It was shared this morning that you now have the opportunity to try the new admin design that’s planning to hit shelves in the next update early, if you want, by just enabling the Experimental Admin Design (MP6) via your Users –> Personal Settings in your profile. It’s been talked about for quite some time, especially in the .org side of things, but most of the WordPress.com users have probably been casually unaware that there’s a new design coming down the pipe.

I’ll admit it – I’m not super-fans of any other commenting system other than the one that comes with WordPress – in other words, I’m somewhat partial to just going out-of-the-box. That isn’t to say that the other systems, like the very popular Disqus or the somewhat mediocre IntenseDebate aren’t bad – it’s just that I don’t like using them because I really want to limit the amount of data that heads off into other distant lands beyond my own installation. But many users use them and they have done quite fine with them. Another quite popular commenting system is Facebooks’ […]

Because everyone loves some retro victorian graphics, right? Sometimes you just need to reflect those age-old iconic styles that make your progressive and relevant content or brand really shine. Or maybe not. But, if you did, there’s a great free resource that has more than a few that might suit your fancy. Take a look at some of them that have fallen out of copyright and can be used, royalty free, and that have been scanned at the highest resolution with extensive cleaning to reduce noise and excessive fragmentation. Sweet deal:

Just wanted to toss our congratulations into the ring for Cristian Antohe and Adela Ticleanu as they are the two responsible for the very simple email newsletter service wpMail.me! They announced in their most recent release that they crossed the 100 issue mark and are just a month away from their 2 year anniversary. Way to go guys and thanks for providing valuable content to thousands (6,300+ at the recent count) of inboxes! In their latest Cristian said that it “puzzled” him why their service was still around and that’s easy enough to answer – it’s because it’s a valuable part of the WordPress […]

The Android team has “jubilantly” announced the release of their 2.3 and it’s quite a doozy, but inside and out. One of the obvious things that you’ll see right off the bat is the significant UI update, which is using the Holo UI pattern. With the use of the sweet Action Bar and navigation update using the menu drawer you may feel as if you’re using an entirely different application. Well, you may not have that big of a lurch in your experience but it’s definitely worth a review. Big ups to Isaac Keyet and the contributors that helped round out […]

Many of us do much more development than just WordPress – from iOS to Rails to .NET to ______[fill in the blank]______ you’re building apps everywhere. As a natural consequence, many of us are using newer and newer tools that are helping us create, manage, and deploy development environments for our work – anything to speed up production and eventual launch. Anything that’ll save time, especially with things like configuration and working in a shared environment. With things like Nitrous.io (which was Action.io) you can, with a cloud solution where you get a lightweight and centralized way to manage your […]

Dashboards, dashboards, dashboards! They seem to be everywhere! Include a hint of a “status” board and you’ve got an overwhelming number of choices to simply show you “stuff” that you already know about but in a condense form. Or perhaps it’s just me – I’m getting a little dashboard fatigue, if you know what I mean. That’s why I’m so thankful for Pär Thernström who sent us this little “panel” that he’s created for Panics new iPad app, Status Board.

I love it when passionate people dedicate their time to pursue projects based out of their passions, especially around blogging and online publishing. Jason Schuller is one of those guys who has been ‘around the block,’ sotospeak, in terms of the WordPress ecosystem and has seen some of the changes that WordPress has undergone over the past few years. In fact, he hasn’t always liked where it’s all been going, so much so that he’s decided to take a step back and reassess where exactly he fits (and his perspective) in the growing marketplace of digital publishing:

Have you seen Jeff Starr‘s latest and greatest book? You know, that guy who co-authored the amazing Digging into WordPress book with Chris Coyier? Well I’m not sure about you but I’ve bookmarked Jeff’s blog, Perishable Press, years ago and it’s provided incredible strategies, snippets of code, and yes, .htaccess scripts that have more than saved me a couple times. So when I heard that he was rocking a book covering that topic specifically I knew I had to get it.

Now wouldn’t this be some cool technology that could sit right within the post editor for WordPress? I know it would be a stretch and something that might be a little jarring at first, but imagine if the text editor, the area that I’m typing in right now, became a much more collaborative environment, much like Firepad.io? Imagine that for a moment: