June 23rd, 2009
I’ve managed to chat with one of the three founders of WooThemes lately – Adii Pienaar. Adii was very busy during the last couple of weeks with the Woo2 Release, but he was still so kind to answer some questions I had, so here we go:
@kovshenin Okay Adii, how are things going at WooThemes right now? I mean after WordPress has released 2.8 and most of your clients have upgraded (I guess). Everything okay?
@adii Yep. Everything is fine again now. We only had some minor bugs to fix in some of our older themes, when WP 2.8 was released, but it seems that those are all squashed now and the ship is sailing once again.
@kovshenin I believe the toughest times were between the Release Candidate and the actual 2.8 Release, right? Did you manage to do everything in time?
@adii Well, we generally only fix bugs once an official version is released. So whilst we did some prelimanery testing on 2.8 beta’s, we only started fixing bugs when 2.8 was released. Obviously this is a bit difficult, since some of our users upgraded immediately, but we managed to do all the testing & fixing within about 2 days after 2.8 was released.
@kovshenin Wow, guess those were 24 hr workdays? ;)
@adii Hehe nah. We have a pretty dynamic team, so it was “all in a day’s work”. Plus we do bug fixing & improvements to our themes on a daily basis anyway.
@kovshenin Most WordPress plugin & theme developers were not pleased that 2.8 was released after only four days after the release candidate was. What do you think about it? Should the WordPress developers slow it down next time?
@adii I didn’t really perceive it that way and don’t really mind it to be honest. The beta was out for quite some time and I don’t think there were too many groundbreaking differences from the beta version to the RC and the RC to the actual release.
@kovshenin What about the 2.6 to 2.7 switch? That had some core changes, didn’t it?
@adii Oh yes definitely. There’s been quite a few changes from 2.6 to 2.7, which required a lot more changes within our older themes. 2.8 was minor compared to those.
Strange, but fair enough. Why bother working with the release candidate when you could just ask your clients to not rush with the update and work with the actual release, which may also be slightly different from the RC.
@kovshenin Which of the new 2.8 features did you like best?
@adii Most definitely the improved widget interface, which is absolutely amazing. And a MASSIVE improvement on previous versions.
@kovshenin I was sure you liked the syntax highlighter :D
@adii Well, I never use the theme editor in the admin panel (as I’m sure other serious WP developers do), so whilst it’s a great feature I’m honestly not that excited by it.
When I first saw the code editor built in WordPress I thought it’s no use at all. Why would I use a simple code editor that has no lines numbered, no syntax highlighting to edit php files that I could easily edit via FTP? Well if you need to edit a few lines in your header.php (like add a favico or whatever) it’s much easier to add that using the built in code editor than to search for the FTP account details, download the file, change it, upload back to server. What if you’re not at your usual workplace?
With the built in code editor you can even make those changes using your iPhone ;) And now that it’s got the syntax highlighter and the function browser, wow, that makes it even cooler!
@kovshenin Did you know about Chet Baker BEFORE the 2.8 announcement?
@adii Hell no.
Oh well, neither did I. Did you? Vote vote here ;)
@kovshenin I heard you run a little design agency called Radiiate. Are your clients okay with WordPress? I mean lots of people think that WordPress is for blogs, right? How do you convince your clients that WordPress can drive a corporate website, e-store and a social network? What example websites/products do you like to show?
@adii Mmm, well firstly Radiiate hasn’t been actively doing client work for a few months now, because we’re focussing on WooThemes. But… I think most of Radiiate’s client came to us looking for a WordPress solution, so we didn’t need to convince them about using WP in favour of other alternatives.
@kovshenin But you are gonna keep up the work at Radiiate aren’t you? whenever things settle down with Woo..
@adii Yes and no. Radiiate is on the backburner, so whilst there’s no immediate or set plan to revive it, I’m sure it’ll be something that I spend time on again in future. And to continue fueling WooThemes’ growth, we need to focus all our energy on it! :)
Well, too bad.. *sigh*
@kovshenin What do you think about WordPress “Theme Frameworks” such as Thesis, Thematic, etc. Do they have a future?
@adii Definitely. I think both Thesis and Thematic are great themes and many more developers are going to adopt them (or other similar frameworks). Theme Frameworks are however more developer tools (imo), so more out-of-box themes will still have a role to play within the theming community.
I totally disagree here. I think developers will be looking forward to create their own tools. Look at Ryan’s post about Creating Your Own WordPress Theme Framework.
@kovshenin Your thoughts on SquareSpace. If you were a WordPress.com blogger, would you switch to SquareSpace?
@adii I haven’t actually tried SquareSpace, but I’m hearing good things about it. So I can’t really give an opinion…
@kovshenin Where did the “Woo” come from? Is it from like “Woohoo! I got a brand new Theme!” ? :D
@adii Hehe no. Magnus actually came up with it and it’s a mix of w00t & WordPress.
I guess that’s it. Thank you Adii and thank you WooThemes!
June 18th, 2009
Yup, that’s the way it generally goes. I finally got myself an account at SquareSpace to play around with, and I poked the Thesis Framework a couple of months ago, so I now got to a conclusion – I’m not satisfied with any of those. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with SquareSpace, it’s a very neat and highly customizable blogging platform. I liked playing around with it, but it took me less than a few minutes to realize, that “play around with it” is all I can do. SquareSpace is not free, and neither is Thesis. But don’t get me wrong, WordPress is not free either (I’ll tell you why in a couple of minutes)! Everything depends on what you’re looking for.
Blogs, blogs, blogs. Everybody’s a pro-blogger today, especially in the world of Twitter. Everybody needs a place to discuss the perfect formula of “gaining 2000+ followers in one week”, then sell ads & get cash or perhaps donate to some charity of their choice. Anyway, this is not my point.
My point is that there are so many blogs out there, they’re so different, and yet so similar. And this is where the blogging platform comes in and I like to divide this into three steps (while the third one might also be a step 0 for some people).
Step 1: Just get out there and blog!
Blogger, WordPress.com, LiveJournal – these platforms are for busy people. For people that want to blog. Generally not techies. They don’t even care about how their blog looks, as long as the content is delivered to their readers (oh yeah, there are those that don’t give a damn about their readers too, but that’s a different story). People might spend some money for extra functionality on these platforms from time to time such as ad removal, custom CSS, etc. There are much more blogging platforms of this type than mentioned above, and even not so well-known networks of blogs created by people using Multi-User WordPress, Ning, buddyPress and others.
These types of platforms are generally free of charge and require no special knowledge. One-click sign up and you’re ready to blog. Most of them (the blogs) don’t live very long though, they get abandoned in a few months.
Step 2: Time to customize. Look at the new me!
As I said before, SquareSpace is cool, really. It may actually be the next step in your blogging adventure – customizing your look & feel and the readers interaction, making you different from your partners/competitors. People don’t like their blog to look like their friends’ blogs. WordPress.com blogs look all similar, Google Blogger too and that may get very annoying after a few months blogging. SquareSpace lets you customize the look of your blog without any programming skills at all (unlike Custom CSS on WordPress.com for instance). Watch this short video presentation.
Pretty cool eh? Take a look at the Features List for more info. The video on their website has a male voice btw, that’s strange… I prefer this female one ;)
Alright. We finally got here. Thesis from DYI Themes. Oh jeez. I don’t wanna talk much about Thesis, honestly, it’s starting to get on my nerves. First of all, they’re asking me to pay for a “Theme Framework”. What on earth is a “Theme Framework“? Lemme tell you. It’s just a bunch of functions, that limit your WordPress capabilities and make your website look rediculous. I like to refer to WordPress as a Framework, because it does have all the functionality and flexibility to be called one. Now, why do you need a framework on top of a framework?
Oh god, take a look at the Thesis showcase, they all have the same look. That Thesis look, which is kinda cool when you see it for the first time, but makes you wanna vomit when you came across 20 similar blogs a few hours ago. I can’t believe that people are actually giving away their money for this. And the developers license… Wow, you really wanna become a “Thesis Theme developer”? Heh, I’d go with WordPress if I were you.
Step 3: Time for a fresh start
Back to WordPress. This is the final step before you get all frustrated with blogs and decide to build your own social platform (with blackjack, and hookers ;) Why is it “back” to WordPress? Well, because this is where most people start and feel that WordPress (I’m talking about standalone WordPress blogs, not the ones hosted on WordPress.com) is not good/powerful/easy/flexible enough and doesn’t suit your needs. And this is the place where people start to look out for paid themes (yeah, and frameworks too) and other blogging platforms. I mentioned that it’s not free, remember? What I meant was that if you want a high-quality, good-looking WordPress blog, find yourself a loot WordPress junkie and pay him to do some theme customization (or perhaps build one from scratch), plugins customization (or perhaps build some from scratch, lol) and setting it all up.
Yes, this may cost a little more, but this is the only guarantee that you will get whatever you’re asking for, and it’s generally a one-time fee and maybe some small charges from time to time to stay up to date (get up a “happy christmas” version of your theme, extend functionality, etc).
In conclusion, I just wanted to say that you should stop wasting your time and stick to the right option straight away, during the start. You don’t wanna be jumping from one platform to another every month. Yeah, I know there are so much handy export/import tools but it still is a waste of time.
June 15th, 2009
StartupsLive.tv is definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen around these days and guess what! I got there!
Startups Live is the non-biased platform for any startup to get live exposure, a captive audience, and valuable feedback from potential business partners, customers, members, and investors.
I sent a request to Startups Live asking them to feature the Foller.me Twitter service I’ve created and bang! I got on the show! It was really amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it!
The girls are so wonderful! Charissa was the one interviewing me and Dannie took care of the promo and blog post. We had so much fun during the live recording, that we couldn’t stop reading the Foller.me profiles after the show, so if you missed the live version, you’ll never get to see what happened beyond the recorded version at Ustream.tv, sorry!
I was very nervous on the show, but Charissa and Dannie said that I never showed that (hope that this is true), although when I played back the recorded version and looked at myself, I kinda laughed. Do I really look that funny on TV? And the panda, oh that was weird, wasn’t it ;) but I couldn’t help it! Then, when Charissa asked me about the business model of Foller.me, wow! I didn’t know what to say, cause I haven’t really thought about that (much).
The guests in the chatroom during the show were amazing too, especially when we started reading their Foller.me profiles out loud, heh that was fun! And my brand-new-to-twitter brother @SoulSeekah got his one-minute celebrity spotlight on the show too, thanks for that girls!
Anyway, if you’ve missed the show, I feel terribly sorry for you! So go ahead and watch (at least) the recorded version on Startups Live. You won’t regret it.
Don’t forget to follow the girls on Twitter: Charissa Cowart and Dannie McClain. And definitely follow Startups Live on Twitter for the hottest news. Oh, I almost forgot, they have a Startups Live Facebook group. I suggest you join that too ;)
June 15th, 2009
The update was great! The new features in WordPress 2.8 are awesome! Most of my Twitter friends have updated to 2.8 and haven’t had a single issue. The new widgets area is so cool! Oh jeez, I’m so excited. For a full features list check out Version 2.8 section in the Codex.
Anyway, the only issue I had so far is the Thickbox usage. I’m not sure why it’s lost, but I’ve discovered it in the Quick Flickr Widget plugin when upgrading. The thickbox feature worked fine in 2.7 and 2.7.1. For an unknown reason, WordPress 2.8 doesn’t call the thickbox.js file through wp_enqueue_script. The other js libraries work fine though (prototype, scriptaculous). jQuery’s being called out too btw, cause it’s a dependency of Thickbox, but thickbox never shows up. This is actually weird. I hope I’m not the only one with this issue, cause it’s starting to feel bad ;)
I’ll submit a bug ticket to their Trac for 2.8.1, but until that here’s a temporary workaround:
global $wp_version;
if ($wp_version == "2.8") wp_enqueue_script("thickbox28", "/wp-includes/js/thickbox/thickbox.js", array("jquery"));
else wp_enqueue_script("thickbox");Hope this helps. And don’t forget to inject the thickbox CSS and javascript settings in the wp_head action.
Update: Thickbox loads in the footer section in WordPress 2.8, that should be right before the closing body tag. And yes, loads of themes are lacking the wp_footer() function call. So, forget about the workaround, fix your themes first.
The 1.2.9 update of Quick Flickr Widget included the fix above, so 1.2.10 reverts that fix back to the standard way, sorry for the hassle ;)
June 3rd, 2009
Hello everyone. Very busy week here and more good news! I have been asked about the future of Foller.me by many friends from Twitter and e-mail and IM, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here in public.
Foller.me is going quite good although there are a couple of bugs and issues that haven’t been solved yet, but we’re working on it very hard. The future? Well, that’s actually unpredictable, really. I’ll explain. We work out the areas that you (the end-users) want us to, and that is why your feedback is very important and it basically defines what we will be doing next. Yes, there are loads of comments and suggestions from inside the developers team, but we’re really looking forward to making a Twitter service that you people would use, and that’s our main goal.
Now today I’d like to give you a tiny little insight on what’s coming up next on Foller.me. We call it Followers Geography. Ever wondered where your followers are from? Or perhaps you wonder where your followers’ followers are from? Yes, there’s a location field in Twitter profiles which most people fill out quite good. Combining Google Geocoding and Google Maps, we’ve managed to scan through your followers’ locations and point them out on a map. Oh, and it also shows the current profile’s location (we totally forgot about that at first, hehe).
There are a few restrictions here, and the main one is definitely Google Maps API. Google allows around 15,000 API queries every day (while Twitter provides us with 20,000 every hour!) AND restrict their bulkness – there should be a 200-300 ms interval between each API call. So, generally you would have to wait for around 5 minutes to digest a profile with a thousand followers, and that’s where we came up with our great caching mechanism. The API calls are not made from within your browser. They run on a time-based (cron) job from our server to geocode new locations. Yes, it still takes a while to digest everyone, but you don’t get to see the delay and that’s the bright part of it!
The second restriction is your followers count. Your browser can’t handle 1,000,000 markers on a Google Map and that’s why we’re down to a maximum number of 500 followers (thus, locations) which works fast and doesn’t overload the browser with javascript. We’re working on a pagination system so don’t worry, you’ll get to see the rest in no time ;)
The public beta of Followers Geography is planned to be released by the end of next week. It’s going to be a new section below the three tag clouds and will be a small part of the huge “Followers” section in the future. If anybody would like to take a look at the living version post your requests into the comments, and I’ll provide you with an address, username and password by e-mail in exchange for good feedback ;)
That’s it for now. So how d’u guys like the idea? Anything else you’d like to see on that map?
Hi! I'm Konstantin, a freelance web developer from Moscow, Russia.