ContentRobot

This proved to be a great week for WordPress fans:

1. Sneak Peek of the Visual Design WordPress 2.7: We think it’s a great visual upgrade and can’t wait to see if it lives up to it’s promise! Will the WP community gets frustrated with all the interface updates they have endured in recent upgrades?
2. Automattic Acquires PollDaddy: Polling gets native for WP.COMers and a plugin is available for the rest of us. Matt Mullenweg said polling is big and we agree it’s a great way to easily add interactivity.

They say news comes in “threes” - so what’s next?

On a rainy Sunday morning, the ContentRobot team took the train south to check out WordCamp NY. Jonathan Dingman had the tough task of gathering the WP geeks into warm room in the Sun headquarters. Here’s what we experienced:

Keynote with Matt Mullenweg

Matt praises the State of the Word as “strong,” and he gave a bunch of usage/download stats that were just amazing. The room was a-buzz as they were happy to be part of this wave - we were, too!

This year, Mullenweg concentrated on meeting as many users as possible at various WordCamps all over the world and spreading the open source gospel. Some quick facts from Matt:

• Automattic wants to evolve WordPress toward the FireFox model of updating, stats, and usage
• Sees plugins as a free market of features that allows them to adopt core functionality in a democratic way
• Average plugins per blog was 5 - our clients tend to hover around 10
• WordPress 2.7 is coming in November and has a totally customizable dashboard/interface
• Improving comments were on Automattic’s top-of-mind, especially with comment threading coming and the integration of their recent purchase of IntenseDebate
• An integrated library of themes and plugins with a promise of one-click updates on the way
• Looking forward to easier implementation of rich media - audio/video, etc.
• Sees the blog as a one-stop place that brings together all different modalities, such a tumblr log, Flickr pix, Twitter stream, Facebook, and more

Making it into the Big Leagues with Aaron Brazell

Aaron focused on atracting big audiences with marketing, message, and branding. Stuff we especially liked from his discussion:

• 90% of your users are new and come from search engines
• Your marketing activities that will keep them coming back
• Create content that is relevant and consistant
• Determine who your audience is, what they want, and keep giving them it
• Word of mouth will shape your brand, so your interactions with your customer will define it - not you
• Develop a pattern of deliverables from web site, print materials, blog writing, etc. that enforces your brand
• Participate on others’ blogs and develop a repore with other bloggers
• Grow your audience via newsletters and RSS feeds

Running a Blog Network with Jeremy Clark

Young Jeremy is responsible for a global, multi-lingual site that holds lots of challenges. Tho his discussion was a bit more technical than some of the audience would have liked, he was entertaining and had some great points to make.

• Keeping the overall design simple, so it can be easily integrated any blog in the network
• Decide on what the core features are and stick to your guns
• Focus on security by upgrading (especially to stay ahead of the hackers)
• Learn how subversion can help the upgrade process go quicker and easier

We enjoyed our day at WordCamp despite the lack of WiFi at the event. The food was awesome and we had fun meeting a variety of fellow bloggers.

ContentRobot had the pleasure of meeting Lorelle VanFossen at BlogWorld Expo last month. She chatted with us about her involvement in WordPress and Woopra - it was really great to meet her.  Then, she whipped out her video camera and asked us “how has WordPress changed your lives?

She showed the resulting video at WordCamp Portland and a very-tired ContentRobot made the cut! Here’s the YouTube version … or click over to her site to watch the Viddler version and read more about the project. Watch the whole thing or skip ahead to the 7:40ish mark to see us.

Thanks, Lorelle, for letting us be a part of your video and all you do for the WordPress community.

Matt Mullenweg announced today that Intense Debate is now an Automattic joint.

Intense Debate is a richly interactive comment system that includes cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles.

We know that WordPress’s commenting features were lacking and we were hoping some improvements were forthcoming.

Interestingly, we met with the IntenseDebate team at BlogWorld Expo this past weekend and we were impressed with their offerings.

It will be interesting to see where this goes - we’ll be watching!

The ContentRobot/WeFixWP Team is heading to WordCamp NYC on October 5th.

We are really looking forward to seeing the latest tools and techniques we can offer our clients.

About WordCamp NYC

Date: October 5, 2008
Time: 9:30am-6:00pm
Where: Sun Microsystems Office 101 Park Avenue, 4th floor New York, NY
Cost: $30

Go now and get your tickets - we’d love to meet you!

<rant>
ContentRobot touts ourselves as “the blogging and WordPress experts.” We are committed to the WordPress platform and exclusively recommend it to our clients. So, it was very painful to see the huge presence of rival Six Apart at BlogWorld Expo and a very tiny (and even surly contingent!) of WordPress.

To us, WordPress has a superior blogging platform, so why were they not at blogging’s biggest event of the year? One guess is that they are concentrating on their developers and they’d rather spend their energies at participating at the various WordCamps instead.

In contrast, the SA team had a big part in the opening keynote (in fairness, Matt Mullenweg keynoted last year) and set the stage for what blogging is and what it means to them. Then, who’s booth was first as you entered the expo floor? Needless to say Six Apart’s area was big, very well “manned,” and they were more than ready to help.

So ready, in fact, that our buddies in the Newstex booth (who were next door) told us that they heard repeated stories about how easy it would be to convert bloggers to a more “secure platform.” In stealth mode, we decided to see what they had to say - luckily for WordPress, their story didn’t go much beyond that SA is less hackable. We were not convinced - sorry, Andy Wibbles! - but it gave us a bad taste in our mouths anyway.

When we finally found the WordPress team, they were just part of a small booth. Worse, they put forth an unhappy WordPress.com team (and believe us we were not the only ones who felt that they were uninviting and uninspiring). Thanks for the stickers, pins, and tattoos, but we could have been better cheerleaders for WP.

In fact, we were! We twittered that our team was there to help assist anyone having and WordPress questions or issues. The WordPress.com team followed us with a similar tweet, but we don’t know how effective it really was.

Another overt WordPress fan - Lorelle VanFossen in the adjoining Woopra booth - was encouraging visitors to tell their “we love WordPress” stories and getting it all on video. This is just the kind of involvement and excitement WP needs to elicit and sustain.

Automattic, please go to BlogWorld next year - show off how great your software and solutions really are. You have tons of loyal users (including ContentRobot) that would be happy to help you with a booth, twittering, or whatever you need to showcase, highlight, or support the WordPress platform.
</rant>

WordPress released the latest version  (2.6.2) of its blogging software on Monday - they are encouraging users to implement it immediately. According to Lorelle VanFossen:

This mandatory security upgrade adds protection for a SQL Column Truncation and other security and bug fixes. There is a full changeset and list of changed files to help you find the differences, and a specific changeset for downloading will be available soon.

The vulnerability impacts all PHP applications, not just WordPress, specifically open registration on WordPress blogs. Boren says the attack is difficult to accomplish, but WordPress would rather be safer than sorrier if this is manipulated in the future. If you allow open registration on your WordPress blog, upgrade immediately and follow the instructions in the announcement.

ContentRobot once had a favorite host that we recommended to all our clients: Pair Networks. They were reasonable … wonderfully responsive … easy to use … Then …

A client’s blog was partially down, meaning you could see the site content but not the theme or the CSS. What happened? Where was the warning email that we were promised last time? Did they turn off services? Who could help us during this crises? ACK!

Then after 3 separate phone calls to find out what was going on, came this stellar response from tech support:

Sorry we don’t support WordPress and we can’t help you to get your site working …

Then our (now irate) client contacted Pair himself. He had to escalate the call to finally get the answers and resolution needed to get him up and running. (Yes, your site’s services were throttled and, no, you were not contacted correctly during this process.)

While we continued to politely ignore the banner ad on the Pair Networks control panel touting another (in our eyes, sub-par) blog platform, this blatant statement became a (sore) tipping point for us that we can no longer ignore.

We believe that hosts should support multiple major blogging platforms where clients have a choice (like selecting between a Windows or Unix environment). Is platform/application neutrality more appropriate for a hosting company? Should WordPress try harder to create relationships with hosts so their blogging software can easily be installed and supported?

Recently we extolled the virtues of WordPress’s Media Manager and its relative ease to add images to your posts. After upgrading several client sites to WP 2.5/2.6, we must say in practice that there is still work to be done here.

Our beef? WordPress relies on Flash to upload media. This means that you get a nice visual or “crunching” status bar, but downright unhelpful error messages. What issues have we encountered?

• Big images - you can’t upload full size images
• Resizing images - sometimes the resizer (placing small and medium images) will be completely ignored
• Image types - doesn’t like PNGs!

What can you do to minimize problems with the media manager? We suggest that you disable Flash with the No Flash Uploader plugin. Since installing it, many errors have been thankfully squelched.

We realize it’s a good start, but we look forward to the continuing evolution of the Media Manager.

We have a lot of clients who are multi-author blogging. In fact, we think this approach is quite effective and believe every company should consider having more than one voice on their blogs.

With the launch of WordPress 2.6, they implemented a nifty feature - post version control. This means that when you go into Manage > Post in the back-end, and you make an edit, you’ll see a Post Revisions area.

This means that it:

• Saves a copy of a post every time you edit it
• Allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions)
• Displays any differences between any two revisions along with their timestamps

If you are ready for developing a multi-author blog (or have content that requires lots approvals), 2.6’s version control can help you out.

If you haven’t made the leap to WordPress - and its latest version - now may be a perfect time. We were impressed!