The WordPress.com 2012 annual reports are live, this year with a snazzy fireworks motif.
Here’s an excerpt from the report for the simpledream blog:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 19,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals
Extra! Extra! The latest WordPress release is fresh off the presses.
If you’ve been around WordPress a while, the most dramatic new change you’ll notice is a completely re-imagined flow for uploading photos and creating galleries. Media has long been a friction point and we’ve listened hard and given a lot of thought into crafting this new system. 3.5 includes a new default theme, Twenty Twelve, which has a very clean mobile-first responsive design and works fantastic as a base for a CMS site.
Did you read that right?! Yes. New media flow. Totes awes, batpeople. There is much more in this release but that alone should be enough to make you go update to 3.5 right this moment. WPCandy has a nice run-down of what’s new in 3.5. (Note: if your site is on WordPress.com you’ve been using this for a few weeks already. You are a future-living geek and didn’t even know it.)
This is so awesome—you can now generate your WordPress starter theme based on _s with one click: Underscores.me — The Best Way To Get Started With The _s Theme.
I attended WordCamp San Francisco this year—my third time in a row. Thoroughly enjoyed the speakers and sessions, networking with partners and friends—plus meeting new folks. Following the main conference, on Sunday, I was part of a very productive Dev Day where 17 (seventeen!) of us hacked on the new default theme for WordPress, Twenty Twelve.
Here are a few photos from the weekend.
If you haven’t been to a WordCamp—I highly suggest it, find here a list of upcoming WordCamps.
Evan Solomon: Premium Themes are a Lie
Interesting post and follow-up discussion on an old but still very important topic. Premium themes, just because you pay for them, doesn’t guarantee any code or design quality.
It’s time again for WordCamp San Diego 2012. Sat Mar 24 and Sun Mar 25 will be two days filled with WordPress geeky goodness, a full conference on Saturday and a developer hack day on Sunday.
I’m speaking in the Developer track on Saturday at 2:10 pm—my topic is Theme Busters R Us:
Breaking themes for fun?! Crazy talk. Busting your WordPress theme–on purpose–can be both fun and useful. The process is a crucial part of building sites with WordPress, whether it’s for a client project, a personal blog, or releasing an awesome new theme to the world.
See the rest of the talks on the full Saturday schedule; there are two tracks to choose from (End User, Developer) with great speakers and topics.
If you’re not at the event you can still join in, the talks will be live-streamed. Check the WordCamp San Diego 2012 website for details.
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:
The plugins I’m going to miss the most are:
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.
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.
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:
Add the cron job from the command line.
crontab -eMAILTO=""
# Update WordPress install every six hours
* */6 * * * svn up -q ~/path/to/your/wp-installTo 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.
-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.*/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.
