What a week it has been my friends! I’m not so sure about you, but this past week nearly killed me – trying to get back into the “groove” of things gets harder and harder and harder. But we survived the first week of April, didn’t we? On to the next one!

No, not anytime soon (I hope?). But maybe, sometime in the future, it could always be a possibility, especially since some of the other publishing platforms are experimenting with it. For example, Tumblr has gotten a lot of publicity and facetime in the WordPress community as being a model to be examined and analyzed in terms of fluidity of publishing and simplicity of UI/UX. To be honest, the Tumblr interface and overall experience isn’t something to laugh at – it’s incredible. I believe that Tumblr poses an interesting threat to WordPress long-term – and if they continue to gain traction […]

Remember the TimThumb scandal? Or rather, the big hullabaloo about vulnerability around TimThumb a year or so ago? Well, many themes still are using it as an integral part of their product, which doesn’t mean that they necessarily vulnerable but it’s worth noting that if you have an older version of a theme that you should probably update. Pagely has listed out a handful of them that are still using TimThumb within their architecture – so make sure you take note if you’re using a theme that does use it.

It’s already a conversation that’s brewing (and has been brewing) for a bit of time but most WordPress users may not even know that there’s a change coming down the pipe with a new look to post formats in 3.6 (Beta 1 dropped yesterday) that may catch them by surprise. Brad Williams’ shared his thoughts yesterday without reservation about the new post formats: I’m a firm believer that the new Post Format UI buttons are going to cause a lot of confusion to beginner WP users http://t.co/kPy29gNaeR — Brad Williams (@williamsba) April 4, 2013 He specifically calls out newer WP […]

I know crowdfunding is a bit of the technological soup du jour right now and for good reason – it’s disrupting many different industries and challenging the fundamentals of investment capital and securities regulation. I believe all these things are good for the future of technology and innovation and I’m happy to have experienced it (or I’m in the middle of experiencing it) first-hand. But because I live in a WordPress world I instantly think about crowdfunding the applications and implications for our ecosystem. For example, with standalone themes like Fundify and their accompanying crowdfunding plugin it makes me wonder if giving […]

And… it’s here! Beta 1 of 3.6 just released less than an hour ago and it’s time for testing. Did your schedule just get messed up because you’ll now spend the rest of the day testing Beta 1 instead of your real job? *Raises hand!*

It’s hard to stay enthusiastic about new WordPress products, especially ones that do not necessarily seem to push the boundaries of WordPress design and development, let alone software development as a whole. Drag and drop interfaces is not something new and it’s been done in more than a few WordPress-centric product before. And to be honest, drag-and-drop interfaces as a whole aren’t something that is very attractive to me. I’ll admit, somewhat emotionally and illogically I just feel that d-n-d features make the product worse, not better. I feel like for a neat feature they sacrifice the integrity of the overall […]

Scribu had a fantastic reminder about data portability, even as far as saying that it’s “more valuable than having an open source project to manipulate that content.” Some may disagree but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to agree. Because most simply the possibility of WordPress completely tanking and disappearing off the face of the planet is still (and will always be) a real possibility. It’s hard to imagine that WordPress would ever lose it’s luster but how many applications have you used historically that you may never have thought would ever become stale and ugly […]

Blogging software is built for people to communicate amazing things to many people – but not always in english. How often do we forget that there are more languages than just my own? I believe it’s part of our responsibility to make our products, our WordPress themes and plugins, multi-lingual compatible. If not out of the gate but that you’re definitely thinking in that direction long-term. That’s why I love to see what Elegant Themes has done with all of their themes, making them all WMPL compliant and compatible.

You may have already updated but yesterday the version 3.5.2 was released which nicely disabled autosaving because of the issues that many users were experiencing. This latest also fixed a number of crashes that were brought on by 3.5.1 – so you should see a significant stability increase on this newest version.