Automattic designer Matt Thomas yesterday announced the dashboard’s redesign, which features better contrast, the “oh-so-lovely” Open Sans as the default typeface… and is pretty much the (top secret!) MP6 plugin many of us were expecting would be part of WordPress 3.6.

The revamp also includes redrawn icons and spacing in the dashboard has been opened up.

Thomas said he had a handful of goals for the redesign, which included:

• A simply, uncluttered design; free of excessive decoration and focused on your content.
• It should use webfonts for beautiful, legible typography that’s consistent in every browser.
• A responsive design tailored to desktop computers, tablets and smartphones.
• It should be able to do all this while retaining the familiar user-tested dashboard interface that millions of users already understand.

He said work was still underway on a responsive design for users who used smartphones or tablets to post to their WordPress.com site.

The new dashboard will be available later this year, but is available to preview now.

To enable the responsive dashboard, go to Users > Personal Settings and click the checkbox next to “Enable experimental responsive design (MP6)”.

Thomas was quick to respond to comments in his announcement post about bugs in the design. He has encouraged users to send any screenshots to WordPress.com support.

The announcement comes after the final weekly update for the MP6 plugin at Make WordPress UI on June 8.

In response to a question about whether MP6 will be the new WordPress 3.6 dashboard design, Thomas reassured users the plugin wouldn’t be part of the release. It’s possible we will see this dashboard design in a future release of WordPress.

It’s great to see the dashboard has been given a beautiful look. Hopefully the confusing navigation will be next to get a makeover because I’m not the only one who gets lost trying to use it.

What do you think of the redesigned dashboard? Do you think it meets Thomas’ goals? Tell us in the comments below.

Image credit: Pixabay

Related posts:

1. Keep Yourself Organized With Dashboard Post-It Notes Working with a lot of different WordPress sites? Need to...
2. Get bbPress Forum Updates in the WordPress Dashboard Ryan Imel has written a handy plugin that lets you...
3. New Multisite Dashboard Feed Widget in the WordPress Plugin Repository Here’s a handy new plugin for all of the WordPress...

The app’s creator Tom Witkin announced the news in a short statement on his blog, saying he, along with his software, had been snatched up by the WordPress.com parent company. He didn’t disclose how much money changed hands.

Witkin will be joining Automattic’s mobile team as a designer and coder.

“So what’s changing? Poster will no longer be available for purchase, but if you’ve already bought the app you’ll always be able to re-download it. I’m continuing to support it, and I’m always just an email away if you’ve got any questions.

As for me, I get to keep doing what I love: creating apps and experiences that enable and delight. The only difference is that I get new opportunities to continue to learn and develop personally and now get to work with some amazing people. I truly believe that something great will come from devoting my time and attention to Automattic.”

Poster was added to the Apple App Store last August, offering a clean and simple blogging alternative to the WordPress iOS app.

Witkins’ app has already been taken down from App Store. It is yet to be added to Automatic’s list of products.

It’s interesting to note that Witkins’ addition to the mobile team comes after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg recently spoke to CNN Money about the platform’s need to focus on mobile technology.

“I think probably within the next five years we’ll transition to a majority, or super majority, of WordPress usage coming from touch devices, including things like laptops that have keyboards, but they’ll primarily be touch driven,” Mullenweg said.

“I don’t think we embraced mobile early enough, especially because open source communities don’t embrace these closed platforms.

“We’re doing fantastic on the web and growing that percentage but I don’t think our mobile apps are really where they should be at.”

The Poster acquisition is the second time Automattic has pulled out its cheque book this year and is the latest in a long list of Automattic’s acquisitions, starting with Gravatar.

• Gravatar - October 2007
• BuddyPress - April 2008
• Intense Debate - September 2008
• Polldaddy - October 2008
• Blo.gs - April 2009
• After the Deadline - September 2009
• Plinky - June 2010
• Code Garage - December 2012
• Simperium - January 2013
• Poster - June 2013

So what has happened to these products and services – which you may or may not have heard about before – since Automattic’s snapped them all up?

Let’s take a look:

Gravatar

After buying Gravatar, a service for providing unique avatars that follow you from site to site, Automattic rewrote it in PHP, made premium features free, improved the server response time, allowed for bigger sizes, and now millions of avatar images are being served over 8.6 billions times each day.

Sites that have signed on to use Gravatar include American Idol and Battlefield 3 Battlelog.

Tom Preston-Werner, who created Gravatar, went on to successfully start GitHub in 2008 and is the code host’s CEO.

BuddyPress

Automattic bought out the social networking in a box software and hired its creator Andy Peatling, who continues to work as a WordPress.com engineer.

The first stable release of BuddyPress hit the shelves – or should I say, the WordPress plugin directory – in May 2009 and since then a small core team led by John James Jacoby has continued what Peatling started.

The latest stable version, 1.7.2, includes theme compatibility, group administration and a streamlined installation process. BuddyPress 1.8-beta 1 was released on June 13. BuddyPress has been downloaded almost 1.5 million times.

In September 2010, Automattic gave control over BuddyPress to the WordPress Foundation.

IntenseDebate

Less than a year after startup incubator TechStars launched the commenting system in October 2007, Automattic bought out Intense Debate and hired its developers for an undisclosed sum.

The system “super charges” the comment section of a site by adding features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation and global profiles.

At the time of the buyout, Mullenweg wrote in his blog that he planned to keep Intense Debate as a platform-agnostic, independent service and integrate some of its features into future versions of WordPress and Gravatar.

“Long-term, I think comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation,” Mullenweg said.

According to the plugin’s trac log, it hasn’t been updated in 12 months, though the Intense Debate blog is regularly updated.

It’s not clear what Automattic’s plans are for the commenting system, but it’s still available to other blogging platforms and can be activated as a plugin within WordPress installs.

PollDaddy

Polldaddy started out as a two-man, self-funded operation in Ireland before it was acquired by Automattic.

Co-founder David Lenehan became the product lead for Polldaddy at Automattic. The polling and survey software now operates using PHP and MySQL and is more stable and scalable.

The plugin’s trac log shows it’s regularly updated and support questions are quickly answered. The blog on Polldaddy’s site is updated sporadically.

Like IntenseDebate, it seems Automattic is simply maintaining PollDaddy for use as a plugin with no grand plans in the works.

Blo.gs

Automattic acquired blo.gs, a ping update service, from Yahoo. Yahoo had originally bought the service from it’s creator Jim Winstead in June 2005.

At the time, Matt Mullenweg said Yahoo was transferring blo.gs to Automattic for “safekeeping”, adding he had been a long-time fan of the service and it had inspired an early WordPress feature that reordered blogrolls based on update times.

“We’re looking forward to beefing up the service and giving it a refresh, while continuing its reputation for reliability,” Mullenweg posted on his blog.

Well, a quick visit to to blo.gs reveals the site’s news feed was last updated in 2009 - with a post announcing Automattic had acquired the service.

It seems the site has been neglected and any plans to beef it up have been long forgotten.

After the Deadline

Mullenweg discovered After the Deadline when the spelling, grammar and style-checking software’s founder Raphael Mudge commented on a Hackernews post that his software had found errors in a New York Times article. Mullenweg contacted Mudge and just a few months later, Mudge had joined Automattic’s staff. He was tasked with delivering After the Deadline to non-English speaking bloggers.

The software is now available for French, German, Portugese and Spanish, as well as English and is free to for personal use as a Firefox add-on, Chrome extension and OpenOffice extension.

It’s no longer available as a plugin for WordPress – in June 2012, After the Deadline became part of Jetpack.

Mudge worked for Automattic as a code wrangler for about a year and now runs software and training company Strategic Cyber.

Plinky

Plinky joined the Automattic family about a year after its launch in early 2009. Plinky was Thing Labs’ first product, which they stopped developing after their Twitter client Brizzly took off.

Plinky is a site designed to help people get over writer’s block. The service send you a prompt every weekday with a question, such as “What is your favorite summer memory?” or “Is being ‘normal’ – whatever that means to you – a good thing or a bad thing? Neither?” to get your creative juices flowing.

Automattic code wrangler Stephane Daury and Krista Stevens, who leads the editorial team, continue to work on Plinky. Plinky supports WordPress as well as LIveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress.com, WordPress.org and Xanga. Plinky answers can also be shared on Twitter and Facebook.

Like IntenseDebate and Polldaddy, it appears Plinky is being maintained, with no big plans to further expand the service.

AOL acquired Thing Labs in 2010.

Code Garage

When Code Garage founder Peter Butler found his business was growing larger than he alone could handle, he approached Automattic and a few months later joined the VaultPress team.

At the time, Mullenweg said he hoped Automattic could learn from Code Garage’s approaches, such as its agency-friendly pricing model, making it easy for customers to manage dozens of sites, something that VaultPress was experimenting with.

Butler has written an insightful post about how he started Code Garage and how it was eventually acquired by Automattic.

The backup and security service, along with all of Butler’s customers, is in the process of being fully merged with VaultPress and existing Code Garage customers have been invited to migrate to VaultPress by July 1. Butler continues to work for Automattic.

Simperium

In January this year, Automattic bought out Simperium, a startup that ran a data syncing platform and, along with it, Simplenote, the company’s personal note-keeping app.

Automattic also bought the simplenote.com domain name from a squatter.

Simperium’s three-member team, including founders Mike Johnston and Fred Cheng, joined Automattic as part of the acquisition.

In a post on the Simplenote blog, Johnston and Cheng said the plan was to “super charge” Simplenote with a lot more attention in the “coming months and years to come” on native apps for more platforms, ongoing improvements and more work on the data syncing service.

“You know how sometimes, the services you love just disappear when they’re bought by someone else? Or they wither and die a slow and painful death? Not the case here. We made sure of that,” they posted.

In announcing the acquisition, Mullenweg posted on his blog that he was a daily user and fan of Simplenote and looked forward to seeing how Simperium could be used across WordPress.com

Simplenote is still available to download for free, but the app’s blog has only been updated once since Simperium was acquired. Who knows, the acquisition could be part of some big plan to advance WordPress into the touch device market – or maybe Mullenweg has just scooped up another product/service he personally like to use.

Summing Up

So what will happen to Poster? Well, existing users can continue using it but we’ll have to wait and see whether its features are incorporated into future versions of WordPress or it is re-released as a stand-alone app for mobile devices.

Is there any software you would/wouldn’t like to see Automattic snap up? Tell us in the comments below.

Image credits: Joi, Wikimedia Commons, Del Barfoot.

Related posts:

1. Sweet Pay Day For Automattic Employees: Tiger Global Invests $50 million Some of Automattic’s early employees and shareholders are set to...
2. WordPress.com Parent Company Automattic to Make $45 Million This Year Flood of money forces new hires – a CFO and...
3. So, when exactly are Microsoft going to buy Automattic? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure...

Our very own @aristath has created a plugin that brings Twitter Bootstrap styles into your WordPress dashboard. Bootstrap Admin is a clean, minimalist administration theme that totally changes the look of your dashboard with new icons, colors and Bootstrap as the backbone.

After you install and activate Bootstrap Admin, your WordPress dashboard will be transformed to look something like this:

So far Bootstrap Admin includes:

• General styling of the WordPress admin area
• Admin menu sub-menus as bootstrap popovers
• Bootstrap Icons for a lot of things
• Default WordPress forms theming
• Buttons theming
• Post boxes theming
• Style the admin using LESS
• Includes WPMUdev Pro-Sites optimizations
• Includes WPMUdev MarketPress optimizations

Style the WordPress Admin Using LESS

Another cool feature of Bootstrap Admin is the ability to style the admin using LESS. phpless is included in the plugin for compiling your code. It can be turned on or off in the includes/config.php file.

If you’re a big fan of Twitter Bootstrap, you’ll appreciate the overall cleaner look that Bootstrap Admin brings to the WordPress dashboard. Even if you’re just bored with the default WordPress admin, this plugin is a great option for sprucing things up. In the future @aristath plans to add the ability to completely re-brand your WordPress administration. If you’d like to contribute to the project, jump in on github and lend a hand.

Related posts:

1. Luca’s Theme: A Free WordPress and BuddyPress Theme Based on Twitter Bootstrap Check out this brand new free WordPress and BuddyPress theme,...
2. 7 Free Twitter Bootstrap Themes for WordPress Want to use Twitter Bootstrap with WordPress? Check out all...
3. StrapPress: A Responsive Twitter Bootstrap Theme for WordPress Check out this new Twitter Bootstrap theme available for WordPress....

That seems to happen a lot with widgets. There are all sorts of wicked widgets out there, but with a lot of them, they’re limited to the sidebar area.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could pull those nice widgets off the sidebar and stick them right in the middle of a post or page?

Well, with the AMR Shortcode Any Widget plugin, that’s exactly what you can do. It lets you insert any widget into a post or a page with nothing more than a shortcode.

How “Shortcode Any Widget” Works

Let’s say you that there’s a list of links that you want to promote in a prominent place in a number of different posts or pages on your site. Maybe these links are to top content or money-making resources pages, or maybe they’re even off-site affiliate links. Who knows? There are a number reasons you may want to get a short, targeted list of links in front of a visitor in a more “direct way” (i.e. not sitting off on the sidelines of your site).

And let’s take this example a little further. Let’s say you’d like to change that list of links on a regular basis.

If you were to do this by hand, it would soon become a massive pain. Let’s say you put that list of links into 20 different posts. When you wanted to change the list, you’d not only need to remember all the different posts you put it in, you’d also have to go back into each one and recode it.

With the “Shortcode Any Widget” plugin, however, you can simply make up a custom menu (Appearance > Menus), drop the Custom Menu widget into the newly created “Shortcodes” area on the widget page, and then call your Custom Menu widget into your 20 different posts with a shortcode.

When it’s time to update the links, you simply go back to your menu, update it once, and your lists of links get updated everywhere across your site.

Let’s Take a Look at That in Slow Motion

After installing and activating the plugin, you will see a new widget area on your widgets page titled “Shortcodes.” Drag whichever widgets you’d like to call in with a shortcode into this area.

In our example, we’re putting the Custom Menu there and selecting our specially made “menu” of links that we want to put into a number of different posts.

In the post, call in the widget you want by inserting a properly formatted shortcode (essentially “do_widget” + the name of the widget – there are instructions on the plugin page).

And that’s it. The shortcode will call in your widget and work whatever magic it’s supposed to work right there in your post. In our case, it prints out the links from the menu we made.

Extra Flexibility

I have to say – I love the extra flexibility that plugins like the AMR Shortcode Any Widget give you. When you get an idea in your head but you just … can’t … quite … do it because the thing that’s over there needs to be over here, and then you find a plugin like this, it’s a beautiful thing indeed.

photo credit: Carol Mitchell

Related posts:

1. How to Use a WordPress Shortcode Outside of the Post Editor Here’s a handy tip from the codex. If you want...
2. Super Useful New Widget Displays Recent Custom Post Types If your WordPress site is displaying custom post types of...
3. Customize Post Display with the Advanced Recent Posts Widget New widget gives you a highly customized display of recent...

Here’s a little bit of what you can expect from BuddyPress 1.8:

BP_Group_Extension Rewritten

Many BuddyPress plugins interface with the groups component. The BP_Group_Extension has been rewritten to make it faster for plugins that depend on it. The new changes will make writing group extension plugins much easier than before.

Improvements to Group Administration Panels

BuddyPress 1.8 adds pagination support to “Manage Members” panel in the dashboard.

Template Hierarchy

BuddyPress 1.8 introduces a new template hierarchy layer for top-level templates. This hierarchy more closely matches WordPress’s template hierarchy. Theming BuddyPress will now be more natural for those who are already familiar with theming WordPress.

Ability to Disable @mentions

This release includes a filter that will let you easily disable @mentions. Just add this line to your bp-custom.php file:

1

add_filter( 'bp_activity_do_mentions', '__return_false' );

RSS feeds for activity streams

RSS feeds have been revamped to better follow best practices for feed construction.

Want to help test BuddyPress 1.8-beta1? It’s not ready to be used in a production environment yet, but your testing can help to get it there sooner. Download the zip file from WordPress.org and take it for a spin.

Related posts:

1. Create, Edit, and Delete BuddyPress Groups with Drag and Drop BP Group Organizer is a new plugin that lets you...
2. Expand BuddyPress RSS Feeds to Increase Collaboration and Participation within Your Community A new BuddyPress plugin is available that greatly expands the...
3. Learn How to Customize Your WordPress Theme for BuddyPress with the BP Template Pack Plugin If you’re looking for some BuddyPress documentation on customizing your...

Is it JIF or GIF?

I’m gonna keep saying GIF with a hard “G”. End of story, as the file format’s creator Steve Wilhite likes to say.

P.S. This is a Friday Funny so chillax :)

When you activate a new theme for the first time and it’s not quite what you expected…

When you finish writing a post and you can finally close all the windows that are clogging your browser…

When you need to update an old plugin that you didn’t bother putting comments in…

When you’ve had a long day at work and can’t quite switch your brain off…

When the WordPress visual post editor removes all your forced line breaks…

When one of your posts tops WPMail’s latest email newsletter…

When you find out Matt Mullenweg paid $14,000 for WPTavern…

When WPMU DEV announces it’s changing its pricing structure and customers have a lot of questions…

When the WordPress gods blacklist your website…

When WordPress 3.6 is finally released…

When Apple unveilled iOS 7…

When you saw the NSA’s PowerPoint presentation

When you haven’t watched the latest episode of Game of Thrones and someone gives away a spoiler…

When you realise it has just turned five o’clock on a Friday…

Have a great weekend! Share you favorite animated GIFs in the comments below.

Credits: the_coding_love();, lubczuk, gif vs jif, Twister Sifter, Developer Life.

Related posts:

1. Life In The Cloud: Are We Ready For Nothing But The Web? What's your take on the Google Chromebook? Could you survive...
2. Animated Weather Widget for WordPress If you want weather on your website, you could do...
3. Want a free WPMU DEV membership for life? Yes, we thought you might, and that’s the latest promotion...

Not updating vulnerable plugins is one of the biggest mistakes anyone running WordPress can make. And it seems some of the world’s most visited sites are making that exact mistake. … Are you?

A number of weeks ago, perhaps the two most popular caching plugins, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache, both updated their code to patch a security vulnerability. HackerTarget.com reports that a quick check of the top 100,000 sites reveals that less than 50% of those sites that run W3 Total Cache have updated their plugins to the latest secure version.

The exact numbers for WP Super Cache are not known, but it’s not unreasonable to think they’re similarly dismal.

The bigger you are, the harder you fall. But you don’t have to be big to be vulnerable. If you’re running one of these popular plugins, it might serve you to make sure your copy is up to date.

Update! Update! Always, always update!

Photo credit: Sibel

Related posts:

1. Add a W3 Total Cache Flush Button to All WordPress Admin Pages If you’re a fan of the popular W3 Total Cache...
2. WordPress Security Exploit Found: Upgrade WPTouch, AddThis and W3 Total Cache Notice that you can’t get access to the forums or...
3. Maximize WordPress and BuddyPress Performance With W3 Total Cache Wondering what all the fuss is about with people tweeting...

The Tavern Keeper over at WPTavern opens up about selling his site to Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg for $14,000, almost selling WPTavern to Joost de Valk and how WPCandy was interested in buying the site’s domain name in an insightful interview on the latest episode of the DradCast.

The interview also raises valid questions about the need for objective news in the growing WordPress community where theme sellers are popping up left, right and centre and developers and businesses are cashing in on the success of WordPress – while cash-strapped news sites are left fending for survival.

“My advice to anyone wanting to start a WordPress centric website, especially if you think it’s going to make you some money, is to stop, focus your efforts on where the real cash is – commercial themes, plugins, services and consulting,” Chandler says.

“A news-centric website takes time and energy to maintain and keep fresh. It’s not worth it in the long run unless you have a company backing you, providing a steady stream of cash that pays the bills and puts food on the table.

“Every time I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a reason to use that would convince someone else to pay me to sit on my ass and write about WordPress all day.

“The value and worth comes from writing code, not text. Fortunately there’s a WordPress user that valued my contribution to the community so much he granted me the opportunity of a lifetime, to sit on my ass and write about WordPress all day.”

Of course, Chandler is referring to Mullenweg, the mystery buyer who recently ended months of speculation when he announced he had bought the news website.

After starting WPTavern in early 2008 and cutting back his hours at his grocery store job to one day a week so he could spend up to 10 hours a day in front of his computer working on WPTavern, Chandler admits he eventually came to a cross roads when he couldn’t afford to pay his bills.

“I always viewed myself as a content producer. I really had no interest in marketing or doing affiliates, doing all that stuff you’ve got to do, sell ads, display advertising and all that other junk but I had to in order to make some money,” he says.

“And I discovered that display advertising is very inconsistent and almost begged people to buy ads; affiliate was based on look and hope that someone would come

“It came to the point where I was almost begging people to buy stuff in my ads… and I was generating content that would make me money instead of generating content that really interested me and I felt like sharing across to the community.

“So I operated the tavern as long as I could under affiliate links and display ads. It was not consistent enough to where I felt being able to do it full-time.

“I had to go back to mostly full-time work at the store as I tried to figure out what was going on at WPTavern.com. It just finally got to the point where I thought, I’ve got too many bills here, what’s going on here, I’ve got to get out of the community, I’ve got to sell the site.”

With a “couple of big bills” hanging over the 29-year-old and other things going on in his personal life, he started looking for someone to buy his site – for just $7000.

“I didn’t valuate my posts, I didn’t give myself the correct value on what I did,” he says.

A few interested buyers started circling, including Yoast.com’s Joost de Valk. WPCandy’s Ryan Imel even expressed interest in buying the WPTavern.com domain name.

But just as Chandler was getting ready to finalise a deal, he decided to reach out to Mullenweg.

“I said, ‘this is what’s going on, I need this kind of money, I’m getting out of the community, what do you think’. He says, ‘How much are you asking for?’. I said, ‘I’m going to sell the site for $7000′. He goes, ‘Are you kidding me?’. He goes, ‘you’re severely undervaluing your work and your content and what you’ve done’,” he says.

“He said, ‘I’ll double that amount’ and he wrote me a cheque and then bought the site, just like that.

“He gives me a cheque for $14,000 for the site and next thing you know, he’s the new owner of the tavern.”

Chandler says the speculation over who had bought out WPTavern was “fun”. Not so for the DradCast’s Dre Armeda, who suggested what started out as fun “maybe got juvenile”.

Chandler wasn’t able to shed any light on why Mullenweg took so long to come clean on buying the site.

“When the purchase went down, it was requested by Matt that we keep this under wraps,” he says.

“I respected his decision to keep it under wraps… At the time I had no idea what he was going to do with the website.

“Two or three weeks after he purchased the site, I said, ‘Hey, how about I maintain the website for you for a certain amount of money every two weeks?

“So I was able to get paid by him at the time to continue maintaining the WPTavern website and it goes on and on and on and on.”

It was at that point, he says, that he wrote his Bermuda Triangle post.

“I finally got to the point where I had a mortgage payment and I had bills and I had all the other stuff that goes along with your personal life and I thought, you know what, I’ve tried everything I can think of to try and make money with WPTavern.com doing stuff that I’m not interested in and I’ve come to the conclusion that running a WordPress news site is very hard,” he says.

“At the prime of the website where I had a lot of people contributing, I would spend eight, nine, 10 hours a day just pumping out content, interacting with people on Twitter, responding to comments and all I would do is think to myself, ‘Who is going to pay to me to sit on my ass and do that all day’.

“At that time, (Audrey Capital developer) Scott Reilly had got in touch with me and he says, what would it take to get you to stay on and continue writing for WPTavern? What would make you happy?

“So we negotiated some things and then we got Matt (Mullenweg) involved and we negotiated some things and at the end of the day he offered me an opportunity of a lifetime (to continue writing for WPTavern) and I accepted.”

He has copped criticism about selling his site to Mullenweg – selling a site set up to give news and views about the WordPress founder’s own activities, as well as the goings on in the wider WordPress community. Chandler admits the criticism is rightly so.

“I am an employee, Matt is my boss, I work for Audrey Capital,” he says.

“My job is to run the tavern, to help curate the community; that was my initial goal for the website.

“Matt’s primary role is as an advisor. He doesn’t tell me to write stuff, he doesn’t tell me what to write about. Every now and then he might suggest a site, service or theme he thinks is cool that maybe I should put out there in front of everyone else but outside of that he’s just standing back, he’s giving me the opportunity of a lifetime to do what I love and he’s just a hands-off approach kind of guy.

The problem, as Chandler highlights in the interview, is the lack of viable revenue options for independent news sites. While people will happy fork out cash for a theme, plugin or support, they don’t want to pay for news – but are happy to consume it, engage in it and criticise. It’s a problem media companies across the world are struggling to contend with.

WordPress news sites have come and gone, most recently WPCandy, which the Dradcast’s Dre Armeda says, “came to stardom with a bunch of content, looked to get overwhelmed, maybe spread out too thing and then imploded. It’s not really somewhere where you’re seeing a lot of content from.”

Chandler says there’s no sustainable business model for independent news websites that aren’t backed by an already profitable business, like WPMU.org and WP Daily.

In his Bermuda Triangle post, he suggests following a hundred or so WordPress folk on Twitter is enough to negate the need to read WordPress news sites.

But 140 character blasts on Twitter is not journalism and neither is blogging. Biased opinions don’t offer indepth insights into an issue. Good journalism is interpreting what is happening in the WordPress community and offering a view presenting both sides. Then there are opinion pieces, which are another kettle of fish and should not be confused with balanced reporting.

There hasn’t been much talk in the community about the fact Mullenweg bought WPTaven. Only time will tell whether Chandler’s claims that he remains independent and free from Mullenweg’s editorial influence ring true.

In the meantime, Chandler had one last telling thing to say to DradCast listeners… “I want to go on the record and say I have the best boss in the world.”

Is WordPress news worth paying for? If news sites like WPMU.org disappeared, would there be a void in the WordPress community? Have your say in the comments below.

Image credits: ronalfy, NS Newsflash, Charlotte90T, grenade, (Mick Baker)rooster. (Mick Baker)rooster – 2

Related posts:

1. Top 10 WordPress News Blogs to Keep You Up to Date The following are some of the top WordPress news blogs...
2. Subscribe to the BuddyPress News Planet Quickly catch up on BuddyPress news with this new resource....
3. WordPress News: BuddyPress is a Finalist for Most Promising Open Source Project! Great news for BuddyPress today! The finalists in the 2010...

The Heartbeat API will be a new feature introduced in the latest release. It’s been designed to deliver login expiration notifications, provide post locking and trigger autosaves - making writers like me very happy.

According to Andrew Ozz who is leading the API’s development:

“The purpose of this API is to simulate bidirectional connection between the browser and the server. Initially it will be used for autosave, post locking and log-in expiration warning while a user is writing or editing.

The idea is to have a relatively simple API that sends XHR requests to the server every 15 seconds and triggers events (or callbacks) on receiving data. Other components would be able to “hitch a ride” or get notified about another user’s activities.

In the future this can be used to block simultaneous editing of widgets and menus or any other tasks that require regular updates from the server.”

The “heartbeat” will be set to a default 15 second interval when the browser window is in focus and the user is active. When the window is out of focus or there aren’t any mouse and keyboard strokes for 5 minutes, that interval drops to 2 minutes.

Locking posts has been a sought after feature, giving people who work on websites with multiple authors editing posts, like WPMU.org, the ability to “lock” posts. The last Autosave update at Make WordPress Core reveals a dialog box will be shown either when an author visits a locked post or when a post becomes locked. When you visit an already locked post you will have the option to break the lock and take over control of a post, a handy feature if you’re an editor.

As I mentioned above, autosaving is important to writers. There’s nothing worse than tapping out a long and carefully written post and then losing every single freaking word when there’s a brownout or your cat has jumped onto your mouse and inadvertently navigated to another browser page. I’ve sworn at my laptop, at WordPress, and for a while started writing posts in Notepad to avoid using the WordPress post editor.

So I was a very happy camper when Mark Jacquith acknowledged my pain and the pain of others before me back in January when he announced an update to the autosave feature in 3.6, enabling autosaving to the browser’s local storage:

I want, as a major 3.6 bullet point, that we should never lose posts due to expired cookies, loss of connection, inadvertent navigation (even if AYS’d), plugin or core errors on save, browser crashes, OS crashes, cats walking on keyboards, children drooling in keyboards, etc. I want people to trust WordPress with their posts.

They should never fear that something they’ve spent time creating or editing should go away due to their mistake or ours or that of a third party. Mistakes and errors should be recoverable. I can’t stress enough how important it is that people believe this and have good reason to believe it. If a post gets lost, there is a catastrophic loss of trust, that could take years to be regained (if indeed it ever is). This is people’s time and their creative output we’re talking about. If we’re not valuing those things above all else, then our priorities are seriously out of order.

This is an all-hands-on-deck item for 3.6. Even if you’re not actively working on the code or the copy or the UI or the UX I want you to be thinking about ways in which WordPress could better treat your creative output as the valuable artifact it is.

The last Autosave update also reveals improved user logout notification is now in core and its UI has been tweaked to directly show the login box, rather than prompting first. According to Ozz, there was discussion as to whether it was better not to block a user’s access to the editor/current page when it was detected they not longer had a login token, since it would stop the user while they were in the middle of a sentence.

Hopefully we’ll see another Autosave update soon as there hasn’t been one in a while.

There will be a lot of opportunities for developers and plugin and theme sellers to make the most of the heartbeat. Mike Hansen has suggested it could be used to enable comments on posts to auto populate while someone is viewing them, blog posts could auto populate while a reader is viewing all posts and forums such as bbPress could even become interactive like a chat room. Pretty cool stuff.

A heartbeat test plugin is available if you want to try it out.

What else do you think the heartbeat could be used for? Tell us in the comments below.

Credits: hyekab25, Aaron Jacobs, DavidDennisPhotos.com

No related posts.

Introducing Chat 2.0!

New and Improved Chat 2.0 Features:

You won’t believe how many amazing new features we’ve packed into Chat 2.0. In addition to Facebook and Twitter authentication, participants can now sign in with their Google+ accounts. We’ve also added integration with BuddyPress groups, many more moderation capabilities and a huge performance boost. Chat 2.0 now include:

• Sleek redesign of chat UI.
• More settings to control the look, feel and colors of the chat windows
• New: Added support for Google+ user authentication.
• New: Added integration for BuddyPress group and friends.
• New: Added integration with WPMU DEV Friends plugin.
• New: Added support for user lists for each chat session.
• Rewrite of core messaging function to improve overall performance.
• Improved support for Widgets.
• New: Support for Private one-to-one chats initiated by moderators
• New: Support for one-to-one chat between WP users.
• New: Added ability to ban user by email address
• New: Added ability to block words.
• New: Added ability to control position of bottom corner and private chat to top/bottom/left/right
• New: Added popout/popin ability on all chat windows to break out of the theme frame. Full screen on tablets and smart phones.

BuddyPress Group and Friends Integration

BuddyPress group admins can enable chat for the group by visiting Admin > Group Chat. Group admins can customize the box and message experience, message input, user list and much more. Groups can use live chats to keep in touch and host community discussions. Moderators can also initiate private 1-on-1 chats with members.

Once chat is enabled, group members can jump in and participate in chat sessions on the groups page.

Chat also integrates with BuddyPress friends or our Friends plugin for individual member chats. Logged in users can set their online statuses in the WordPress toolbar and invite their online friends to a private chat:

Live Chat made for WordPress – no third party service required!

From a developer’s perspective, the absolute best thing about this chat plugin is that it doesn’t require any third party software to pay for or maintain.

It’s also not a memory hog like many other third party chat solutions you may have tried in the past. Chat is built with WordPress and for WordPress with no outside configurations necessary. Therefore, installation and setup are virtually painless.

Chat 2.0 is available to WPMU DEV members for immediate download. Get your copy today to start hosting your own live chats with WordPress.

Related posts:

1. Free WordPress Chat Plugin is Fully Compatible with Multisite and BuddyPress We’re pleased to announce that our new WordPress Chat plugin...
2. Organize your WordPress Support Chat Rooms with Fluid, a Mac app Fluid is a Mac OS X app that lets you...
3. A WordPress Chat Plugin That Draws A Crowd Learn more about how Barc.com helps to engage your visitors...