Setup Large WordPress Projects at WordCamp Porto

I had a trip to Porto for WordCamp Porto earlier this month and I gave a talk on my experience with "WordPress Setup for Large Projects". Porto is a great city with an active community from Portugal (Porto, Lisbon and other cities too) and it was a pleasure to hang out there for a few days, drink some sangrias, eat some francesinhas and definitely spend a great hack day with the folks that attended the Sunday fun. Video from my session is now available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDerTeRnxR0 We had some issues with the VGA so I had to present at Daniel's Mac… Continue Reading

Matt Mullenweg at Joomla World Conference 2013

Last weekend was quite important for the Open Source world - in addition to several WordPress events (such as WordCamp Porto, WordCamp Kenya and WP Camp), the Joomla folks had their Joomla World Conference. The noble thing this year was Matt's presence there, being one of the keynote speakers presenting on Sunday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X1iYm68VdI Being used to Matt's Q&A sessions at WordCamps (leaving aside the State of the Word talks for a minute), i was quite amused by his talk at the Joomla event. I would advise everyone who is even remotely related to WordPress - or even startups, business, freelance… Continue Reading

Choosing the Right WordPress Theme

My talk at WordCamp Sofia two weeks ago was related to choosing the right WordPress theme. Slides are available here. The gist of the talk was making users cautious about their WordPress sites and managing their stack properly, especially in the WordPress context. I find it quite common for users to browse for random, free hacked themes and get their servers attacked from the inside, or becoming a part of a botnet. That is one of the reasons why I'm quite sensitive when it comes to the WPTRT work. Users choose from several options for picking a theme for their… Continue Reading

Theme Reviews, Guidelines and Community

I've accidentally started a long discussion due to a small and fairly insignificant bug that turned out to be more than enough for several major theme authors, reviewers and theme lead devs to chime in and share their thoughts. I usually try to avoid those scenarios, but every now and then the tension needs to be released. These are my observations, thoughts and ideas based on my experience over the past 2.5 years with the theme directory. Theme Reviews in 2011-2012 I have joined the WPTRT in 2011, after doing a dozen reviews as a "candidate reviewer" before getting my… Continue Reading

WordCamp Europe 1.0

We have attended the first WordCamp Europe in Leiden this weekend. It was great to meet so many WordPress people in Europe, including several amazing community people from the US, Australia, Asia and other great places. I'm not sure what the official numbers say, but I guess more than 650 people were having fun in Leiden. Two days of talks, after party on Saturday and Contributors Day on Monday. I was finally able to meet Amir in person, I was having a great time working for him on the Toolset project, together with other community folks. I was unable to… Continue Reading

5 WordPress Contribution Tips Learned from Scribu

If you have used WordPress for at least a few months, you have probably used a plugin by scribu or at least heard a discussion over one of the tools or plugins he is involved with. Recently Cristi (scribu) announced his "retirement" from the WordPress industry and he's currently involved in just a few projects, mostly WP-CLI (which involves mostly some custom PHP, server-related tasks and playing with cool stuff such as Travis, Composer, Behat). However, I've been monitoring his work on the WordPress Core and his plugins over the Trac/support forums/GitHub and I am happy to outline my top 5… Continue Reading

Contributing Together

Recently I've been spending a lot of time poking others' projects. Since I have more time than I had while working full-time for an employer, I'm polishing more of my snippets and I've been busy with small enhancements that couldn't find a place in my long list before. Additionally, I find myself sending more pull request than before and requesting from plugin authors to clone their WordPress.org project to GitHub as well for collaboration: https://twitter.com/no_fear_inc/status/377052160518672384 As a developer, I'm tempted by reinventing the wheel and releasing something on my own. But I try to be practical and I often browse… Continue Reading

WordPress IRC Chats Schedule

Since I tend to forget when most WordPress dev chats are or pick wrong time zones instead, I set up a small weekly schedule with weekly IRC chats: http://devwp.eu/chats/ I got the schedules from the Make blogs and listed them with custom post type entries in a calendar. The handy thing is that one can control the timezone listing with a UTC-relative GET argument (also, few time zones are listed at the top of the calendar that switch that automatically). For example, what I use in Bulgaria is http://devwp.eu/chats/?utc=+3 which triggers the events shifted towards my timing instead of UTC. Even though I… Continue Reading

WordPress Product Marketing – the Right Way

I browse and read a lot (articles, code) on a daily basis, I tend to forget quickly due to the tons of data that passes through my head (I normally have about 5 windows with 20 Chrome tabs open each). I read a great post by Brian Krogsgard on marketing WordPress products on Wed and I finally had the time to write a quick review. It's a great resource. It's definitely a post to be read by everyone who is building (or has already built) a product or a service that needs attention from users. And by definition this should be every… Continue Reading

Start a WordCamp in Your City

According to my notes from the past 3 years I've seen many WordCamp organizers getting nervous and exhausted from organizing a WordCamp. Often the next WordCamp is organized by other community people and the main reason is actually the bad taste in mouth from organizing the previous event. I tend to disagree with this and I'm writing a counter-post to what my friend Kovshenin wrote for WordCamp Russia :) I'm in the organizer committee for WordCamp Sofia for a second year and I'll explain why I love to be in the WordCamp organization group. WordCamps are fun The most important… Continue Reading