There’s a lot of talk and movement this year around local meetups (as well as WordCamps) and I’ve been finding more and more great examples of local communities that are going all-out for their people and providing them as much value and resources as possible. For example, I stumbled upon one of New York City’s local communities @ WPNYC and it was neat to see what they’ve implemented for their community. For instance, they have created an entire BuddyPress community site for their members which is active daily:

This morning many people were greeted with an interesting question posed by Adii of WooThemes: We’re toying with the idea of building a hosted version of WooCommerce, which has all the benefits of a downloadable product (flexible, customizable templating) along with the benefits of a 1-click setup experience. So we’d essentially take care of all the work & you’d just start with the customization and implementation of your project’s goals. Instead of once-off costs (which is the case with WooCommerce themes & extensions now), we’ll have different monthly pricing plans which will include access to various themes & extensions. Direct […]

As you may have experienced in the last few weeks WP Daily has been up and down a handful of times as we mess with server settings, tweak caching, and other such tomfoolery. We’ve had such an incredible response that it’s demanded that we move a lot quicker in terms of building the site into a place that can scale well and smartly, especially since we’re on a shoestring (internal) budget that’s making this site feel oh so very much like a startup. And that’s a good thing. It forces us to become incredibly innovative with our time and how […]

Hot of DevPress is the new DP Dashboard plugin which has finally seen the light of day! There’s been a lot of talk about a better user experience in the backend of WordPress (as well as the post layer) and it’s neat to see some people put some of those ideas into action. Some of the features that you’ll readily see in the DP Dashboard ($40 per year subscription) are as follows: More user friendly menus Makes you feel good completing tasks Simplifies sub-tasks & actions Boring tasks made easy and beautiful No more squinting, bigger title font sizes Easy […]

Having trouble deciding which membership plugin you need for your next (or existing) WordPress-powered site? Sick of simply “googling” for some results and getting a bunch of crappy hop-links to plugins that might totally kill your site (or open it to nasty hackers)? Perhaps you need to refer to Chris Lema’s recent decision-tree infographic for membership plugins! Take a look after the jump:

WordPress.tv is continuing to crank out great presentations from all over the web and even more specifically from a number of the great WordCamps that have been completed in the last few weeks. There have been a handful of new presentations that you might want to check out – we’ve provided them here for quick viewing as well as their slides. Enjoy!

I got a notice the other day about signing up for an email list that I had completely forgotten about – how many times do you do that? It was from Memberful which is an easy way to sell digital goods, whether it’s software, graphics, fonts, icons, templates, themes, and plugins. Oh my! Anything really. Memberful is really easy (like point and click) to set up. It also optionally integrates quickly with WordPress via a plugin. The guys over at The Theme Foundry have been using it for over a year to sell their WordPress themes and integrate with their WordPress powered website. And, […]

It was recently announced via Make Mobile that Will Norris now has core commit access to the Android Trunk for development! We just wanted to have a quick shout-out to him and let him know that we’re thankful to his contributions and dedicated work. Interesting aside, but Will is also a Googler – that is, a Google Engineer working in their Open Source Programs Office. OoooOoooOOooh. Sounds so legit! Of course he has a Google+ page so you can track him there but he’s also on Twitter: @willnorris.

Although we’re moving to a more permanent location we’ve been in love with being a virtualized and distributed team for quite a while and we’ll continue to do that with our out-of-state staff. It’s tough though, that’s for sure, to stay on task at times and to make sure that everyone is in-sync with the what we’re doing so we use things like SocialCast for our community management and as well as tasks on occasion. It’s like a digital watercooler back there at times! And of course we have to deal with such oddities as figuring out where you put the […]

VaultPress is continuing to cook up new features on it’s product and this one’s a long time coming: The ability to restore a backup on a new site! Just imagine the possibilities! You’re transferring old content to a new domain or site or doing a massive migration perhaps for yourself or a client. Or what about moving to a sub-directory even on your current server? All this is now made possible with a few clicks of the magic button: