Category Archives: WordPress

WPCandy Interview on Commercial Themes

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Hard to believe it’s been 12 months since the last time I was on WPCandy.

I talked last Friday about commercial themes on WordPress.com with Ryan Imel of WPCandy, looking back one year after launching the service. Here are the links to listen to the interview.

Thank you to Ryan and his crew; they do a superb job of covering all the WordPress news and events, day in and day out.

The Move to WordPress.com

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I switched this site to WordPress.com last weekend — it had been self-hosted since 2005, on Dreamhost.

Things went very smoothly — I followed instructions in the WordPress.com Support documentation and in various dashboard screens, and they were very helpful. I especially was impressed with the Google verification steps and how easy it was to add MX records for my Google Apps integration.

Probably the most annoying thing was waiting for propagation after updating nameservers, but there’s not a lot I could have done about that anyway.

A few hiccups:

  • Old email subscribers: I had to email my old list to ask them to subscribe again on WordPress.com (I was using FeedBlitz before).
  • Link importing: I had to split up the OPML file to import with categories, otherwise I’d have a flat import with no categories.
  • I used Textile on my old blog, so I had to run a small PHP script to update the content in posts/pages to plain old HTML.

The plugins I’m going to miss the most are:

Continue reading →

WordPress 3.2, Gershwin

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Last night I shared about the latest and greatest WordPress release at the July 2011 Tucson WordPress meetup.

The focus for the 3.2 release was making WordPress faster and lighter. Highlights include a new distraction-free writing mode, a completely refreshed admin UI, faster updates (only updating files that changed), support dropped for IE6, PHP 4, and MySQL 4, and the new default theme, Twenty Eleven.

Go update now! (3.2.1 is out now, by the way, with some minor fixes.)

Here are the links I mentioned in my talk.

The next Tucson WordPress meetup is scheduled for September 7th, 2011. Mark your calendars, and see you there.

Thanks to Andy Nacin for allowing me to use his slides from WordCamp Columbus as a starting point for my talk.

Break Your Theme, WordCamp Columbus

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I gave a talk called Break Your Theme in June 2011, in Columbus (Ohio, USA) for WordCamp Columbus 2011. I had a blast! The room was packed and I had great questions after my talk and in the hallways later.

Packed house! (Photo by Ryan Imel, WPCandy.)

Here are the slides and notes from the talk.

By the way, Ryan Imel of WPCandy did an awesome job of live-blogging WordCamp Columbus 2011.

Automatic WordPress Updates with SVN

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Want to keep your WordPress install up to date automatically? Follow these steps to add a cron job to update your WordPress install every 6 hours.

Set up the install

The WordPress install must be a Subversion checkout. You can grab the bleeding edge source with a command like this:

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ .

If you aren’t familiar with Subversion, start here:

Schedule the updates

Add the cron job from the command line.

  1. Edit the cron job list. 
    crontab -e
  2. Add the cron job (edit the path to your WordPress install). 
    MAILTO=""
# Update WordPress install every six hours
* */6 * * * svn up -q ~/path/to/your/wp-install
  3. Save and close.

To learn more about editing cron jobs from the command line search Google for man cron and man crontab.

You can also use a GUI tool like CronniX on Mac OS X to manage the cron jobs.

Notes

  • The -q parameter tells the svn update command to run silently so that you don’t have to worry about any output from the cron job. But, you should add the MAILTO definition if you want to completely silence output.
  • Some systems don’t recognize the */6 syntax for hourly notation. If you get an error when trying to save the cron job you might have to change it to comma-separated values instead: 0,6,12 or similar.