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5 Major Updates to the WordPress Plugin Directory

Sarah Gooding — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:15:33 +0000

This past week the WordPress Plugin Repository has gotten a complete refresh that will greatly improve discussion and support for the 19,000 plugins currently listed. Some of the tweaks may seem small but they’re bound to make a huge difference in the community for developers and plugin users alike.

Here are the most important updates you should know about:

New Support Tab

Forum threads about a plugin are now pulled into a new “support” tab on the plugin’s listing page. This is a huge UI improvement that closely ties support in with its corresponding plugin and makes it more of a focal point. Housing support forums under the plugin page is a much tighter integration and more convenient for anyone browsing.

Plugin Author Display

Plugin authors are now more prominently displayed with bigger gravatars, the number of plugins they’ve created and better placement on the page. This is one of my favorite updates, as it gives developers a little more credit for the plugins they offer for free to the community and gives the donation link more prominence.

Support Activity Summary

Now you can see how active and well-supported a plugin is by glancing at how many threads have been marked as resolved in the last two weeks.

New Favorites Feature

You can now mark plugins as favorites. Your favorites will show up on your WordPress profile page so that you can find them quickly.

Forum Stickies

Forum developers now have the ability to set stickies on the plugin forums. These can be used to showcase FAQs or to provide extra information on troubleshooting. Any user you add as a committer on the plugin will have moderation access to the forum.

Head on over to the plugin repository to check out all the changes. What plugins are you adding as your favorites?

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Ned Dwyer On His New ThemePivot Service: Save Time and Money While You Customize Your WordPress Site

Sarah Gooding — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:27:33 +0000

Today we get to talk to Ned Dwyer, the mind behind ThemePivot, a super exciting theme customization service that gives your WordPress site the power of multiple developers working together. It’s a new kind of marketplace which makes it easy for people to make minor changes, or tweaks, to their website.

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+

ThemeThrift: Pay What You Want for WordPress Themes

Sarah Gooding — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:20:33 +0000

A unique WordPress theme site popped onto my radar today. ThemeThrift is a new creation by Jake Caputo of Design Crumbs with a bit of an unorthodox pricing structure. The site will be selling themes at a substantial discount and even giving them away for free. Deals have a set time before they expire and users can choose exactly how much they want to pay:

Caputo is currently offering his Modest Theme on the site as the first deal. You can view the features and the live demo and elect how much you’d like to pay:

So what’s going on here with the themes? How does ThemeThrift work?

Caputo has set up the site as an experiment and we’re interested to see how it goes.

What happens to the theme afterwards is up to the developer; Some will sell them on theme marketplaces, others will retire them forever, and some might put their theme in a car and push it off a cliff, creating a fiery inferno of twisted metal and code.

Intrigued? Sign up at ThemeThrift to be make sure you get notified when new deals are available.

So what are your thoughts? Is this a WordPress theme graveyard or an exciting new experiment?

Sarah Gooding on Google+

WordPress.com Parent Company Automattic to Make $45 Million This Year

Joseph Foley — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:00:52 +0000

According to a recent article at AllThingsD, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Schneider revealed that the company anticipates revenues in the $45 million range this year.

How do they make that much? According to the AllThingsD article,

The majority of Automattic revenue comes from premium subscription services, and that’s supplemented by a “VIP” enterprise publisher business — in total, there are half a million paying customers — as well as a recently launched advertising revenue-sharing network.

In light of this growth, Automattic has hired, for the first time ever, a Chief Financial Officer and a General Councelor.

Stuart West will take up the CFO position. West, who recently served as executive in residence at Andreessen Horowitz, has also been Vice-Chair of the board of Wikimedia Foundation (of Wikipedia fame) for the last four years. He has also worked for Kno, Tivo, and InfoSpace.

Paul Sieminski will fill the General Counselor position. Most recently, Sieminski practiced law as a corporate and securities associate at Gunderson Dettmer. He has experience working with both technology companies and venture capital firms.

Says Automattic’s CEO Toni Schneider of the new hires, “WordPress has been doubling in scale every twelve months and we are positioned for further growth and development. Stuart and Paul’s experience will help manage the coming critical stages of intense expansion.”

So, congratulations to Automattic. It seems WordPress in general continues to grow and get stronger. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Joseph Foley on Google+

Infected WordPress Sites Connected to Trojans on Approx. 700,000 Macs

Joseph Foley — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:00:08 +0000

According to security software firm Kapersky, the recent Apple Mac Flashback Trojan that made such a splash in the news recently can most likely trace its roots back to infected WordPress sites.

Alexander Gostev from the Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team explains how compromised WordPress sites were used to infect Macs, “From September 2011 to February 2012, Flashfake was distributed using social engineering only: visitors to various websites were asked to download a fake Adobe Flash Player update. It meant the Trojan was being distributed as installation archives named ‘FlashPlayer-11-macos.pkg,’ ‘AdobeFlashUpdate.pkg,’ etc.”

According to Gostev, in March 2012 approximately 700,000 computers worldwide were infected with the Trojan. He says, “The infected computers are combined in a botnet which enables cybercriminals to install additional malicious modules on them at will. One of these modules is known to generate fake search engine results. It is quite possible that, in addition to intercepting search engine traffic, cybercriminals could upload other malicious modules to infected computers – e.g. for data theft or spam distribution.”

As we reported last month, the internet security firm Sucuri stated that in the cases they analyzed, the infected sites were either running an outdated version of WordPress or a vulnerable plugin. Attackers were also said to be gaining entrance to sites via weak passwords.

(If you would like to test your site for hacks and malware, Sucuri has an easy to use site-checker.)

In somewhat related news (though not directly related to this situation), WordPress has just released WordPress 3.3.2 – which is a SECURITY release. In other words, the new version has important security updates. You would be wise to update your site as soon as possible.

Photo: Cute_Worm_In_Apple from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Report: Top Bloggers Use WordPress More than Any Other Blogging System

Joseph Foley — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:00:38 +0000

According to a recent report from Pingdom.com, WordPress is the blogging system of choice for 49 out of the Technorati Top 100 blogs. This is an increase from 32 out of 100 from three years ago.

The number of self-hosted WordPress blogs stood at 40 while hosted WordPress blogs stood at 9. (“Hosted” WordPress blogs include sites hosted on WordPress.com and WordPress VIP SaaS Hosting.)

It should be noted that 8 of the blogs were from the New York Times, and 4 of the blogs were from Wired. Therefore, 12 of the 49 blogs were from two organizations.

The following chart is from Pingdom.com.

Now vs. Then

Some of the more interesting tidbits from the report came from comparing this year’s stats to the stats from three years ago. Here are a few of the highlights:

WordPress increased from 32 to 49
TypePad decreased from 16 to 2
Moveable Type dropped from 12 to 7
BlogSmith dropped from 14 to 4
Custom solutions increased from 8 to 14
Blogger went from 3 sites to 2 sites
Expression Engine went from 1 site to 0
Tumblr entered the list with 1 blog

According to the report, the following top blogs use WordPress:

Photo: golden-red award labels from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Daily Tip: Get Info About WordCamps at WordCamp Central

Sarah Gooding — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:16:24 +0000

The WordCamp Central website has recently gotten a full re-design. This is the place to find all of the latest news about upcoming WordCamps. Click on “Find a WordCamp” and you’ll see the scheduled dates for upcoming events. You can also check out featured speaker profiles, find information on organizing a WordCamp and learn what to expect when attending a WordCamp.

Subscribe to the WordCamp Central News blog for all the latest info on scheduling, ticketing, speakers and venues. If you’ve never been to a WordCamp, you can view some videos from past events on the WordCampTV channel. Check out the new WordCamp Central site to find a WordCamp near you!

Sarah Gooding on Google+

WordPress Version 3.4 Beta 1 is Released to the Public

Joseph Foley — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:30:37 +0000

WordPress.org has announced the beta version of WordPress 3.4. You are advised to use this version for testing purposes only. You can see more about how to report bugs you find, etc., on the WordPress announcement page.

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+

Some Amazing WordPress Statistics to Brighten Up Your Day

Tim Gregg — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:55:23 +0000

If you’re an avid user of WordPress, you already know that it’s the greatest publishing tool and CMS on Planet Earth.

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.}

Never Buy Hosting Again: NodeKi Offers Lifetime WordPress Hosting Plans

Sarah Gooding — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:50:36 +0000

What if you could pay for hosting once and never have to worry about it again for the rest of your life? No monthly or yearly bills, no contracts to renew, nothing to worry about except building your websites.

Sound interesting?

Introducing NodeKi: A New WordPress Hosting Company

NodeKi is a new WordPress hosting company that offers a unique pricing structure, which includes Lifetime Hosting plans. They started providing WordPress hosting solutions to both public and private businesses last year. So far in 2012 NodeKi has been undergoing a massive overhaul and adding new servers, resources and staff in preparation for launching their new products. They’re a team of four employees currently located in eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia.

Lifetime Hosting:

Since the company started they have focused on their Lifetime hosting packages. Pricing for the Lifetime WordPress Hosting packages starts at just $39.00 USD. NodeKi will continue to offer Lifetime hosting plans when they relaunch and will also introduce their brand new line of secure, optimized WordPress VPS’s with their custom LNVMP Stack & CPanel/WHM.

Lock in Early Bird Pricing Now…

NodeKi will be relaunching on April 1st. Their current pricing will increase $10 per plan and the limited time pricing will not be available anymore. You have just a few days left to purchase your lifetime hosting plan to lock in your early bird discount.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback for the NodeKi team, they’re available to assist you. Feel free to drop them an email at hello@nodeki.com.

Sarah Gooding on Google+