The Genesis of Microsoft and WordPress.com

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At the very beginning of this episode there’s a short interview with Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic, and Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management, Windows Live. Only an hour before we recorded this interview they were on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to announce that all the Microsoft Live / MSN Spaces users would be moved over to WordPress.com.

Toni Schneider (Automattic) and Dharmesh Mehta (Microsoft)

We talked about what this meant for future work between Microsoft and Automattic / WordPress, and whether any of this would impact WordPress.org users.

Brian Gardner - StudioPress

This interview is followed by another (much longer) interview with Brian Gardner and Nathan Rice of StudioPress and Genesis. In this interview we discuss how Genesis came to be over the last year, what it’s benefits are over a normal theme and what the process of going from a set of themes to a framework was like.

We discussed the SEO settings of Genesis, which has some of the more advanced SEO settings ever seen in themes, but also whether these kinds of settings should be in themes at all. I referenced a recent post of mine and we talked about a plugin Nathan developed, the SEO Data Transporter that allows you to transport your SEO meta data from a plugin to a theme, or from one theme to another etc.

Nathan Rice - StudioPress

Another interesting point was the discussion of how to set up a community around a theme framework like this, and Brian showed us, for instance, dev.studiopress.com. We also talked about the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin, a very cool way of allowing people to change sidebars for posts.

Then there were two plugin picks:

• Nathan picked Simple URLs, a very cool new method of doing redirects using a custom post.
• Joost picked Press This reloaded, a “re done” version of the Press This bookmarklet that allows setting of SEO titles etc. from within the Press This screen too.

It’s really an information packed show, so go ahead and listen right now!

PS sorry for my sore voice and coughing, I’ve got a quite heavy cold pestering me.