I use CloudApp a lot, and recently saw mention of Dropmark. That got me to thinking of a relatively simple, WordPress-powered application for small-group-collaboration which I thought I’d throw out here in case anyone wanted to build it.
- A WordPress installation, with a group of people who all have accounts
- A small Mac/Windows app that lived on your desktop/menu-bar/somewhere easy to get at. Let’s call it… Guppy.
- All users download a copy of Guppy and configure it to point to the same WordPress install.
- Guppy now sits on their computer, waiting for them to interact with it.
- When they drop files on this copy of Guppy, it does some magic
- Images will be uploaded and inserted into a Post, or set as a gallery (if there’s more than one),
- Text files will be uploaded and rendered as pre-formatted text,
- Other will be uploaded and attached to a Post,
- Double-clicking/clicking Guppy would open a small window where they could type in some text (and perhaps also drop files into that window and have them appear as “objects” within their text)
- Right-clicking Guppy would allow you to change options, jump to the configured website (like you didn’t already have it open in a browser tab!), create a new instance of Guppy, maybe some other stuff.
- All of this content is published as Posts on the connected WordPress install, and is automatically formatted beautifully (perhaps via an optional theme that’s geared heavily towards collaboration?). Comments are enabled, so you can discuss things on that site, right there while you’re looking at it.
In essence this is just a streamlined, simplified, beautiful WordPress client. There is nothing stopping someone from creating this today. There you go internet, 1 more free idea.
I’ll be at WordCamp Orange County, presenting a session on plugin development, specifically looking at some of the more advanced things we did in Jetpack. It will be fun — you should go.
For the past few months, my team at Automattic (Team Social FTW!) has been working on a super-secret project. Today, almost perfectly synchronized with the NASA space shuttle landing (total fluke, but awesome regardless) we launched Jetpack!
Jetpack is a new plugin that delivers a bunch of popular features from WordPress.com (the hosted site, which Automattic runs) to self-hosted installs of WordPress (such as the one that runs Dented Reality). Once you install Jetpack, you get some of the cooler things available on WordPress.com, automatically enabled on your own WordPress site. The modules you get today are just the beginning though, there are a lot more planned for future releases. We’re going to be targeting some of the biggest features that are easier for us to do on our massive grid/cloud infrastructure, but harder for folks to do on their own shared-hosting accounts.
We also managed to partner with a bunch of leading web hosts, so if you’re doing a one-click install on Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, or Network Solutions, you’ll get Jetpack as part of your install. This is huge for people installing their own WordPress.
This has been the coolest thing I’ve worked on at Automattic so far, and it’s been awesome to be involved in a project that has seen so many contributions internally (over 40 people were involved in everything from UX to design to internationalization to testing and debugging) and so many iterations since its inception. I’m really proud of what we’ve created, and hope that it sets a new bar for the design of WordPress plugins (I really think Jetpack is beautiful, amazing work Joen, Hugo and MT!).
So – check out Jetpack if you’re running WordPress on your own server, and let us know what you think!
Which features would you most like to see in Jetpack? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do 
PS: This post proudly proof-read by After The Deadline, as delivered via Jetpack
If you’re a WordPress Plugin developer, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of needing to maintain one of your plugins across multiple versions of WordPress. Until recently, I maintained the IntenseDebate plugin for versions 2.5 and up of WordPress, including versions 2.6 of WPMU and up. That’s a lot of versions (10 actually, not counting minor revisions). Here are some tips I picked up/developed to try to make my life a little easier along the way.
Read the rest of this post…
One thing that’s always bugged me in writing Posts/Pages content within WordPress is that you have to cater for different presentation possibilities. If you’re into web-standards, then that makes life difficult for things like headings (h1, h2, etc), when a block of content is presented in different contexts.
Ideally, your page should be structured with an h1 tag around the title of the most important concept on the page, an h2 around a sub-topic/concept, etc. On your home page, the h1 usually ends up going around your logo/site title, since that’s the over-arching concept. Then under that, you might have a listing of recent posts. Each of those posts should probably have their titles in an h2. No problem so far, right? You just set up your template like that and you’re good to go. Read the rest of this post…
$ svn up
Now running WordPress 3.0. This is going to be a game changer.
I’m now running the development version/alpha of WordPress 3.0 on this blog so that I can get a feel for any changes (and fix any bugs!) before the official release. So far so good, the upgrade was clean and nothing significant is broken. This release is going to be awesome!
