThemeFurnace? They’ve launched an affiliate program for you to get in on, which currently pays a generous 30% commission on every theme and developer club membership sold. Stop by the new ThemeFurnace shop to check out their “Red Hot WordPress Themes”.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

The best part is that several of the sessions are being live streamed throughout the day.

Beginning in just a few minutes, check in to the USTREAM channel for the following:

10:30am CST – Branding Yourself Online

1:30pm CST – Long Term Blog Maintenance

4:30pm CST – Blogging for Business

*All times are Central Standard Time which is -06:00 GMT

There are also two WordPress specific sessions that may be streamed during the day, and if so, I’ll update the schedule above. These are WordPress 101 and WordPress Premium Themes.

About Blogathon

This is the fourth Blogathon in Austin – an informal day of collaboration for bloggers, tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurship, and more.

There are tons of informal sessions, blogging help, and food!

If you happen to be in the Austin area, or are up to visiting our fantastic city, check out blogathonatx.com and sign up for the next event!

We’re working hard behind the scenes to bring some very exciting stuff to everyone, but we felt like it was time to go ahead and revamp our live chat schedule over on WPMU DEV in advance of these improvements.

What’s that? Live Chat?  Oh yeah, members at DEV can drop in during weekly, scheduled times and chat with a developer, designer, or member of our support staff.  It’s pretty fantastic – especially if ya get stuck and really want someone to walk you through a particular element.

So, yeah, it’s there and been around for quite some time actually, but as of next week we are really upping our game.  We’ve more than doubled the amount of live chat sessions we offer each week!  AND we’ve taken full advantage of our international team to provide times across many many times zones.

Check it out right here.  Oh, and we’ve now got a nice gcal embed which means you can quickly and easily add your favorite chat session to your own calendar and let google due the time zone math for ya :)

Come on over, have a chat with any of us.  We love hearing from members and discussing their current projects!

BitNami provides the easiest way to deploy WordPress – and other open source apps – natively, virtually or in the cloud.

Completely free and pre-configured “BitNami Stacks” are available as native installers, virtual machine images, and AMIs for the Amazon Cloud.

With BitNami Cloud Hosting, you can easily manage WordPress and other BitNami applications on the Amazon Cloud.

The free tier of service makes it a no-brainer to try and BitNami is running a special, limited time promotion for our readers where you can get 30% off 6 months of any of the paid plans! Just use this special sign up link to reserve your discount before it ends at midnight Pacific on April 14^th.

(Note: you do not need to sign up for a paid plan now – you just need to create a free account before the deadline.)

Check out this link here for more detailed information or see the video overview below.

Tip: Don’t miss similar deals like this in the future! Be sure you’ve entered your email in the blue subscription widget on the right to get our weekly email of updates, deals, and WordPress news!

Enjoy!

According to WordPress, these are some of the major changes you will notice:

• Theme Customizer with Previewer
• Flexible Custom Header Sizes
• Selecting Custom Header and Background Images from Media Library
• Better experience searching for and choosing a theme

And these are some of the “under-the-hood changes”:

• New XML-RPC API for external and mobile applications
• New API for registering theme support for custom headers and backgrounds
• Performance improvements to WP_Query by splitting the query (Please test!)
• Internationalization improvements (improved performance and locale support)
• Performance and API improvements when working with lists of installed themes
• Support for installing child themes from the WordPress Themes Directory

You can download WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 here.

Joseph Foley on Google+

But sometimes it’s fun to crunch a few numbers and remind yourself of how much ass WordPress really kicks.

The WordPress 'Wow Factor'

So I’ve scoured the interwebs this morning, and dug up some fun little factoids. These data nuggets really illustrate the dizzying heights that the WordPress community has reached. Enjoy!

Some WordPress statistics…

• WordPress 3.3 has been downloaded over 12 million times. This latest version of the software was released on 12 December 2011, making that an average figure of 105,263 downloads per day.
• 16% of all websites run on WordPress in 2012. That’s an estimated 58,000,000 sites.
• Indonesians are the most prolific WordPress users on the planet. WordPress.org is the 8th most popular website in Indonesia. By contrast, it’s the 21st most popular in the United States, and 18th in the United Kingdom.
• WordPress holds 53.8% of the market share for Content Management Systems. Over half of all webmasters using any kind of CMS have chosen WordPress. Joomla, the closest competitor to WordPress in terms of popularity, holds just 9.2% of the CMS market. Drupal sits in third place with 6.7%.
• WordPress has been translated and localized into at least 73 different languages. This has been achieved entirely on a volunteer basis, by passionate WordPress users in all parts of the world.
• There are 19,017 plugins freely available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Altogether, these plugins have been downloaded over 285,000,000 times, or nearly one download for every citizen of the United States.
• Over 20,000 people make their living with WordPress. Developers, designers, consultants, bloggers and countless other professionals use their WP skills to put bread on the table.
• Speaking of which, WordPress skills are in higher demand than ever. According to the latest Online Employment Report at Elance.com, WordPress programmers rank second place on a list of the 100 most sought-after freelance professionals. Generic PHP programmers rank first.

Over to you – got any fun WordPress statistics up your sleeve? Leave a comment below this article and share your quirky wisdom with crowd.

_{Photo courtesy of Torbein.}

From WP Engine’s Press Release:

We’ve built “TachyCache” which is a Tachyon-based caching system that pre-renders pages before a site visitor even clicks on a link….using quantum entangled cookies our system knows when users will load your page and is able to pre-render page content from within a time dilation field.  Essentially, we can build pages in the past and use them in the present so content is served instantly to the browser (requires the latest version of WebKit to work).

Read the full statement and signup details here.

It’s obvious that this drastically changes the hosting landscape and WP Engine’s pre-cog servers are definitely the must-have feature for anyone serious about page-load performance.  Just how well does it work?  We’ve been beta testing it here for at least a day.   Didn’t know you were gonna read this article today did ya?  Well, WP Engine did.

What’s everyone’s thoughts on this?  Feel free to let us know in the comment section below!