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.

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

Table Prefixes

Did you know that WordPress supports to use of a different table prefix for each installation? You may not really have noticed but it’s even an option in the wizard-style installer if you don’t manually configure your wp-config.php file during setup. This means that you can modify the names of the tables used for a specific installation of WordPress to avoid clashing with other tables that may already exist within your database. It also means that you can easily run multiple copies of WordPress from a single database by using a different table prefix on each install. I just use a different prefix for each major version of WordPress (wp28_, wp29_, wp30_) and then I can install them all in a single database and have easy access to everything.

For the sake of my own sanity, I opted to install WPMU in different databases (named according to the version I was installing) since it creates lots of tables.

Multiple Installs

Apart from the table prefixes trick, I like to use the version of the install as the name of the blog (“WordPress 2.9″) so that I always know what I’m looking at. I’ll set all of the admin accounts to the same details, and then import the same set of test content (via a WordPress Export/Import). That gives me a consistent environment to work from.

Symlinks

So now you have a bunch of different installations of WordPress, all using the same database (although different tables). You need to get your code in place so that you can test it on each version. One option would be to put a copy of your plugin in each wp-content/plugins directory, but then that quickly gets out of control if you make changes to any of them while you’re debugging/developing. A better option is to put your code in one place, then symlink it into location in all of your installs. I use something like this:

ln -ns ../../../dev/pluginname pluginname

(executed from within the wp-content/plugins directory of each install, and assuming a directory called dev/pluginname containing the plugin, at the same top level as all of your installations). This links wp-content/plugins/pluginname from each install back to the same set of code, and allows you to modify it in any of them and have that change be reflected in them all.

Capability Checks

Rather than checking for a specific version of WordPress (which is actually easy to do), I usually prefer to test for specific functionality. For example, to see if you can use the WP_Http() API (introduced back in WP 2.7), you could do something like this:

if ( function_exists( 'wp_remote_get' ) ) {
    // Can use WP_Http()
}

If you really want to check for a version of WordPress, then you probably want something like this (note that the $wpmu_version check in this case is to make sure we’re NOT using WPMU). You might need to declare it as global if you’re doing this within a function:

if ( version_compare( get_bloginfo( 'version' ), '2.7', '<' ) && empty( $wpmu_version ) ) {
    // do stuff
}

Tracking Major Changes

The other big issue is keeping track of what changes from version to version and how that might affect your plugins. Probably the easiest way to at least get a cursory glance at this is using the announcement pages on the Codex. For example, here is the announcement page for Version 3.0. If you need more detail, you can also try getting a report from Trac, like this one which covers everything in 3.0. Combining these, you can come up with a bit of a list of things that are likely to affect your plugin, depending on exactly what it does. As usual, the more you stick to the documented APIs, the less likely that your plugin will break over time. I personally use this to find new/better ways of doing things and harnessing new features that are introduced more than anything else.

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.

In the content of each post however, this means that you’re down to an h3 if you have sub-sections within the post. No problem, just use that markup and everything’s golden. Until you view a single-post/page and then your structure doesn’t really make sense any more. Ideally, on these pages, the title of the post would be an h1 and those h3s would now be h2s. What to do?

Easy, drop the following code into your functions.php file (within your theme, or I guess you could turn it into a plugin if you were into that) and it will dynamically adjust your headings for your homepage (and archives, tag pages, etc).

function beaus_dynamic_headings( $content ) {
 if ( is_singular() )
 return $content;

 $content = str_replace( array( '<h5', '</h5>' ), array( '<h6', '</h6>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h4', '</h4>' ), array( '<h5', '</h5>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h3', '</h3>' ), array( '<h4', '</h4>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h2', '</h2>' ), array( '<h3', '</h3>' ), $content );
 return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'beaus_dynamic_headings' );

So when you’re writing a post, write to target a single-page view, where the title of the post/page itself is h1, and your structure within the post should start from there. The code above will take care of fixing it up for the homepage, archives etc (bumping all heading tags “down” one level).

Now running WordPress 3.0. This is going to be a game changer.

I'll be at WordCamp SF, 2010

WordCamp Indonesia

Below are the slides and notes from my presentation, which covered the current state of WordPress, what’s coming up in the next release and some of the related projects. You can also get the slides on SlideShare. Click the link below the slides to expand my full outline/notes.

I’d also like to send out a special thanks to the organizers who treated me to a tasty, spicy, Indonesian dinner at a restaurant after WordCamp. I know you were all exhausted from keeping everything running so smoothly during the day (I know I was tired, and all I had to do was get up and speak for a little while!), so I appreciate you shuttling me around and showing me some of Jakarta. Here are a few of the pictures I took during my trip, you can see the rest on Flickr.

I’m in here for another day or two, so I’m catching up with an old friend from Australia, getting a bit of work done, then jumping on a plane back to San Francisco.

In the last few days, I’ve put together a quick site to try to help introduce people to the BackPress project. From the site:

BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.

So effectively, BackPress takes all of the best core functionality (on a code level) from WordPress and bbPress, and makes it available to you and your next PHP-based web application/project. By using BackPress in your projects, you are then able to use most of the code you’ve come to rely on while working on WordPress-based projects, such as $wpdb, trailingslashit(), make_clickable(), __(), wp_remote_fopen() and more. The site includes some details on how to use BackPress in your project, and has the beginnings of a collection of documentation covering the main parts of the code library.

I’m personally really excited about this because I think BackPress has huge potential as a library for other folks and other projects. It allows them to benefit from the lessons learned through years (and thousands of “man-hours” worth of development) on the WordPress and bbPress projects. I’m using it as the core of my HTFS project (not released yet), and I know that some other projects are starting to use it as well. As a developer who has spent a lot of time in “WordPress land”, it makes life so much easier to be able to continue using a lot of the design patterns and techniques that I’ve become accustomed to.

Check it out, and please let me know what else we could get on the site, what needs more documentation etc!

If you’re anywhere near Indonesia, book your tickets around January 30, 2010 and come and chat about WordPress with a bunch of like-minded folks! Michael Koenig (a fellow Automattician) will be joining me, and spreading the love about IntenseDebate (which is a major sponsor of WordCamp ID).

Indeed.

According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.

The basic idea here is that WordPress has a built in system for storing bookmarks (Links), so why not use it? I like Delicious, and I like the plugins and whatnot that pull its content into my browser, but not necessarily enough to give them all my data and not retain any control over it. So how about this:

• Add a new taxonomy, let’s call it link_tags,
• Add an entry box to the Add New Link page, allowing you to enter tags when you create a new Link (don’t forget to use some sexy AJAX suggestions for previously used tags to help control your vocabulary)
• Select a specific Category for all your links, let’s say “Bookmarks”
• Build a simple page that looks something like this screenshot of the Delicious one, and include a bookmarklet so that you can open it in a new window and post to your new link-system just as easily as using Delicious.
• When you use that UI, have it automatically select your Bookmarks category (behind the scenes) and also cross-post into your Delicious account, which you’ve pre-authorized somewhere else.

Voilà, you now have all your links stored in your WordPress installation, so you control the data, and you also have them stored in Delicious, so you can make use of the cool things like the Firefox plugin, which pulls those links directly into your browser.

For bonus points, it would be absolutely awesome to also include an Importer (Tools > Import > Delicious Links) that would suck all your existing Delicious links into this new system, so that you weren’t starting from scratch.

Any taker?

My first appearance was to give a 5 minute lighting-style introduction/demo to the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin. Since we thought internet access might be a problem, and since I hate doing “live” demonstrations, I pre-recorded a screencast (using iShowU for Mac) running through all the features, then just talked over the top. Here is the video, and you can click the link below the video to get the notes I used while speaking. This same presentation was given on Sunday during the Ignite-style talks.

After lunch, I was involved in a Google Summer of Code round-table discussion, where we talked about what the SoC was, how WordPress was involved, and some of the things that both mentors and students learned during the experience. We were also trying to explore what WordPress as an organization could do in the future to improve the experience for everyone involved, and also how we could potentially include more mentoring as part of the “normal” operations of the community. Daryl Koopersmith (the student I mentored), Justin Shreve (Search API student), Jane Wells (WordPress GSoC program admin) and Mark Jaquith (another mentor) were all there, and we had a few other folks who came along to learn about GSoC and the projects that came out of it. I’m personally super excited to see Daryl’s project, Elastic, mature and get into the wild a bit more.

Finally, during the last timeslot of the day, I presented a new talk called “Advanced WordPress Development Environments” (boring title, pretty technical information). The idea of this was to present some of the perhaps more advanced development techniques, tips and tricks that have become a part of my everyday development work over the past 13 years that I’ve been working on the web. Again, my notes are available via the link below the video.

I want to say a huge thank you to Jane and Steve (the organizers), to all of the sponsors, the other speaks, and of course to all of the attendees. WCNYC just rocketed to the top of my list of coolest WordCamps thus far

I was at BizTechDay on Friday afternoon at the WordPress table, after which Raanan was kind enough to drop me off down in Mountain View at the Wild Palms Hotel, where everyone was staying for the event. That night there was food provided and some drinks, general mingling/networking etc. The next morning we were all shuttled over to the GooglePlex (although I got a ride with the guys from TYPO3, thanks!) where we could grab breakfast, and up to the main room where we started the process of figuring out a schedule for the next day and a half. People suggested topics on large sheets of paper and each mentor had 8 stickers which were used to vote on sessions to indicate their relative popularity, and thus which room they should use.

Once sessions were decided, we scheduled them in on a giant grid which was provided, and then we could break out and start attending sessions which interested us. I tried to go to something in every time slot, and here are a few general notes from the 3 most interesting sessions I attended:

• WordPress has a relatively bad reputation for security, particularly amongst open source folks (who admittedly tend to have a more heavy-handed view of those sorts of things)
• A few people (specifically Jake Applebaum of Tor and Dan Collis-Puro of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society) thought that specifically doing security-only patches for WordPress, and doing them for “old” versions would be a way to increase the number of users who applied them
• Doing security-only patches would also potentially allow us to do fully-automated core updates.
• Getting designers involved in open source projects is really difficult
• Breaking down small, bite-sized projects is a better way to get designers involved (one small module, one form, *something*)
• Designers need to be involved from the ground up where possible. It helps build respect and trust, and it means they understand what they’re designing better, so they avoid coming across as “coming down from on high” with their opinions
• All the major CMSs (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla,TYPO3,  even MediaWiki to an extent) are coalescing around some similar problems/approaches, and are generally becoming application “frameworks” with a “default mode”.
• There is a LOT of potential to pool/combine development skills across these platforms to build common, core libraries (for things like Open ID, OAuth, Feed parsing, etc) where it makes sense
• There’s a lot to be learned from each other, yet we all felt like there was a culture of not wanting to publicly acknowledge/interact with each other for some reason (everyone is a zealot?)
• Below is a photo of the board of notes from a discussion on why the number of women involved in open source projects is so low:

For more detailed notes on all sessions, you can visit the mentor summit wiki.

All in all it was a great event, and I met some really cool people who I hope to maintain some connection with over time. I’m also hoping that perhaps from this we can start some sort of cross-pollination of ideas (and maybe even code) between some of the popular CMSs where it makes sense, and perhaps implement the idea of security-only patches in WordPress. We’ll see what happens.

I’ll keep you posted on what I’ll be talking about and when I’ll be on, but I’ll be there all weekend, so if you see me, grab me and say Hi!

Blogie and Chattee (and Blogie’s brother) picked me up from the airport and then once I was checked into my hotel, took me out to get some lunch and hang out for a bit. There was a pretty impressive thunderstorm with some heavy rain in the afternoon which was a bit of a treat since the weather in SF is normally so mild I took a nap in the afternoon and then we went out again for some dinner and drinks with some of the organizers and their friends. We ate at an Italian restaurant at the mall near my hotel, where I also met Regnard from AIM. When we were done with dinner (and a few pitchers of their home-brew beer), we headed to a beer-bar claiming to have 100 beers. My jetlag was kicking in so I could only manage 1 more beer before I was falling asleep in my seat.

When I got back to the hotel, I a bit of drama with my laptop — I had left it plugged in, but of course when you leave the room the power goes out. I guess the laptop didn’t realize it was unplugged, so it drained my battery to the point that it was non-responsive when the adapter was plugged in. Apparently it didn’t even have enough power to light up the small light on the plug to say it was charging. Decided there was nothing to do, so I’d deal with it the next morning.

The next day I went straight to the Mac store which I had luckily noticed the night before, right across the mall from the restaurant we ate at (what are the chances?). They didn’t open until 11, so I went to hunt down some breakfast. At a place called FlapJacks, I bumped into Regnard again, along with the 2 guys (Seth and Gen) who were attending WordCamp from Mozilla. After chatting with them for a while I headed back to my room to hang out and read for a while, freaking out about my laptop still.

11am rolled around eventually and I went to the Mac store… where I was quite embarrassed when one of the support people there plugged it in and it promptly started charging up like normal. He ran some quick diagnostics that said the battery and adapter were both fine, so I charged it a bit more there, then took it back to the hotel to keep charging it up. Crisis averted. Grabbed a juice blend/smoothie to keep me going, and got some work done improving my slides for Saturday’s presentation/talk.

That afternoon I gave an interview at AIM (Asian Institute of Management, the venue of WordCamp) which was videoed (was not expecting that!), adn then met some of the volunteers and checked out the actual venue, all of which looked good. After that we had some halo-halo (Philippines shaved ice + “other stuff” drink) which was very tasty. I ended up spending the rest of the day having dinner in my room and working on my presentation (since my laptop drama earlier in the day prevented me from doing it then).

The next morning I walked to the venue for WordCamp and things got started. They were very well organized and people were excited. My talk was up first and I think it went reasonably well. The way the laptop/projector was set up meant that it wasn’t easy to see my notes, so I just winged it, based on my slides. I did a full intro to WordPress, WPMU, bbPress, BuddyPress, BackPress and GlotPress. Throughout the day (and especially at the end), I took photos with people, listened to some of the other talks and drank copious amounts of coffee to try to stay awake. At the end of the day we had a panel with all the speakers on stage and answered questions from the audience.

That night, Seth, Gen and I joined all the volunteers and organizers out for dinner at a restaurant called WhistleStop. The entire time I had been there, Chattee had been trying to convince me to eat balut, and tonight was the last chance. Seth was all for it, so we ended up doing this:

You can see some more of my photos over on Flickr.

I’m planning on posting a more detailed entry covering my trip here, but in the meantime I wanted to get my slides up here so that I could point people to them immediately. It’s embedded below so please check it out, it’s an extended version of the presentation from last weekend at WordCamp LA.

Topics covered include:

• WordPress
• WordPress MU
• bbPress
• BuddyPress
• BackPress

UPDATE: The video from this talk has been posted at WordPress.tv, so here it is:

I’ll be giving my talk called “Meet the Family”, which is an introduction to some of the other WordPress-related projects going on which you may not have heard about. I will have just given it (for the first time) the weekend before at WordCamp LA, so hopefully I’ll be able to improve it based on feedback from that event!

I will be there, not just because it’s going to be a really interesting day (I love WordCamps), but because I’m honored to actually be speaking at this event!

My talk is called Meet The Family and will give you an introduction to some of the WordPress-related projects which sometimes don’t get enough love. I’ll focus on:

• WordPress µ (WPMU): The multi-user version of WordPress that powers sites like WordPress.com
• bbPress: bulletin board/online forum system that uses a lot of common code/approaches to WordPress, and can use SSO
• BuddyPress: social-networking in a box. A drop-in framework for turning WPMU into a social network
• BackPress: a collection of code libraries used in WordPress which are useful for other projects (e.g. bbPress)

Hopefully I’ll be scheduled in the morning because I think it’ll provide a good “mental framework” for people to get an idea of what’s going on with some of the technologies that are likely to be discussed throughout the day.

I’m looking forward to getting some feedback on this talk as well, so please feel free to tag comments on Twitter with #mtf or @beaulebens them to me. You should also use the main tag for the event, which is #WordCampLA. Watch our for any tweets containing it, search Flickr for photos, etc to keep on top of things. You can also leave comments below of course.

See you all there!