Episode 23: WordPress 2.2 delayed, GSoC workers, Aaron Brazell

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03:50

News: WordPress 2.2 delayed

WordPress v2.2 has been delayed as late possibly as June. When it is released, it will include features as:

  • The Blogger importer
  • Permalink redirection
  • Improved comment editing
  • phpmailer being integrated
  • Atom 1.0 support for feed
  • Atom API support
  • Additional XML-RPC APIs for pages
  • Plugin sandboxing (deactivates plug-ins that contain fatal errors)
21:06

News: 10 Coders Accepted for Google’s Summer of Code

WordPress was one of a few open source projects chosen by Google for participation in its Summer of Code program where college and university students may earn $4,500 USD to help improve whatever project they were accepted to. Of the 84 applicants to improve WordPress, 10 were ultimately chosen. They are:

  • Celeste Paul is pursuing her Master’s of Science degree at the University of Baltimore in the Interaction Design and Information Architecture program, and she hopes to find three things that can be improved in WordPress by comparing it to competitors, and she’ll be mentored by Matt Mullenweg.
  • Ronald Heft, Jr. is a 19 year old freshman attending Penn State Lehigh Valley and is working on adding podcasting support to WordPress and will be mentored by Lloyd Budd.
  • Keith Bowes is a 27-year old who blogs in Esperanto and he’ll be working toward making the template system easier to use, and that Andy Skelton will serve as his mentor.
  • Dion Hulse is a 19-year old attending classes at Southern Cross University in New South Wales Australia, and with the guidance of Robert Deaton will be creating a much anticipated plug-in to automate updating your WordPress installs.
  • Bernardo de Pãdua dos Santos is a student at in Brazil who hopes to create a sort of a “drag and drop” functionality for pages in WordPress, using a bit of AJAX magic and with the help of Michael Adams.
  • Mike Grouchy is a 23 year old Computer Science student at Memorial University in St.John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, and with Peter Westwood‘s guidance hopes to completely overhaul and improve the way we all use WordPress’ commenting system.
  • Luc Bizeul will create a Unit Test Framework for Editor Formatting, (whatever that means) with the help of Lloyd Budd.
  • Corey Shaffer will be helping to improve Content Management, mentored by Brian Layman.
  • Andrew Nelson will be guided by Robert Deaton in performance testing and speed improvements.
  • Matthias Bauer will be striving to improve WordPress’ localization to other languages, with a focus on making all literals translatable and the internationalization of (plugins and themes) metadata, all with the help of his mentor, Nikolay Bachiyski.

A Google message group has been created to watch this group of young people’s progress.

26:31

News: WordPress.com is about to turn 1 million users old.

At current, there are about 900,000 blogs being hosted on wordpress.com. At a net increase of about 3,700 new blogs a day (new signups minus blog deletions), that means that any day now, wordpress.com will host over 1 million blogs.

27:28

Tip: Automatically Update Your Blog

If you have Subversion installed and you’re running WordPress on a *nix server, both Red Monk and Aaron Brazell have bash files to help you automatically update all of your WordPress blogs.

30:08

Plug-in: Admin Panel Comment Reply v0.2 beta
Beta version of a plug-in that allows you to respond directly to approved comments from the Dashboard without ever having to first visit the post’s page.

32:36

Plug-in: Comment Relish v1.0 Automatically sends an e-mail message to new commenters, thanking them for doing so. It even includes several tags to use to personalize the message such as the commenter’s name, the time of the comment and even the text of the comment itself.

35:14

Plug-in: Embargo Press Release v1.0 alpha While this plugin won’t be for everyone, it is particularly effective for bloggers who “scoop” stories or who, perhaps, have product announcements. It’s customary practice to release entries to limited recipients for early review or to gain publicity on the entry early. This plug-in will allow you to generate an Embargo Notated version of an entry in the form of a Word Document.

38:06

Feedback: More on the Vidavee Video Player Plug-in

Anthony from vidavee.com reponded to our mullings on their video player plug-in, saying, “Thanks for your review of the Vidavee WordPress video plug-in. David is correct that the videos are transcoded to flash and hosted by Vidavee. Regarding rights, the content producer maintains all rights to their content. We recognize that video bloggers demand & desire greater control over their content.”

40:25

Feedback: Listener Gives the ThinkFree Viewer Plug-in a Thumbs Up

Dave Lee from gobackpacking.com commented on the blog about last episode’s ThinkFree plug-in saying, “I’ve installed the ThinkFree Viewer, and tested it out with an Excel document. It works great! I can’t wait until I’m ready to start making use of it in my blog.”

41:03

Feedback: David and Aaron Face Off on Sponsored Themes

Tristan Mendès from egoblog.net, asked for our thoughts on the sponsored themes controversy, and boy, didn’t we do just that! While some people think sponsorship is just another way to fund theme development, others look at the inclusion of sponsor’s links and the requirement that the end user must retain those links as a back-door means or gaming the search engine results. WordPress Project Leader Matt Mullenweg has even created a poll on the question, to determine whether or not sponsored themes have a place on wordpress.org.In the debate, Aaron mentions at least one theme author who tried releasing his themes under a GPL first, then switched to Creative Commons because he was “tired of being ripped off”, then switched back to “contribute more.”

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30 Responses to Episode 23: WordPress 2.2 delayed, GSoC workers, Aaron Brazell

  1. Dave says:

    Congrats to the 10 selected people for the Google Summer of Code – sounds like an exciting opportunity for them, and a potential windfall of benefits for users!

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  3. Great show, but I’m biased! :)

  4. Small Potato says:

    The last paragraph is inaccurate. Initially, I released themes under GPL, switch to CC because of rip-offs, and currently trying to switch back to contribute more.

    It doesn’t make sense for me to switch back to GPL because I’m tired of rip-off artists ;).

  5. Charles says:

    Good point! I’ll modify it.

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  7. Tristan says:

    Thanx a lot for mentionning the sponsored theme issue. :)
    I’d say that I am still on Matt’s side.
    One small thing, my full name is Mendes-France (as in Pierre Mendès-France, my grandfarther http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Mendès_France). ;)
    Cheers from Paris.

  8. Aprazeth says:

    w00t! Good news all-round :)

    I am really anxious to see version 2.2, as good things come to those that wait (very, very anxiously)

    And congratulations on the 10 coders – and congrats to the 10 coders as well. I look forward to seeing what they can produce :)

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  18. Hi guys

    Your guest never really managed to say what the press release plugin actually _does_, just kept repeating that it’s not for everybody (because not everybody’s cool enough to know breaking news before it breaks). Maybe you can clear that up in the next episode?

    Did you mention being annoyed that MyBlogLog automatically “added you to a community”? If it wasn’t you guys, and I just heard it somewhere else, just ignore this. :-) Well, that’s the stated purpose of that service! If you’re a repeat visitor to a site that has the MyBlogLog tracker (and you haven’t asked it to keep your repeat visits a secret), then your avatar will be shown on that site. If you don’t want this to happen, don’t use the service…

    Cheers from Vancouver,
    Jan Karlsbjerg

  19. Jan:

    Sure I did. I said. It takes the post, puts it into a Word Document with embargo information and prompts a direct download. How was I not clear on that? You can also look at the plugins page if you need that info.

  20. Well, it wasn’t clear to me what the workflow was. For example the meaning of “You point to a word document”:

    Is the word document there to begin with (maybe containing letterhead and disclaimer information?) and the plugin adds the post into the body of the document?

    When do you write the post&press release, and when is it published? Is it a “post to the future” kind of thing?

    But never mind. If I need the answers, I’ll go and find them. :-)

    Cheers from Vancouver

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  25. Giovanni says:

    It’s not fair… :(
    I assigned the feeds of wpcommunity and only appear to me the last 5 posts, can you display all posts in feeds for those who started to read the blog now ?

    I posted here, because I didn’t see any contact form.

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  27. ricky says:

    Well / thanx for good infos of new wordpress for blogs,R.

  28. LobsterMan says:

    First of all, it was pretty cool having Aaron on the podcast. Maybe you should bring in guest co-hosts now and then, it ads some interest.

    As a theme developer that releases both free, open source themes and also does paid consulting and services, I don’t see what’s wrong with releasing themes in any license other then the GPL, and charging whatever you want, or putting as many links as you want. If someone doesn’t want it, he doesn’t need to download it. While contributing open source code to the community is cool and all, you can’t force anyone to do it.
    The way I see it, all the business activity around open source projects are what keep them going. And that doesn’t take away any of the benefits of open source.

    Oh, one last comment to David: It’s interesting how your perspective changed since a few episodes back, when you were ranting about automattic making money on wordpress.com

  29. I want to comment a bit on the term “rip-offs” in light of the GPL.

    There is no such thing as a “rip off” for something that is under the GNU license. You, by virtue of that license, have given it away. You have decided to open your code to others to do with it *WHATEVER* they wish including (and especially) modifying it as long as they do what you did first in taking the high road and releasing it to the public.

    The substance of my assertion is that you gave it away, it was not ripped off.

    Thanks for listening.

  30. vlad lauren says:

    Thanx for good infos of new wordpress for blogs