WPWeekly Episode 142 – Interview With The Founder Of OSTraining, Steve Burge

Marcus Couch and I were joined by Steve Burge, founder of OSTraining.com. OSTraining was launched in 2008 and is one of the few websites dedicated to educating users of three major open-source platforms: Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. Through OSTraining, Steve has a unique perspective on the pain points users are encountering with each platform.

We talked about the future of WordPress as well as the move towards front-end editing. Will it help users edit their content without having to navigate the back-end of WordPress or will it cause more confusion? Burge introduced us to his new WICS system (Words Ideas Clicks Screens) aimed at determining which platform is easier to use based on a common set of tasks. WordPress scored well, especially with the task of organizing content. Last but not least, Marcus shared some plugins that caught his eye this week.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress 3.9 Beta 2
Better WP Security To Be Renamed, Undergoes Major Changes
WordPress.com Formally Opens Its Marketplace to Theme Developers
30,000 Plugins in the Repository.

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

WP Widget Devices – With this plugin, you can control when widgets are displayed. For example, configuring a widget to only display on mobile devices.

Plugin Logic – There are many ways to increase the speed of your WordPress site. One of them, which is often forgotten, is to deactivate Plugins on pages where they are not needed. This Plugin allows you to do this easily. By disabling plugins on certain pages, you can reduce the amount of JavaScript, CSS, and SQL queries executed per page load.

Gmail Comment Approval – This plugin incorporates the Gmail action API for WordPress comment approval. You can directly approve the comments from your Gmail inbox without logging into your site.

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Listen To Episode #142:
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