WordPress powers 25% of the web. It is arguably the most influential open source PHP project, and claims a massive community and developer base. It’s not handling PHP upgrades responsibly. This is not a new issue. The push from the community for WordPress to raise the minimum required version of PHP has been happening for years. It was brought up again with Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp US 2015. Take a look.
I’m a huge WordPress fan. that’s no secret. I’ve been using it since 2007 for pretty much every site (blog or otherwise) that I’ve built. I write plugins and themes for it. I’ve fully invested my personal website and blogging experience in the WordPress ecosystem. That’s why, when I learned about Known a couple of weeks ago, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma. Known seems to embody the same principles and goals as WordPress: federated content, control of what you publish, open source codebase, distributed community, the list goes on.
I love WordPress. I use it for nearly all the sites I build, I write plugins for it, I run this site on it. It’s an awesome content management system and blogging platform. I love that I can modify and extend it with plugins and themes however I want, without restriction. I love that it’s open source, so I can contribute to it being a better product and use it pretty much however I want without fees and license restrictions.
WordPress.com creates an end-of-year report for every WordPress site that runs the Jetpack plugin and has Stats enabled. Mine showed up yesterday evening. Here’s an description: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 8,100 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people. Mostly I just like watching the fireworks :-)
I’ve released a new WordPress plugin, called Author Customization. This plugin gives you much greater flexibility in managing post authors on your WordPress site. Rather than having to rely entirely on the one-size-fits-all user management system, you can customize author names and bio entries on a per-post basis. You’ll also be able to enable a WYSIWYG editor for biographical info (the same editor used by WordPress for editing posts), to have richer formatting of author bio entries.
Today I released my first WordPress plugin, called Relogo. It’s a simple plugin that lets you easily add support for rel="logo" to your WordPress site, in accordance with the spec published at relogo.org. The rel="logo" specification is a cool and simple way to make sure people always have the most up-to-date version of your logo without having to make any changes to their code. So check out my plugin, and install it on your site!
All is Fair in Love and Twitter The origins of Twitter are steeped in drama, betrayal and intrigue. Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right HealthCare.gov is just one of a number of major government tech projects that have failed. Here’s why, and how it can be fixed. Why didn’t the White House use WordPress? Five of the 14 states running their own exchanges use WordPress, with much greater success than HealthCare.
Great Place to Work: At Automattic Employees All Work From Home And Travel To Exotic Locations The company behind WordPress has a culture of decentralized employment, and it’s working well. Take note, other companies everywhere. Why I changed my mind on weed Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN is now in favor of medical marijuana. Bonus: his explanation is based in science, not rhetoric. A Brief History of Apple’s iWatch Yes, iWatch isn’t even real yet.
For years I’ve been using the same link structure on every Wordpress site I operate: example.com/year/month/day/post-title. I opted for this method because I liked that it gave time context to the content right inside the URL. Plus, my links looked fancier & more impressive! Recently I’ve decided I don’t like this so much anymore, mainly for one reason: it’s not easy to tell somebody a link like that in conversation.
As an avid WordPress user, I have come to rely heavily on some of my plugins. Occasionally I’ll browse the WordPress.org plugins section looking for cool ones to try, but usually I stumble across them trying to solve a problem or make my life easier. I’ve come up with a list of the ones that I find the most useful, or that are cool and worth having anyway. Google Analytics: This plugin is crucial to me, perhaps above any of the others I use.
