An upcoming free Stanford HCI (human computer interaction) course coming up:
https://www.coursera.org/course/hci
(Hat tip: @DanielBachhuber.)
Updates from Matt Mullenweg Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Matt Mullenweg
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Matt Mullenweg
You might notice that this P2 has gotten a big head. All of the Make P2s have actually, and like the rug in the Big Lebowski we think it really ties the room together.
The Get Involved tab has been added, docs have been moved under support, home has been hidden. This isn’t ideal — we’d eventually like to move to more of a verb-oriented navigation system — but it is better than everything under Make being its own island and not really linked to or from the main WP.org side, or to each other. Hopefully it will also let more folks know about how to get involved (I added a link to the Make Core Handbook to the top sidebar widget.)
I’ll be talking more about some of the improvements to WP.org tomorrow at 11am PST and you can still get streaming tickets if you’d like to tune in: http://2012.sf.wordcamp.org/tickets/
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Alex Mills (Viper007Bond)
This is awesome.
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George Mamadashvili
Great. Looking forward to “State of The Word”.
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Andrea Rennick
Noticed it earlier, went “Whoa.” Cool beans.
It does tie the room together…
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Offereins
Cool. Only the parent page ‘Get Involved’ is missing the integrated markup.
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Otto
Yeah, working on that later today. It’s not a P2 theme there, so need to make a new child theme for it.
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Brandon Dove
Like Donnie, “I was bowling.” I miss these kind of things sometimes because I digest with RSS, so thanks for pointing it out. This is awesome.
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Chuck Reynolds
nice man
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Scott Kingsley Clark
This is absolutely one of the best ways to bring people into the project to contribute! Awesome job team!
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Dominik Schilling (ocean90)
http://profiles.wordpress.org/ocean90 still has the old nav bar.
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Otto
Not anymore.
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Jacob Guite-St-Pierre
http://make.wordpress.org is using the wrong theme
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Andrew Nacin
We’ll get there!
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Dominik Schilling (ocean90)
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Jorge Bernal
Where is the “Like” button here?
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Matt Mullenweg
Looking for a lead
The Core Contributor Handbook is live here, and has a lot of great content from a number of contributors already:
http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/
What we’re looking for is someone to “own” the CCH and be responsible for:
- Expanding and editing it, getting feedback from devs.
- Walking people through it to get ideas on how to improve it (and get people involved with WP!).
- Soliciting other contributors (don’t want a one-person show) and keeping an eye on all the changes.
- Figure out a cool way to package and print the handbook.
Let me know if you’re interested in taking on this role, a comment on this post is fine.
This also reminds me — it would be great to be able to see a feed of changes on a site, like edits to a page. Anyone have a favorite plugin there?
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dremeda
Good stuff, Matt. I would like to contribute here. Whoever ends up owning it, you have your first contributor/volunteer.
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Ben Tremblay
Detail: that URL was not clickable in EMail. ThunderBird is pretty well behaved with that sorta thing.
Odd it wasn’t a live link.
Links in header and footer were just fine. -
dllh
Can you clarify what level of involvement with the community the lead for this should have had to date? For example, I’ve gotten a few patches in here and there but don’t know that I’m sufficiently familiar with all the things to be a useful lead on something like this. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that others who’re interested in pitching in have similar feelings. Are you hoping to land somebody who already has a solid insider view of things or are you after a fresh perspective?
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Matt Mullenweg
I don’t think being super-involved in core is necessary, in fact it’s probably better to have a beginners mind with regard to much of this. However you’ll want to run things by folks with more experience just to make sure you’re leading people on the right track.
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Emil Uzelac
Good stuff indeed
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Tom Auger
Boy oh boy, this is such an important piece of the WordPress puzzle! My own journey (still in its infancy) in becoming a useful contributor has been fraught with good intentions and big learning curves. If I had more experience I’d definitely volunteer to shepherd this thing into a true roadmap for the would-be contributor.
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Mike Bijon
Hi Matt, I’d like to be considered for this position too. I’m a 1-time core contributor and have worked with the PDX WP Meetup and Codex lately. More details, http://www.mbijon.com/about-mike-bijon/. Now that I’m not a full-time developer at work, and take on a lot more planning & PMing tasks, I think I could be a lot more productive with this than I’ve been with trying to make rare, quiet coding windows.
Also, for tracking changes to the CCH:
Audit Trail has most of what you need, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/audit-trail/, but would have to be turned into a feed. Adding some open diff tools could help make it more readable, http://www.raymondhill.net/blog/?p=441, or https://github.com/austincheney/Pretty-Diff. Although what would be interesting is to build a way to deploy all content via a git or Github repo, http://drupal.org/project/content_staging (which would also solve a lot of commercial users’ Dev > Production deploy problems). -
Japh
Hey Matt, the Core Contributor Handbook is already an excellent resource, and I’d love to see it grow even further.
I would also like more information about what your expectations are for this role. Specifically, how much experience with core contribution do you feel is necessary? How much time per week do you expect this role will require?
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Matt Mullenweg
Answered the experience question above. As for time, I would plan for 10 hours a week as a good baseline, as with any serious volunteer commitment across WordPress.
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Siobhan
Hi Matt – I’d love to help out with this. I was looking at it before and wondering if you needed someone to help out.
I’m a documentation specialist (http://wordsforwp.com) and I spend a lot of time communicating with devs and translating what they say into beginner speak. I build a lot of documentation projects from the ground up, and work with a lot of developers on similar projects to this, so it’s right up my street. I’d be more than happy to get involved. My time is a little limited over the next few weeks but as of the end of August I have 10 hours per week for sure.
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Andrea Rennick
I’d vouch for Siobhan having the chops to take the lead on this.
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Marcus
same
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masonjames
+1
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Azizur Rahman
Hi Matt, count me in to be one of the volunteer. I don’t think I can do 10 hours at the moment to take a lead, due to my other volunteering commitment at the moment. I am happy to be supporting whoever ends up taking the lead.
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Beau Lebens
If anyone is planning on coming to the Dev Day for WCSF, I plan on making contributions to the CCH part of the action for the day.
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Devin Reams
Great! I’ll be sure to stop by and lend a hand…
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Chris Olbekson
I would love to help where ever possible on this. I think the perfect plugin to help manage the project is Edit Flow http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/edit-flow/. I’m not sure if it has a feed but the notifications and editorial comments will be very helpful.
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Doug Provencio
I added a section called Suggestions, for people to add suggestions about Missing Sections, Style and Navigations, and Sections still needing major work.
Do we want to break off a list of which pages still need work (and who’s working on them) onto its own page?
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Matt Mullenweg
MT has given the typography on WordPress.org a refresh to bring it more in line with our sans-serif (instead of Lucida) approach in the WP dashboard, and also tightened up the vertical space the sub-heads were taking up on the page. Helvetica / Arial is a bit tougher than Lucida at smaller pixel sizes, so drop a comment here if you notice anything funky on the site.
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Jane Wells
For newer contributors who don’t know, MT = Matt Thomas.
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Emil
Also nicer on mobile devices as well. Nice guys!
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Alex Mills
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Emil
so clean
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Jane Wells
The new profiles layout is a project Chelsea Otakan and I did a while back, but we didn’t get it coded up until this week when Otto was in town and pitched in. This is a first step toward integrating more activity stream stuff like attending WordCamps, meetups, etc.
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Dominik
Seems like the profiles doesn’t have sans-serif yet?
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lite3
MT is an hosting.?
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Mika Epstein (Ipstenu)
Much much love for the forum level up
Older people + folks with terrible vision comment. The fonts are a smidge too small on the forums. If #forumlist has a fontsize of 12px (instead of 11) and maybe #forumlist a to 13px, it’s just a bit easier on the eyes
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jb510
+1 – it’s really really tiny on my hi-res MBP’s screen.
Also anyone know why the Meetups forum reports -73 (negative 73) topics?
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Mika Epstein (Ipstenu)
It needs a re-count in bbPress. It’s from all the support tickets people posted in there that we had to move out, or the spam we deleted.
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sabreuse
Am I seeing things, or have the too-small fonts in the forum been tweaked some time today? Anyway, much better, now, and I really like the changes overall!
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Chris Van Patten
I thought something looked different… really loving all the tweaks to wordpress.org this week. Looking great!
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Jeffro
typography was one of the reasons you got involved with B2. All these years later and you’re still tough on creating the best typography.
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Ben Huson
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Ben Huson
Whoops, meant to post that in the previous post above plugin headers… duh
Another nice enhancement might be to add gravatars or something on the plugin author pages too – just a suggestion.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/profile/husobj-
Dominik
I think it would be better to combine both profiles.
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Mert Yazicioglu
I think user profiles on WP Profiles are going to be used across the site, hence they are redesigning it. If that’s not the current plan, it most definitely should be
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Michael (alchymyth)
I am missing the background color behind codes when they are posted inline, which makes them harder to recognize.
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Jonathan
Looking great to me, I’m a big fan of the update!
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Chelsea Otakan
humungous yay!
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Matt Mullenweg
Been giving a lot of thought to how to give plugin authors more control over their plugin pages. In WordPress custom headers have been hugely beneficial in people’s ability to make a theme their own without having to be a designer. (And designers can make them really sing.)
As an experiment we’ve turned on custom headers for the plugin directory. If you’d like to try out this feature:
- Make a 772×250 pixel jpeg or png. (No animated GIFs. )
- Check it in to your plugin’s SVN directory with the path
assets/banner-772x250.(jpg|png). Note that theassetsdirectory is added to your plugin’s root directory, not trunk. - On the next plugin directory refresh (every 15 minutes or so) you should see your image start showing up on the page.
For an example of this in action, check out Hello Dolly, natch. Our goal is to mainly see how people use them, so if you try this out leave comment below with a link to your plugin!
Final note: this is just an experiment, and there is a 98.254% chance the dimensions, placement, and text overlay for this header will change in the future, or the idea might not work at all. But I think it’s a nice toe in the water for letting authors really make their plugin pages shine.
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Rev. Voodoo
Hey, that looks pretty darn good! Definitely give folks a little opportunity for creativity! (You sure you don’t want animation?)
- Make a 772×250 pixel jpeg or png. (No animated GIFs.
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Matt
Put in the flying bee for bbPress.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress/-
John James Jacoby
My favorite!
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Daryl Koopersmith
Debug Bar is showing off some new UI: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/debug-bar/
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John James Jacoby
Ooooooo
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Daryl Koopersmith
You can preview a banner by adding
?banner_url=A_LINK_TO_YOUR_IMAGEto your plugin URL.-
redwall_hp
Imaging the possibilities for pranks! http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/?banner_url=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FJvrGA.jpg
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Alex Mills
LMAO
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Matt
Yeah we’ll probably have to close that down at some point.
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Chuck Reynolds
okay that’s pretty funny. nice
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Cristopher Ocana
LMAO prank time XD
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redwall_hp
But it’s useful for testing. That’s right, for testing.
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DrewAPicture
For science.
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Otto
I’ve limited this so that only contributors to a plugin can use the banner_url trick to preview images. For science. You monster.
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Mike Schinkel
This is excellent news!
I think this will result in more companies being interested in maintaining their plugins because they will be able to control their branding and thus it will seem less like just a technical thing to them.
Thanks Matt, Koop and the rest of the team who are making this happen; you made my day!
P.S. No .GIF?
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redwall_hp
If GIFs were allowed, they would have to screen for animated ones. I don’t think we want dancing Rick Astleys or flaming skulls in the plugin repository. Or do we?
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Alex Mills
Plus the GIF format just plain sucks. PNG is the way to go.
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redwall_hp
Of course. The animation issue is just icing on the cake.
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Mike Schinkel
@redwall_hp – Ah, good point, I was thinking more about how some images files can be much smaller in GIF vs. PNG, and some images are not a good fit for JPG. But the animation issue does, mixing with your metaphors put the nail in that coffin.
@Alex Mills: GIF may suck, but JPG is not good for simple raster images and PNG files are typically 2.5 times larges in size than an equivalent GIF files. For a larger image like 772×250, especially where transparency is not really needed, PNG is actually the one that sucks when compared to GIF.
But @redwall_hp had a good point about animations and that does trump image size IMO.
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Matt
FWIW I find PNG-8 files (vs PNG-24) to usually be the same size or smaller than GIFs. Also using a tool like pngcrush or pngslim or http://punypng.com/ gets them even smaller.
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mikeschinkel
Matt: I wasn’t familiar with PNG-8 vs. PNG-24, thanks!
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Otto
If you’re on Windows, use IrfanView (free) with the PNGOUT plugin option (also free) to produce incredibly tiny PNG images.
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Scott Cariss
15 mins is so long when you are waiting… Here is mine waiting for the plugin refresh: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-file-monitor-plus/?banner_url=http%3A%2F%2Fplugins.svn.wordpress.org%2Fwordpress-file-monitor-plus%2Fassets%2Fbanner-772×250.png
I’m not a designer by no means but that doesn’t look too bad for a first attempt if I don’t say so myself
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Matt
I know! Been giving some thought to how we can make that faster.
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Mark Jaquith
That should be getting faster soon. I want the update process to run continuously, so it’s as fast as possible.
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Andrew Nacin
There’s a systems request in speed it up, but it’ll take a bit of work. Soon, I hope.
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miyoshi
How about this
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/-
Matt
Love it!
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JLeuze
Cool, I like the updated headers, glad to see the plugin directory getting some love!
I added a banner I doodled up to my plugin Meteor Slides: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/meteor-slides/
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Matt
WP Candy noted these:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mini-loops/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-facebook-connect/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-google-connect/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-twitter-connect/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-snarky/-
redwall_hp
I just updated Tweetable: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetable/
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James Laws
Love the changes:
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Rev. Voodoo
Very tastefully done! That’s a good’n!
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Todd Halfpenny
This is a fab idea… I love it.
Just added a quickie to Widgets on Pages http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets-on-pages/ -
Adam W. Warner
I’m a big fan of this for the various reasons already stated about better branding, but my only complaint would be to possibly restrict the height a bit more. As an avid WP user, I would like to see the description a bit more front and center. It gets pushed down quite a bit for my taste.
…but that’s semantics;)
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Matt
We also have 88 vertical pixels being taken up by the mostly-useless plugin directory header and login area that could be tightened up.
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Sergej Müller
Nice one. Next one
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cachify/ -
Ofer Wald
Ok, mine should be up soon at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/transposh-translation-filter-for-wordpress/
Any chances to move the screenshots to a similar directory so that the plugin download will be a little less bloaty?-
Mark Jaquith
We’re considering just dropping the screenshots from the generated zip files. Obviously that’ll mean that anyone who hotlinks those screenshots from within the plugin will have to change tactics, but it might be worth it to slim down the size of plugin zips.
What do you think?
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John Blackbourn
+1. There’s no need for screenshots to be in the zip file. The new banner in the assets directory may as well be left out too to keep it slim.
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Ofer Wald
You have my vote on dropping those as soon as you can, and maybe even add some sort of gallery to the plugin page if its worked on. Will be more than happy to assist (given a point of contact)
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Tammy Hart
+1. This would make a lot of sense.
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Mika Epstein (Ipstenu)
+1 as well. Yes. That would be awesome.
(Bad hotlinkers, no cookies)
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Aaron D. Campbell
+1 – I like it.
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James Laws
+1 for me as well.
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Matt
For back compat we can continue to support (and include in zip) screenshots in main part of a plugin’s repo, but there’s no reason we couldn’t allow people to move things to the assets directory as a replacement. (Haven’t thought about versions, though, maybe we can ignore it.)
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Joost de Valk
+1 here. Anything we can do to make the downloads smaller so fewer issues occur is nice.
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Mark Jaquith
It’s not that many plugins that hotlink their own screenshot files. Here’s the list. We could probably notify them directly of an upcoming change. Or heck, just whitelist them.
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Joost de Valk
BTW would that also mean being able to do the screenshots in something like a fancybox / thickbox / colorbox? I’ve always thought they look a bit weird…
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mikeschinkel
+1
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Ryan Hellyer
+1 Sounds like a sensible approach.
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Andrew Nacin
Yeah, I’m thinking we support /assets/ for screenshots. Can make it backwards compatible easily. Thinking versions aren’t necessary as they’re only shown on the plugins page (and wouldn’t be included in the zip at that point). Only someone viewing an old version’s readme.txt and trying to match the numbers up would pose any sort of a change in the user experience.
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Andrew Ensley
+1. Absolutely agree. I’ve had the removal of screenshots from the .zip files on my wishlist for a long time.
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camu
+1!
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Ian Dunn
+1. Move them to the /assets dir.
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Marcin
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Mert Yazicioglu
Great idea, it looks great!
Also, is there any chance of replacing the Downloads Per Day graph with a JS-based one?
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Matt
Yeah that’s on our list as well.
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Mark Jaquith
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Matt
You’re on fire!
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Hugo Baeta
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Jeremy Herve
Well, isn’t this awesome? I already liked the changes that you rolled out yesterday, it is good to see the plugin repo getting sexier!
I took the opportunity to update my Facebook apps plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-facebook-applications/
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matt mcinvale
that is awesome! now i need to find something equally as awesome to use for my header images.
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David Hollander
It’s like Christmas for plugin developers… Thanks Matt! I love this…
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David Hollander
Here’s for a few of my other plugins I just did:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-field-bulk-editor/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reliable-twitter/
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Duane Storey
Nice change!
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Joost de Valk
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Tammy Hart
Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’ve committed my jpg to my new assets folder, but it’s not working. When i download the image from the browser, it says it’s corrupt. http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/recipress/assets/
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Mark Jaquith
You can’t hotlink to images in plugins.svn.wordpress.org. It
301s you. Give it 15 minutes to push to the site. -
Mark Jaquith
It’s up now. Looks really nice! http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recipress/
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Joost de Valk
Awesomeness indeed
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Tammy Hart
great! thanks
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Mark Jaquith
Here’s a fun one. Contains the complete usage instructions for the plugin right in the banner, and an example of what it looks like. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-logo/
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Joost de Valk
Somehow I think most of my plugins will never be that easy to make headers for
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jb510
I trust Fredrick is already hard at work on a banner like this for W3TC, right?
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Chris Hurst
I just started messing with this a little bit, took me a few minutes to figure out how to add the assets to the SVN, but I got it working eventually. Here is a link to a few more tips I learned in the process and a link to my plugin…
http://mywebsiteadvisor.com/2011/12/update-your-wordpress-plugin-header-image/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/transparent-image-watermark-plugin/ -
John James Jacoby
Testing ideas with BuddyPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress/
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David Hollander
Very cool. I like how you extended the title box for the icon.
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Tammy Hart
ooo, nice move on the icon hack. “in a”, has too much spacing. **2cents
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Ray
Stole your idea, JJJ!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-followers/
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Mert Yazicioglu
Just put something simple for now: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-move/
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The Frosty
Got mine up! http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-login/
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Mika Epstein (Ipstenu)
This is the only one I’m actually happy with
(the wrong size is being fixed…)-
Matt
Ha!
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sillyandrea
I need to Like this comment.
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Mika Epstein (Ipstenu)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-grins-ssl/ is decent at least
Though I noticed we DO NOT get svn commit emails for the assets folder. Interesting.
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Lee Willis
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Rahe
Simple image sizes have it !
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-image-sizes/ -
John Lamansky
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James Collins
Great idea guys!
You’ve given me a reason to once again pretend that I’m good at Photoshop: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/typekit-fonts-for-wordpress/-
Matt
No need to pretend, if you can crop you’re in.
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Ryan Hellyer
Awesome. Thanks Matt
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Matt
Thank Koop and Otto, they coded the whole thing up!
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Joe Dolson
That’s very cool – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-calendar/!
I’m thinking summer thoughts, if you can’t tell…
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Mike Jolley
Brilliant, the new font lets you fit in longer version numbers without wrapping too
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/woocommerce/ -
Matt
WooCommerce is looking good: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/woocommerce/
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Alex Mills
Just committed a banner but I didn’t get an e-mail notifying me of the change like I would if I were to make a change to some code in my plugin.
Is this intentional? A bug?
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John Blackbourn
Yeah I noticed that too
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Matt
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Stephen Cronin
Wow, this is great! But…
There will be some who cross the line with marketing / spamming etc. How long until someone sells a “Brought to you by ” ad in the banner image for their plugin? In some cases that might be acceptable (if the company sponsors the development of the plugin). But what happens when it’s a less than reputable ad (like an adult ad or promoting a non-GPL product)?
It would be good to have some up-front guidelines about what’s acceptable, *before* this becomes a problem.
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Matt
Anything that doesn’t follow the plugin directory guidelines will be removed or taken over, just like if they put something bad in the code.
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mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)
This is fantastic! Thanks Koop + Otto (+ Matt)! Now only if I had some design sense… here’s two down:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shrimptest/Not gonna lie; was pretty tempted to just make it this, though: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/?banner_url=http%3A%2F%2Fmitcho.com%2Fcode%2Fyarpp%2Fyarpp-matt.jpg
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Matt
HyperDB now has one — http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hyperdb/
It works for geeky plugins too!
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Daryl Koopersmith
This is one of my favorites. So classy.
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Matt
Thanks! Dave Martin made it.
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John Blackbourn
I thought I’d be cheeky and display a couple of testimonials from people who use my plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-switching/
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Millan
This is a good addition to repository. I have added banners to some of my plugins:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-star-rating/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-taxonomies-tools/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-press-tools/It would be nice to have more images added to assets, starting with icon image. Also, having screenshots in there would be a good change also.
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Vladimir Prelovac
Kudos for the holiday gift. Great idea!
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Jane Wells
Hi Vladimir. It doesn’t say anywhere on your plugin page that the plugin ties to a paid service. Can you please include this information on the description page? If you’re not sure where to put it, you could do what Akismet does on theirs with a PS. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
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Gajanan
Finally rtSocial is up after 15 minutes of long wait. Its looking awesome though
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rtsocial/ -
tuxlog
Great Christmas present, I just put one on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-monalisa and one on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-forecast. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a smaller banner in the plugins details thickbox in wordpress?
Thanks a lot from tuxlog
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Lee Rickler
Is it just me or is there now a character limit in the description text? I’ve checked a few plugins and they also seem to be cut off but in different points.
Sexy new header added:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/point-and-stare-cms-functions/-
Otto
Yes, because people don’t pay attention to the rules in the documentation.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about/readme.txt
“Here is a short description of the plugin. This should be no more than 150 characters. No markup here.”
That 150 characters is indeed a hard limit.
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MichaelH
Be great if the plugin author(s) info could be moved back up near the top of the plugin page to go along with this new branding. Thanks.
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David Decker
Great idea – you guys rock!
I’ve added my plugin “Genesis Layout Extras” to the list
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/genesis-layout-extras/…all my other plugins will follow in the next days
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Chuck Reynolds
Updated one of mine: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/brown-paper-tickets-api/
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Martin
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arena
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arena
i just posted a new one (fancy) on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mailpress/
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Chris Clayton
Beautiful addition to the plugin directory!
IMHO, This would also be really nice for the theme directory too Those tiny screenshot make my eyes twitch. :pOh, and while we are in the process of doing some amazing things to wp.org could we also turn on buddypress and bbpress theme preview support for wp-themes.com… It’s annoying not being able to preview the themes properly before installing.
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Marcel
It’s great! Many thanks for this feature.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lazyest-gallery/ -
Adam W. Warner
Hey all, I just wanted to show you a social sharing use case that this addition of plugin banners has allowed:)
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Adam W. Warner
I’m “trying” to keep up with all the plugins listed here and keep them added…it may be a few days before yours makes it into the list;)
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Helen Hou-Sandi
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Matthias
Awesome, love it!
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Bob G
Anybody else notice that some of their Screenshots disappeared? I only now show the first and last screenshot (of the seven screenshots).
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Frank P. Walentynowicz
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Tobias
WP-Table Reloaded now finally has got one, too!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-table-reloaded/ -
Lopo
Mine’s up: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicate-post/
I find it useful to show the new UI of my plugin, since I changed it recently to add new features. -
Ade
Great idea. Thanks to Koop and Otto!
And here’s one of mine: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dynamic-content-gallery-plugin/
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Dan Milward
Thanks Matt. This is pretty awesome!!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/ -
Tobias
A little seasonal touch to our banner! Happy Holidays.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/codepress-admin-columns/
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Kim
We got ours up. We’re loving it.
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Seth Carstens
After hours of agony, I somehow managed to get an “×” symbol in my image name instead of the “x” letter. Really weird, but finally I get to join the ranks of bannered plugin authors! Woot
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sm-debug-bar/ -
Ian Dunn
What I’d really like to see is the ability to create custom pages, beyond just Installation, FAQ, Screenshots, etc. My FAQ page (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/basic-google-maps-placemarks/faq/) is overloaded, and I’d like to be able to break it out into multiple pages.
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Todd Halfpenny
The spankingly new Lanyrd Splat Widget is also sporting a banner… still loving this!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lanyrd-splat-widget/ -
Ian Dunn
Another thing that’d be great would be if screenshots could link to the full-sized version. Right now the CSS is setting a max-width of 530px, which makes full-screen images hard to read. I create my screenshots at 960px (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/basic-google-maps-placemarks/screenshots/) so that people can see the full pages if they want, but right now they’d have to open or download the images individually in their browser to do that.
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Till
My email encoder’s one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/email-address-encoder/
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Gary Gale
Better late than never, but then again, it’s been the Christmas holidays … now WP Biographia has some banner love too … http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-biographia/
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Paul
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mingle-forum/
Thanks for giving us this ability, just a trial banner for now, but will update with more professional one later. -
Ron
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PerS
Had to add a header to three of mine
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lorem-shortcode/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/webputty/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-denyhost/ -
PerS
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bdoga
Love the new Header Image Functionality.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/browser-blocker/ -
jtsternberg
New plugin, new header! http://j.ustin.co/xguKiW
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Jason Witt
I just can’t get this to work. I created a folder in my plugin’s root directory name “assets”. In that folder I placed a image named “banner-772×250.png”. Committed the folder and the file, but it still doesn’t show up. If I browse the repo it shows there. What am I doing wrong?
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Claude
Great idea!
Here our banner: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/oa-social-login/
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ray
Had to try it… works great
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tf-faq/ -
Shibu Lijack
Love this new idea! Check out my plugin’s banner:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cj-custom-content/ -
Russell
Still gutted about animated gifs being disallowed. However, still a great addition to brighten the plugin repository – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/authorsure/ is my contribution
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Alex
Updated my plugin just to see the banner. A nice and simple feature for plugin devs.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/uber-login-logo/ -
WordPress Plugin Development
Nice implementation, quiet workable to me. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jetpack/
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Dawn @ JoeMobi
LOVE the banner idea!
Here’s ours: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/joemobi/ -
Wil
Is this feature still working?
I’ve added the /assets/banner-772×250.jpg to the SVN root for my plugin and it’s not showing on the plugin page.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/always-edit-in-html/
http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/always-edit-in-html/assets/It’s been checked in for 2 days now.
Any clues?
Wil.
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Andrew Nacin
Your name is using the character for “times” (×) rather than a simple “x”. Moving the file to the correct place should fix it.
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Wil
Sorted Andrew. Many thanks.
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Remy
This is a great feature! Just implemented mine: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/live-admin-navigation-filter/
Chelsea Otakan, 
Michael (alchymyth), and 14 others are discussing. 
Matt Mullenweg
One idea that grew from this thread about the number of developers whose jobs are supported by WordPress was that we should try to get more information about the WP developer community at large. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, that have never registered at WordPress.org, let alone been to a WordCamp or subscribed to this blog. It would be interesting to know about them, and also to give them an opportunity to participate in (and maybe even contribute to) the community.
I’m planning on including a link to a survey in the 3.2 announcement post. Because the email goes to end-users as well as developers, this is a great opportunity to capture some feedback from them too. We’ll open source the anonymized/aggregate raw response data and probably present some of the analysis at WordCamps too, like the upcoming State of the Word at WCSF.
The goals of the survey are:
- Gather data on the number and nature of companies and independent developers that use WordPress. (How many jobs has WP created?) Use this both for some static reporting, but also to track trends over time if we do a similar survey next year.
- Provide the community with a picture of the end users. What people and companies use WordPress, and how?
- Inspire greater participation in the community through awareness and the opportunity to receive more information.
It’s currently sitting in the wiki at http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Pjad/WordPress_User/Developer_Survey
What do you think? Any questions missing or ones we should re-word?
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Andrew Nacin
At a glance, looks great. Nice job, Pete!
Question 6 should probably have something like “contribute to WordPress.org (support, documentation, translations, theme reviews, etc.”
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Bronson Quick
Love this idea Matt. It’ll be great to get some more WordPress data.
The survey looks excellent. My only input would be to maybe add in Q10 ‘I’ve attended a WordPress Meetup’ as well.
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Andrew Ozz
Sounds good to me too. Perhaps would have added 1-2 more questions for developers, something along the lines of:
“What do you find most difficult/most frustrating while working with WordPress? Examples: not enough or outdated documentation, not enough comments in the source describing how particular code is working, etc.”.
And then:
“What do you find easiest/most satisfying when working with WordPress? Examples: huge amount of open source plugins implementing even the most unusual features, large enthusiastic community, excellent expandability/large amount of core hooks, etc.”.
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Paul Gregory
In Q10, there’s no ticky-box for Trac participation other than “submitted a WordPress bug report” which reads a bit too specifically as “first post”. Also, there should possibly be a ticky-box for contributions to “Extend > Ideas”.
It seems that there is no equivalent to Q10 for non-developers. I would have thought that end-users that get the notification email or read the 3.2 announcement are just as likely to attend a WordCamp or answer forum questions. I think you should split out the “engage with community” answers from Q10 and ask them of both types of people.
Matt Mullenweg
We have a checkbox in profiles where people can say “I make my living from WordPress.” As of today, 19,932 people have checked that box.
It’s a neat data point, but also makes me curious about more.
I’d love to have a yearly survey we promote when we do a release to ask questions of the WP community that we’d love answered, perhaps collecting (and refining) them on a Codex page throughout the year.
What would you ask?
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Aaron D. Campbell
For those (like me) that were having a hard time figuring out where that checkbox Matt was talking about was, it’s in your Support Forums profile NOT your profiles.wordpress.org profile.
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Alex M.
Here’s some I could think of:
- Type of job, i.e. independent contractor, work for a web development firm, work for a non-web dev corp but do their web stuff, etc.
- Amount of time they’ve made their living off WP (months/years)
- When did they start using WP (I guess sorta relates to previous question)
- Self-taught (reading code, Codex, etc.) or instructed in the ways of WP
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Andrea_R
How much time to they contribute to WordPress.org?
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Edward Caissie
Following the original checkbox questions with sub-questions:
Do you make your living from Theme Design
Do you make your living from Plugin Development -
Justin
I think a more in-depth survey, strictly WP-related, akin to what ALA does (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/survey2010) would be incredibly interesting. Not necessarily as in-depth, but more than just a single question.
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Philip Arthur Moore
1. “Have you ever attended a WordPress WordCamp event?”
2. “Do you develop for other CMSs or are you primarily a WordPress developer?” -
Jon Brown
While I think more granular data about how people make their living with WordPress would be cool, it’d also be interesting to hear what users do that are not making their living with WP.
Pro:- as a theme developer (PHP/MySQL/JS)
- as a plugin developer (PHP/MySQL/JS)
- as a site designer (UI/UX/Graphics)
- as a site operator (business)
- My site sells a product
- My site sells advertising
User
- I’ve modified an existing theme’s code
- I’ve written a theme from scratch
- I’ve written a plugin
- My site sells something
- My site sells advertising
Also maybe with 3/4 check boxes for novice, intermediate, expert…
Then random stuff
- The first version of WP I used was:
- My favorite thing about WordPress is:
- My least favorite thing about WordPress is:
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Alex M.
BBCode doesn’t work in WordPress.
I’ve fixed your comment for you by switching to HTML, well specifically by putting asterisks in front of each of your list items (we have an asterisk -> list feature here on WP.com).
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Mike Schinkel
Simple ask: “What do you do to make my living from WordPress?”
(Maybe add it next to the check box even?)
Dan Schultz
The folks at A list Apart do an annual Web Design Survey – http://aneventapart.com/webdesignsurvey/ . Partnering or consulting with them might be helpful, or you could just reviewing their past questions & results for some inspiration.
DanDare
Since I work on the Fraxion Payments plugin and we are starting to get a core user base you would have to include “selling my content” as one of the ways to earn a living. Right now we only have a bit over 100 locked posts/pages over about 8 web sites and around 200 readers with Fraxions to spend but it is growing. And you can include folks that make a buck out of google ads etc.
Matt Mullenweg
My suggestion on “content types” has gotten completely out of hand, with post styles, post templates…
To clarify, my idea for the completion of that “feature” would be a wiki page with a taxonomy name and a few slugs we all agreed on (aside, gallery, quote, video…) and reaching out to the folks doing tumblelog themes to ask them to support it, noticeably Woo but also 2010, P2, Typographic.
Basically a convention different themes can use so if you switch from one to another you don’t have to redo all your archives.
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Pascal Birchler
I agree with that. +100
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Erlend
Maybe you could come up with some convention names, along the lines of a11y and such, so that when I as a first time customer browse WooThemes and their features, I come by the “We abide by the following WP Conventions: hNh, b7…” and so on.
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Jeffikus
Good point. How and when can we at Woo help?
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Ryan Boren
Matt Mullenweg
When is comment moderation going to be not-broken?
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Peter Westwood
When you crack and fix it
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Matt
At least I got the first post on the 3.1 tag.
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Otto
Which comment moderation are you referring to?
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Peter Westwood
I suspect the 3.1-alpha one
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Peter Westwood
Indeed having just tried a little comment moderation using trunk I can see how suboptimal it is at present.
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scribu
What’s so broken about it? (N.B.: Comments on my blog are mostly closed.)
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Matt
Paging is broken, when you trash something it reloads the entire page with just one comment, it appears to be rewriting some comment info with others when you quick edit… basically the apocalypse.
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Alex M.
Akismet is at fault according to scribu. I have the same issue.
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Matt
Also check how some of the URLs now use post_ID= instead of p= for single-post moderation. There’s no good reason for any of those URLs to change, especially to something uglier (caps).
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scribu
It turns out both the trash thing and the post_ID are my fault. Will get to work on fixing them.
Matt Mullenweg
Based on some feedback from Lloyd I’ve tweaked the homepage intro again, particularly the last sentence.
I’m curious on some other people’s thoughts on the homepage — I think of our audience coming to the homepage as:
- people who have no idea what WP is
- people who know what WP is and want one
- users of WP who need help
- users of WP who want a new theme or plugins
- contributors to: support, docs, themes, plugins, core
Whew. What should be there for each of those people? How do we move folks from one level to another?
My second question would be: what should a download (really a getting started) page look like in the age of one-click installers? Do you know how many people (including my Mom) have an unpacked ZIP of WordPress on their desktop and say the thing is too hard?
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Nathan Rice
The “getting started” page is huge, to most users.
Think about it. In order to do it right, you have to …
1. register your domain name
2. sign up for hosting
3. point your domain name to your host
4. create the database, remember your db user/pass
5. download/install and FTP program
6. FTP into your server
7. download/extract/upload WordPressTHEN you open up a browser and start the install process, upload a theme, start publishing content, etc.
That can be overwhelming to almost anybody who hasn’t done it before.
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Rich Pedley
Haven’t you just explained why WordPress.com exists?
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Andrea_R
Yep. Pretty much. That difference maybe needs to be explained somewhere prominent.
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Matt
Most hosts make that pretty painless on signup though.
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Jon Brown
You almost need a decision tree that says:
Do you already have hosting? or,
Do you need hosting?If you have hosting, is there a simple script option to install? otherwise,
Explain manual install
If you don’t have hosting, explain how tongo about getting hosting with mention of wp.com and Page.ly as alternatives.-
Peter
I’d never recommend the “simple script option” supplied by cPanel its likes to install WP.. That have only meant trouble for me in the past..
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Matt
Really? A lot of folks I know have done well with it.
To clarify there is SimpleScripts, Fantastico, a built-in Cpanel installer, and probably some hosts have custom things. Each is different. I love how Dreamhost, for example, will auto-upgrade all my WP installs there.
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demetris
The introductory description has some stuff I would leave out:
1. The free/priceless sentence seems trite to me.
2. The volunteers sentence does not do anything for me.
3. The links to plugins and themes are premature at that point.I think WordPress does not need much of an introduction, as it sells itself. Just include the major points and you are fine:
1. Modern web publishing.
2. Easy to setup and use, and highly extensible
3. Preferred by millions of people all over the world.
4. Available for free, and also open-source software.Here is a quick translation of the intro I wrote for el.wordpress.org. It is targeted at a different audience—and I don’t like it very much as it is now—, but it might give you some idea to work on exactly because it is different:
“WordPress is a modern platform for publishing on the web. With it you can create a website or weblog in a few easy steps and start publishing all kinds of content: a web journal, articles, photos, videos, information about products and services — in short, whatever you like.
“WordPress is available for free and it is open-source software.
“Here you will find Greek versions of WordPress and also information about using WordPress in a Greek environment.”
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Mike Schinkel
I think #1 should be the primary target of your home page and all others should be able to find a link off of the home page. I think it currently does a reasonable job but I’m sure it could always get better with some hypothesis A/B testing.
As for the .zip file on the desktop, maybe now would be a good time consider a more prominent “Get Started” page and make “Download” less prominent. The Get Started page could be a wizard that would walk them through the options (.com vs. self hosted) and if they choose the latter let them specify a hosting company and send them to the the hosting company that would install it.
Once you have the basic Wizard in place you could then solicit the hosting companies to provide you with information via a feed that could be used to make the Wizard smarter. For example, you could ask the user what they are most interested in, i.e.: price, managed hosting, # facebook fans (or some other way to show external support), then show them the current plans, etc. Next step would be to get the hosting companies to streamline the install process so the have to do the minimum to sign up and get the WordPress site already running instead much like I expect Page.ly has. BTW, developing that and evangelizing the process to with the web hosts would be a really interesting project.
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Ben Tremblay
Coincidentally “A key issue to this is that you have three audiences to address” is what Lorelle was writing about on WP-Docs.
What I’d suggest (short and sweet) is that those with the least knowledge need the most attention. By that I don’t mean quantity, but they will be wanting the best UX. E.g. if folk are actually in need of WP.com that should be dealt with elegantly. -
Ryan
Solution to zip files being too complex … http://wpquickinstall.com/
Dion just needs some encouragement to develop it I think.
Very few people who need it, will be asking for it, because they don’t know that there is a simpler way to do things and the ones who know how to handle zip’s etc. aren’t going to be asking for something like this … therefore I suggest just including something like WP QI on the download page as the main way of installing WordPress. Then include a link off to another page which provides zip’s, including the latest nightlies, betas, RCs etc.
Other softwares, such as SMF, use this approach to installation and it works very well IMO. It’s much faster to install as you don’t need to FTP a whole bunch of files and it’s simpler for the less techno-savvy end-users.
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Mike Schinkel
+1 to WP QI.
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Matt
There’s nothing wrong with a zip file, it’s just useless without a hosting account, and QI doesn’t change that.
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Mike Schinkel
Contemplate please what I said above with Ryan’s suggestion of WP QI. QI might be a tools that hosting companies could use in conjunction with WordPress.org to streamline the getting started process for self-hosting.
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Ben Tremblay 10:57 pm on September 16, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Human-Computer Interaction | Coursera – “Helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology.” see syllabus and preview
Japh 1:48 am on September 17, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Looks great! Thanks for the heads up