Archive for the ‘WordPress News’ Category
by Darnell Clayton on March 8th, 2011
The team at Automattic (the company behind WP.com) have reached another milestone, as they are now hosting over 18 million WordPress.com blogs upon their servers.
Last month in February the NY Times wrote an article detailing how blog platforms were some how being canibilized by Facebook and Twitter, with only Tumblr showing healthy signs of growth (at least among the youth).
While no one can dispute the fact that social networks are claiming their fare share of online content (at least upon Twitter and Facebook), their presence has yet to starve blogging as a whole and (not surprisingly) they are often used by bloggers themselves to promote their content.
Other blogging platforms are also boasting healthy signs of growth, with Tumblr approaching 15 million blogs, with smaller players like OnSugar (which is a fork of Drupal 4.7) gaining influence as well.
Note: Although there are probably as many self hosted WordPress blogs as there are WordPress.com blogs, there is currently no way to track them all as not everyone installs WP.com stats or Google Analytics within their blog.
According to Network World’s research (who analyzed the top 1 million sites online), WordPress’s total market share is between 6.9% (according to Quantcast) and 12.9% (according to Alexa), respectively.
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: wordpress
by Darnell Clayton on February 25th, 2011
The latest beta for WordPress for Blackberry is out and instead of launching a slew of new features for users the team decided to concentrate on something more important instead.
Lots of changes were made under the hood and this is the reason you haven’t seen any update for a while. We thought that security matters, so most of the changes affect the overall app security: We are now using a completely different, strongly encrypted storage model. To make the transition smooth we haven’t added any new features yet. New features will be released in the future. This is the good, the bad is that you might have to re-add your blogs/sites, as well as reconfiguring the app. Draft posts will not be erased, so once you have re-added a blog your old drafts should become available again. (WordPress for Blackberry Dev Blog)
Read More
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: Blackberry, wordpress
by Darnell Clayton on February 23rd, 2011
After a couple of months of waiting (and lots of beta testing), the latest version of WordPress 3.1 has been released to the masses!
The latest version contains a few extra goodies including the internal linking feature (which in hindsight is something every blog platform should have), although the latest update may help WordPress appeal more to the KISS generation (aka “keep it simple stupid”). Read More
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: wordpress
by Darnell Clayton on February 16th, 2011
Whenever a WordPress blog is hacked or (on more rare occasions) thousands of blogs are compromised upon a host, numerous headlines spring up declaring how insecure WordPress is and why users should choose an alternative platform.
Usually by the time a security guru is able to analyze the real culprit (which usually is an insecure web host or an out of date blog), the media is already perpetuating the myth that WordPress is an “unsafe” to use for one’s blog or website.
Although the WordPress community has made upgrading to the latest version as painless as possible, trying to convince cheap web hosts (especially those promising unlimited hosting) to improve security despite the cost can be frustrating affair.
Instead of trying to present guidelines for hosting companies in the hopes that they’ll improve on their own, it might be better for the WP community to establish a “report card” to help inform new comers which hosts will provide the best experience for their site or blog. Read More
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: Self Hosting, wordpress
by Darnell Clayton on February 9th, 2011
After squashing various bugs that kept popping up within the iOS app, the WordPress team is preparing to launch the push notifications for comments (which is currently only available via a third party app).
While receiving alerts about users commenting upon your blog will make it easier for users to respond to readers while on the go, here are a few other features the team might consider adding within the next available update. Read More
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: iphone, wordpress
by Darnell Clayton on February 3rd, 2011
Automattic has just announced that bloggers on WordPress.com will now be able to purchase premium themes, a feature that previously was only available for self hosted WordPress blogs.
I am proud to introduce the very first two premium themes on WordPress.com: Headlines and Shelf. [...]
Along with the distinctive features and a gorgeous design purchasing a premium theme like Shelf or Headlines for your WordPress.com site also gives you full access to dedicated support on the WordPress.com forums. The premium themes forum there will be accessible only to site owners who’ve purchased a theme.
We hope to expand the collection of themes on WordPress.com in a big way in 2011. Look for a significant number of both free and premium themes coming your way this year. (Official WordPress.com Blog)
The Headlines and Shelf premium themes were designed by WooThemes and The Theme Foundry, repsectively, with the latter offering users a tumbleblog like experience.
Automattic has not yet publicly revealed the revenue split between WP.com and theme designers, as well as other requirements like whether theme designers have to fully embrace the GPL before selling themes upon WP.com (i.e. no split licensing).
However with WP.com boasting 17 million blogs, Automattic’s market share (which is roughly 50% of all active WordPress blogs) may simply be too large for theme designers to ignore.
(Image Credit: Logic Bomb Labs)
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: Premium, Premium Themes, wordpress.com
by Franky Branckaute on January 30th, 2011
Brandon Jones over at Envato’s Tutsplus posted the video of SXSWi 2010′s panel, discussing whether WordPress kills the creative design scene. Read More
Categories: Interesting, Linking, WordPress News
Tags: Bradley Potter, Brandon Jones, Envato, Opinion, SXSWi, Videos
by Franky Branckaute on January 28th, 2011
WordPress Post Formats have been the rage among designers and developers since first announced and with WP 3.1 reaching its release a set of standardised, non-extensible, post formats have found their way in the WordPress core. As so often, a decision made by the Core team has lead to questions, sometimes even disapproval. Read More
Categories: Linking, WordPress News
Tags: Andrew Nacin, Post Formats, Thord D. Hedengren, WordPress 3.1
by Franky Branckaute on October 6th, 2010
Rather like sorting the wood from the trees with Credit Loans, it is easy to forget how many versions of WordPress there have been, not to mention the release names. From the early days of WordPress 1.2, every new release is named by Matt Mullenweg after a Jazz legend, a tradition which has not changed over the years. Fans of Jazz will recognise many artists, release names, but it is easy to forget these and use WordPress release number instead. Matt often has chosen for a sax player, an instrument the WordPress founder also plays.
We looked at the names of every release, the main new features introduced with every major new version as well as the basic analysis of the self-hosted blogging software world that is the WordPress community. We then added ‘WordPress Blue’ and ended up with this infographic for you.
With thanks to the crew at Infographiclabs for another awesome infographic.
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: Infographic, wordpress
by Remkus de Vries on June 18th, 2010
Yesterday saw the much awaited release of WordPress 3.0. I’ve talked about this 3.0 release numerous time here, but it’s finally live. As far as I can remember this is the most awaited version because of the heap load of new features. You can tell the guys at WordPress are pretty excited about  this release too judging by their release post:
Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click [...] Read More
Categories: WordPress News
Tags: Releases, WordPress 3.0
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