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Mark your calendars: WordCamp San Francisco , the official annual WordPress conference, will be August 12-14, 2011. This year will mark the 5th anniversary of WordCamp, and as always will feature Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” address as well as a variety of amazing speakers that you’d normally only get to see at expensive industry conferences. This year the program will be expanded to three days, with programming for publishers, bloggers, and developers. There will also be related activities, like core team summits, workshops  for contributors, designers, and local organizers, and various professional and networking events. The planning is just beginning, so save the date on your calendar and keep an eye on the WordCamp SF 2011 site (and/or follow the @wordcampsf twitter account) for updates as details become available. *For people who attended WordCamp SF last year who thought the annual event this year would be called WordCon, with WordCamp SF becoming a more … [Read more...] about The Annual WordPress Conference: WordCamp SF 2011

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Merry Christmas! One of the things that was discussed at the core commit team meetup was release scope (and scope creep). Now that 2.9 is out and it’s time to start thinking about 3.0, we think it would be appropriate to stop and take a breath before diving in, and make a plan in advance. What winds up happening is that during each release cycle a few new features are selected for inclusion, but then right up until feature freeze (and/or beta cycle), people keep adding feature requests, patches for enhancements, and ongoing bug reports. This means each release winds up getting pushed out later than planned, and with so many things going in per release, it becomes harder to catch new bugs. The as-long-as-we’re-not-in-freeze-yet model isn’t working. People wind up waiting months longer for new features they want, like Trash and Image Editing, because we’re still adding other things and then we need to test them all. If we kept the releases smaller feature-wise, we could push out the … [Read more...] about Setting Scope

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The poll is closed, the votes are counted, and the results are interesting. The table below shows the actual breakdown of the poll votes, of which there were 2,651. As you can see, there were four main contenders: Dean J. Robinson’s Fluency-based submissions (two variations), the existing 2.7 interface, and Matt Thomas’s comp (MT), which exists somewhere between them in terms of style. Note: GB was a late entry, and was posted after over 900 votes had already been collected. As several people have rightly pointed out, the Fluency-style designs not only took the top spot, but in combination added up to a higher percentage than any other. We’re not focusing solely on that statistic, though, because had other designers submitted multiple versions, the numbers might have looked different. What was most interesting for me was checking in on the votes over the course of the two days the poll was open. The top three (Fluency-dark, Current 2.7, MT) kept beating each other out for the … [Read more...] about Design Tweaks Poll Results

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Have you seen the getting-prettier-all-the-time menus in 2.7-almost-beta? They really are. Getting prettier all the time, I mean. Once we drop in the fonts and do a little brushing up of edges and colors, the menu system is going to be smooth . The last thing we’ll need to do to is replace the icons we’ve been using as placeholders. Currently, the menus are using icons from Crystal Project , which is perfect because they’re released under LGPL (yay for open source!), but less perfect in that they don’t quite fit with the new visual style of 2.7, so we’re thinking custom icons. I’m always meeting people at WordCamps or via email who say they wish they could give back to WordPress, but that since they aren’t PHP developers, they feel like there isn’t any opportunity for them to be a part of the open source project. Well, here’s a golden opportunity. Want to design the new WordPress icons? The icons: Edit Posts . That’s a total of 13, and for the navigation icons we’ll also need … [Read more...] about Calling All WordPress-loving Icon Designers

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Your website is the channel through which your online business’ customers will find you, and hopefully spend enough time on to garner a click on the “Complete Purchase” button. You’ve got the catchy title, the keyword-rich domain, and even some killer content. But the “content is king” concept isn’t the be-all-end-all. After all, what good is the content if your site’s navigation is complicated? Your visitors will be leaving as quickly as they get there. Many studies have been conducted on the psychological effect of certain website layouts. Small details that you may rarely think about – such as the size of the page titles, where the text is located on the page, and the color theme – are essential to whether or not a site succeeds. It’s time to come up with a layout that isn’t just visually appealing, but also smart enough to hook your visitors in. Once they’re there and see the kind of content, products and/or services you’re offering, they’ll come back time and time again. Here … [Read more...] about How to Decide on a Layout for Your WordPress Site

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