Mullenweg Vs. Pearson on Mixergy.com

A good example of this assimilation was integration of WooTheme’s menu functionality into WordPress 3.0. Of course, the finished product ended up being slightly different (and in my opinion, slightly better) than the original Woo menu, but the important point is that there is now a menu standard that has been readily adopted throughout the theme building community. Almost every new theme takes advantage of this functionality, so it becomes easier to build universally on top of this technology now that you have a set of conventions on which to work.

“Originally themes were designs. Then they became designs with functions stuck on.” –Alex Denning, WPShout

Now, as everybody in the WordPress community has already covered, long-time GPL-hater Chris Pearson has begrudgingly agreed to adopt a partial GPL (Gnu Public License) for his Thesis theme (which he considers to the most important WordPress theme ever, btw). The partial adoption refers to the fact that he has actually decided to split-license his theme, meaning that he GPL’ed the PHP and WordPress functionality that he stole borrowed (seriously, though, you can’t steal GPL code–that’s the whole point of the GPL), but also instituted a more strict propriety license on the theme’s images, CSS and javascripts (which to note, is absolutely kosher).

What does this all mean? It means that Thesis is now GPL compliant because of a hard-fought war of attrition and the dual licenses (which was Matt Mullenweg of WordPress’s idea, btw) really do seem a win for everybody:

1. Automattic (the company behind WordPress) and Matt don’t have to incur a PR nightmare by dragging Pearson to court to set an inherited license precedent (especially silly since so many other major theme authors already adopted the GPL last year). In fact, Matt kinda looks like a bad-ass (Ghandi-style, at least) for persuading Chris to go GPL, using just some well-formed arguments and a couple of online soapboxes, including the infamous tipping-point discussion on Mixergy.com.
2. Chris gets to keep making a fortune off of theme sales (around $2 million so far, according to Chris’s first Mixegy interview), since nobody is allow to resell his theme outright (not with his images and CSS, anyway).
3. Most importantly, the WordPress community can now use Thesis’s functionality in other themes, and hopefully, take what many consider to be a standard-bearing theme admin panel, and turn it into the actual WordPress standard theme admin panel.

As an active ThemeForest downloader, I’ve seen dozens of different options panels, and while some are excellent, most are imitations of older versions of admin panels from the major theme developers, like WooThemes. Imagine, though, if every theme had the same easily updatable options page–making customizations a snap, as well as allowing you to reuse code (or create plugins) that added functionality to each and every theme options page right off the bat.

Another obvious feature that comes with these standards and conventions is exporting/importing. If all future admin panels shared the same hooks, actions, filters and even input id’s, you could easily transfer settings from one site to the next without fear of corrupting your database.

“Sure, there are some limitations with this system. With a set standard, new plugins will likely emerge to fill in the gaps.” — Justin Tadlock

As you can tell, I’m glad to see the walls of proprietary licensing finally fall away from long-time WordPress theme holdouts, like Thesis. There is work to be done, though, and the next step is taking this newest open-sourced theme and integrating either into the core of WordPress, or maybe even into a core theme admin plugin like the import/export function did in WordPress 3.0. One way or another, we need to create efficiencies by aiming to standardize as much of the WordPress backend experience as possible. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d like to one day see WordPress developers focus on web design once again;) If Thesis can become the de facto admin panel, we’ll be well on our way.

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New York Times “Next Post” Animated Button Examples

Just like the NYTimes button, upPrev allows WordPress site admins to provide the same functionality for their readers. When a reader scrolls to the bottom of a single post, a button animates in the page’s bottom right corner, allowing the reader to select the next available post in the single post’s category (the category is also clickable to access an archive page). If no next post exists, no button is displayed.

The plugin’s only current option is choosing a fade-in or a fly-in animation.

It’s absolutely beautiful. I love Grzegorz’s work and I invite you to download the plugin in the WordPress repository.

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

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• Sitemaps and SEO
• Supporter
• Google Analytics

They’ve also got an upcoming plugin to allow automatic default blog content that I’m looking forward to. If I’m lucky, this post will get me a year-long WPMU Dev subscription—fingers crossed!

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Argument #1: Open-Sourced (Free) Beats Proprietary ($)

Expression Engine licenses costs money (here’s their pricing chart). WordPress is free (and open-sourced). Here’s a 2004 post on WordPress.org describing Movable Type’s (at that time, WordPress’s major blog publishing rival) new pricing structure for their developer brand of their software. Here’s the response from WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg regarding MT’s pricing changes:

I have been receiving emails all morning asking if I have any plans to charge for WordPress in the future. The answer is no, but my answer doesn’t matter. The license WordPress is distributed under —the GNU Public License—ensures that the full source is available free of charge, legally.

We saw how well that pricing structure and propriety licensing worked out for Movable Type (it didn’t). Three years later in 2007, MT dropped the licensing costs altogether and officially went open-source. By then, though, a lot of damage had been done to their brand and thousands of their users jumped ship to WordPress.

Open-sourcing WordPress from the beginning was a double-sided advantage for the development of the software. In the short-term, it was obviously free to try WordPress, so lots of people did. There was little commitment to give it a go. As a long-term strategy, though, being open-sourced has  encouraged thousands of people to become involved in the WordPress community (see WordCamp for a great example of what community really means), which is exactly why the software keeps getting better and why there are so many add-ons to help complete a project (this is a great example of Metcalfe’s Law).

Expression Engine, by comparison, has a small community, so you won’t be able to find pre-built themes as easily (just check out ThemeForest to see how many inexpensive, excellent WordPress themes exist) or, more importantly, plugins to fill in the content management systems’ blanks. There are almost 10,000 plugins in the WordPress repository and this isn’t counting all the great premium plugins that are now becoming a viable marketplace on their own (i.e. Gravity Forms and BackupBuddy).

This also means that there is no dearth of WordPress tutorials, blogs, books, forums, meetups, workshops, conferences and consultants (wink, wink) to help you out when you get stuck.

Argument #2: Timely Updates Appease the Masses

Expression Engine is slow to ship.

The EE developers been working on version 2.0 of the software for almost two years now. When I first heard about this big software upgrade, I was like, “Oh, I’m so gonna become an Expression Engine guy”. Well, where the f@#k is EE version 2? Apparently, it’s still in public beta and at this point, it should be done around 2045.

In the meantime, WordPress will have had 50 major upgrades and it will probably be able to cook your toast by then (WordPress averages 2-3 major feature upgrades a year). And somehow, Expression Engine expects its customers to pay for its software when it seems to over-promise and under-deliver.

And did I mention WordPress is free?

I know there have always been a lot of great features in Expression Engine, but WordPress refuses to stand still. The WP 3.0 release is scheduled to be shipped in May 2010 and it will contain all kinds of great changes and features, including multi-site capability, menu editing on the fly and–a long-held Expression Engine feature–custom post-types with custom taxonomies.

Remember, though, even if WordPress is/was missing a killer feature that other CMS’s may have had, plugin developers could usually be counted on to provide that functionality in a stellar manner. Again, the community ensures timely updates, new features and when it needs to, it fills in the gaps through plugins and creative theme development.

With all these great additions to WordPress, I’ll be amazed at what comes next in version 3.1 (due in August 2010). I’ve heard rumors that dynamic image resizing will be included in that release (goodbye TimThumb). And what’ll be included in version 2.1 of Expression Engine? Who knows–I guess we’ll have to ask our grandchildren…

Conclusion

I think that should clear up any questions about the WordPress vs. Expression Engine debate. The clear winner: you (right after you install WordPress through Fantastico–it takes less than 60 seconds). WP is better supported and loved by millions because of (and through) its community.

Expression Engine may someday overtake WordPress as the defacto self-publishing web content management system, but not without first converting all those talented WordPress developers and users.

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As the newest product from the iThemes-spinoff, PluginBuddy, this plugin is a unique and surprisingly simple solution for both WordPress developers and end users to prevent data loss (through complete, rather than just database backup) and to migrate their WordPress sites to new servers. The second feature was the most interesting to us—several database backup options already exist (and backing up wp-content files isn’t difficult to do manually) but until now, there has been no true WordPress migration tool. And as developers, we can attest to the amount of site migrations that go on in the site-building world.

After reading several positive reviews, we decided to put the plugin through its paces, so we bucked up and dropped $75 on a Business License (which supports up to 10 sites) to fully test BackupBuddy’s backup and migration capabilites. And here’s what we found (hint: it’s awesome).

BackupBuddy Product Tour from WebDesign.com on Vimeo.

Getting Started with BackupBuddy

Just like any other plugin, BackupBuddy can be installed from the Plugin menu in WordPress administration.  Simply click on “add new,” search and locate the plugin zip file, and start uploading. After uploading, the plugin creates a new Backup Buddy drop down menu in WordPress with the following options:  Getting Started, Backups, Scheduling, and Settings.

The Getting Started menu option is obviously the best place to begin. After a paragraph-long promotional blurb at the top of this menu page, the plugin provides a very concise list of instructions for backing up and restoring the site.

Backup & Restore Instructions from the Backup Buddy “Getting Started” Menu Page

Before making a backup, the user is required to create a password in the Settings section of the Backup Buddy menu. This password will be used when restoring the backup file. After creating the password, the user is ready to navigate to the “Backups” menu section and perform the backup.

Making Your Backup

Upon visiting the Backup menu section, the user will notice that there are two backup options: full backup and database only. Either backup can be initiated by simply clicking the button bearing the name of the backup type. The full backup we performed on a simple WordPress site took only a second. After the zip file is created, the following items appear in the same menu section: file name, date modified, file size, and sending options.

Backup Zip Files Created by Backup Buddy

The two sending options available to the user are “send by FTP” and “send by email.”  We tested the “send by email” option.  On the first attempt, a message with the zip file attached was received in our email account after approximately one hour.

The backup zip files created are given a unique file name containing the date of the backup.  It is important for the user to not change the name of the backup file.  Later, when the backup file is restored, any changes to the file name may cause the file to not be recognized by the PHP import buddy function.

Now that the user has a backup zip file, when he or she is ready to restore the file, the importbuddy.php script must be downloaded.  The Backup section of the menu displays a link for downloading this importing tool.

Restoring and Migrating Your Backup

We took our backup zip file and importbuddy.php script and plugged them into a sandbox web host account.  In order to start the restoration process, the user must navigate to the domain containing the import script (http://2createanebook.com/importbuddy.php, in our test).  The user will then see the following screen:

After entering the password created previously,  the user is taken to step 1 of 4.  In this step, as long as the user has not changed the file name provided by Backup Buddy, the drop down menu should include the name of the zip file loaded onto the destination server.

Step 2 of 4 involves checking to make sure the backup file is indeed the correct file.  In this step, the user can see the site URL, the blog name, and the blog description.

Step 3 of 4 involves the user modifying any old settings in the backup file prior to uploading the contents to the destination server.  In our test, we received a notice that the URL of the backed-up site, https://theschedulecsite.com, did not match the destination URL, which was created purely for testing purposes. While this appears to have not caused a problem during this step, the migration ultimately did not succeed, and this difference in URLs may have had something to do with the failure.

After the user determines that the import data is correct, clicking “Next Step” will start the restoration.

This step passed very quickly, but unfortunately the next screen indicated that an error was experienced during the restoration:

Our First Attempt Failed

Originally, The restoration/migration function did not work for us.  We expected to complete step 4, and then be able to navigate to the destination URL and find a fully functional and restored version of the original site.  Luckily, the plugin developers are busy guys, and the plugin was undated later in the afternoon. The update included a “compatibility mode” that helps migrations on Windows-based webhosts or servers with other wonky configurations.

Wrapping Up

So, in the end, BackupBuddy worked exactly as advertised. It helped me transfer the site exactly as it existed on its previous server. All the images were in tact, and the content was preserved and maybe most helpfully, every single WordPress setting was migrated over, as well. Resetting all those plugin and WordPress settings generally takes a significant amount of time (and a very good memory), so that feature is worth the money alone.

We highly recommend purchasing a BackupBuddy license for your WordPress sites. It’s cheap, easy and you can’t beat the sense of euphoria that comes with a successful website migration. Also, with a purchase, you’ll have access to unlimited BackupBuddy upgrades for a year, including any new features added to the plugin.

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Mr. Hudson:

I read an article last week about passing along gratitude to those who deserve it. If the article was correct, most people do not get thanked much, so when this morning, I again thought about your astrobiology class I attended while at Eckerd College in Fall, 2001 (I actually think about the class quite a bit), I decided I would take a few minutes and give appreciation for a very interesting, very educational and very enjoyable semester with you.

I still think (and talk) about the lessons–both book and otherwise–I learned in astrobiology. In a post-Wikipedia world, that class stands out as the last big information digestion I’ve had in my life. I learned a lot from you and I actually had fun doing so. The class was obviously challenging (this was the last semester before the class went Honors) and thus, incredibly rewarding to receive an A at the end.

I also thoroughly remember completely failing the constellation identification test on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week and having to stay at school an extra day to study and pass the exam the next evening (I appreciate the second chance you gave me, as well). I worked hard in Astrobiology and I’d like to imagine this one class having positively affected my work habits henceforth.

Mr. Hudson, I thank you for your dedication to science, students and learning. Never imagine that your efforts are in vain.

Appreciation is a very rare currency, so it never hurts to say thank you to someone who deserves it. I hope that you’ll take 10 minutes and try it out yourself today!

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Sans Tim Ferris, Item-9 wouldn’t exist. I listened to the Four Hour Workweek audio book several times while I was traveling through Costa Rica and Panama in March 2009. I hadn’t listened to an audio book since I had a go at Huckleberry Finn in fourth grade and I thought that approach might have been easier than actually reading the book. It wasn’t. I learned then that I’m a visual learner (photographic memory and such) and audio is the worst way for me to learn (imagine how poorly I did in my Spanish classes).

Anyway, Tim’s audio book allowed me something I don’t normally do while I read books—I wrote. Specifically, I brainstormed ideas for a business to start when I got back to the States. Before the trip, I had just quit my full-time web development job in Chicago and without the inspiration and case studies I listened to in the Four Hour Workweek, April’s rent (and May, June and July’s, as well) wasn’t going to be met. The book was the catalyst for starting my own consulting company and the rest is history.

As a Chicagoan, Jason Fried is obviously one of the bigger influences on how I run Item-9 Consulting. His company, 37signals, provides two very important tools to my business: Basecamp for project management and Sortfolio for advertising. I’ll admit that I got on the Basecamp bandwagon a bit late and that I often complain about the pricing (oh, how I complain), but the truth is that there is no better PM software available.

And Sortfolio—where would I be without Sortfolio? There probably wouldn’t still be an Item-9 Consulting without the revenue I generated through that site over the last two months. The well was almost dry, but since January 15, 2010, I’ve had a 600% increase in revenue, due 100% to the clients who found me on that service.

Besides these two great services, 37signals is also responsible for the brand new book Rework that I really hope redefines the way all business is done (of course, the recession already started this process two years ago, but again, I’ll save that idea for another post).

Last, but not least, I’ve got to write about Seth Godin. For those of you who don’t know, Seth is marketing. Every word he writes becomes the marketing gospel and he’s been a direct influence upon every English-speaking business person over the last twenty years. I find it hard to have an idea about marketing that this guy hasn’t written about.

Today, he republished some thoughts on the problem of the high school mentality permeating long after graduation and then into college and the work place:

Yet most of my classmates refused to choose. Instead, they treated college like an extension of high school. They took the most mainstream courses, did the minimum amount they needed to get an A, tried not to get into “trouble” with the professor or face the uncertainty of the unknowable. They were the ones who spent six hours a day in the library, reading their textbooks.

These guys don’t just write about marketing—they write about life. Their words help rookies like me continue to move towards some kind of actualization and help veterans who are surrounded by sheep whip their coworkers into shape. I’m thankful for their help and I invite anybody interested in improving their 9-5 day to check them out.

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If you want to know everything about WordPress 2.8, than look no further. I’ve learned a lot from this book already (even as a guy who’s been using WordPress for three years) and I’m sure you will, too. The authors are also promising to keep updating the book over time and your purchase secures a lifetime subscription to any new version they may release. My vote is that Digging should become the new official WordPress codex. Great job, gentlemen!

Want a sneak peak? Here’s a sample chapter. Let me know what you think below!

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First, they revisit old territory with a semi-dis to Automattic and their alleged third-party commercial cock-blocking, then the announcement of WPPlugins, the supposed app store for WordPress plugins.

Is this goodbye to free [quality] plugins? Maybe, but if this service is to catch on, it’ll take six months to a year for real adoption, so no need to freak out just yet.

The major problems WPPlugins face are: 1) plugin developers haven’t seemed to be very commercially oriented in the past, so I’m questioning if the best and most well known devs will switch over now and 2) WordPress has been in development for almost five years and thousands of free plugins have already been released. If the business strategy really wanted to success, it would have had to been to the market long before 98% of the plugins ever to exist were already created.

I guess we’ll see, but I can’t see why a developer wouldn’t want to monetize their work. This WPPlugins deal seems incredibly fair. I haven’t read the exclusivity fine print, but Incsub, the company behind this project, as well as the better known (and personally loathed) WPMUDev Premium project, only gets 10% of each sale or plugin subscription.

If the service came out a year or two ago, I would predict nothing but great success, but now, who knows? I have a feeling that the biggest predictor might be the adoption (or download) numbers of WordPress in general. If they’re rising, then the market is getting larger, which means quality (and more importantly, dependability) will begin to become more important to the “average” WordPress user. And not surprisingly, average users do equal value with price, hence their aversion to open-source technologies in the first place.

Bonus trivia:

1. Will questions about these premium plugins be allowed on the wordpress.org forums?
2. What will Automattic’s reaction be?
3. Why didn’t Automattic create this service themselves a long time ago?

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