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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”