In this episode, I had the chance to welcome Alex King back to the show to talk about the WPHelpCenter, his Carrington theme framework and last but not least, his take on PremiumMod as well as his thoughts on building a business around GPL software such as WordPress. When I published my review of WPHelpCenter when it launched in April of this year, I had my doubts as to whether there would be demand for it considering the numerous outlets for support that exist within the community. After talking with Alex King within this interview, it’s clear that there is demand for such a service and it’s doing well.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WPClassroom.com. They have announced their next class called WordPress For Beginners that will be held on Tuesday November 24th From 6-9pm EST use the coupon code wptavern to take $5.00 off the price.
WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Last weeks poll question was: Should WordPress Change The Blog Nomenclature Within The Backend?
Out of a total of 103 votes, 92 of you said Yes while 11 people voted No.
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Would You Like To Hear An Interview With Anil Dash?
Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – WP Manage Plugins – WP Manage Plugins, is an easy way to give you more control over the plugins section of WordPress. This plugin enables users to disable upgrade notices for specific plugins, hide the plugins page from all users except yourself, hide the wp manage plugins settings page from all users except yourself, automatically email the site admin when any plugin is added/activated/deactivated and much more.
Last Weeks WordPress Trivia Question:
Which forum software was the first to use CSS based layouts rather than tables?
WordPress Trivia Answer:
bbPress. bbPress was originally written by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, after he could not find software available at the time that fit his needs. bbPress was the first forum software to utilize a CSS-based layout, rather than the tabular layouts of other forum software available at the time.
This Weeks Trivia Question
What powers the WordPress.org website?
Announcements:
Aaron Brazell aka Technosailor will be on the show next week to discuss his work with WordPress as well as his new book, The WordPress Bible.
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Tuesday, November 24th 8P.M. EST
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Length Of Episode: 1 Hour 27 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode79.mp3
Listen To Episode #79:
The Alex King interview was really interesting. I’ve used the Carrington theme on a website for a client. I appreciate the concept of Carrington, but in practice, it wasn’t for me.
I don’t really like the way that the granular structure creates so many extra files and folders. It seems to make things more complicated than it needs to be. But I did try out Carrington like a year ago and there wasn’t much documentation, it looks like there is more documentation available now, which could make using Carrington simpler.
WordPress.org is a big site, it’s hard to judge which sections are the largest. The support forum must have the most pages, followed by all the plugin, theme, and idea pages in Extend. The forums and Extend are largely powered by bbPress I believe, so bbPress must be the platform for at least a good chunk of the site.
The Codex is another big section of the site, and that is powered by MediaWiki. I wonder if the Codex would ever be migrated to WordPress if there was a robust wiki plugin?
My guess is that the rest of the website is powered by WordPress MU rather than the standard version of WordPress. And of course the latest addition to WordPress.org is Profiles, which is run on MU and BuddyPress. I’m looking forward to this section growing, hopefully BuddyPress will play a more important role on wp.org as the focus on the community expands.