WordPress Publisher Blog

WordCamp NYC will be held this weekend, November 14th and 15th. It’s a great get together for the New York, and the extended, community of WordPress-loving bloggers and developers:

With an amazing lineup of speakers, over 525 people already registered, and 8 session tracks – there is something for everyone.

Myself and several colleagues from Automattic are flying in for this event, and I’m personally excited to see the track devoted to CMS use featuring case studies of current publishers.

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s $45 for both days, or just $25 for Sunday. More details available on 2009.newyork.wordcamp.org.

[ Visit WordCamp NYC 2009 and WordCamp.org for other WordCamps happening all over the world ]

NASA has been using WordPress for a few years now, and recently the NASA Glenn Research Center launched a resource guide for WordPress development:

The site’s goal is to be “the guide to implementing and using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) with the NASA Web Accessible (CSS) template design on Glenn Research Center websites.”

With a strong emphasis on 508 accessibility compliance, it’s very impressive to see how NASA has built its own custom theme, and is successfully empowering its team to build feature-rich, accessible, and easy-to-maintain sites.

[Visit wordpress.grc.nasa.gov]

Thanks Cátia Kitahara for lettings us know about a new BuddyPress site which is being used to enable and foster debate about various aspects of today’s digital life in Brazil. Built by the Brazilian Culture Ministry, the beta site is now live at culturadigital.br:

The site describes itself as “an open public space destined to democratically create and build a public policy of digital culture, integrating citizens, government institutions, state companies, civil society and the market.” Making use of all the “Facebook-in-a-box” features of BuddyPress, this site is off to a great start and could be a model for other organizations and companies looking to build this kind of community engagement and interaction.

[Visit culturadigital.br ]

For publishers looking at the search traffic benefits of WordPress, Matt Cutts from the Web Spam team at Google, offers his take:

WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Below is a great video of Matt speaking at WordCamp SF 2009 about how Google search works and what publishers should be doing to ensure proper indexing:

[ Slides from Matt's presentation available on mattcutts.com ]

In talking with publishers who are using WordPress as a full CMS for their sites, many folks are eager to enhance the “Submit for Review” feature for Contributors to include email notifications.

Peter Keung of Mugo Web, has created two Open Source GPL plugins that provide this enhanced functionality.

The first is Peter’s Collaboration E-mails:

This plugin enables automatic e-mails to the relevant users at the different post status transitions: when posts are pending; when they are approved or scheduled; and when their statuses are changed from “pending” back to “draft”.

The second one is often used in conjunction to append relevant notes, called Peter’s Post Notes:

Add notes on the “edit post” and “edit page” screens’ sidebars in WordPress 2.7 and up. When used with Peter’s Collaboration E-mails 1.2 and up, the notes are sent along with the e-mails in the collaboration workflow. There is also a general and private notes system on the dashboard.

You can download both these plugins from the WordPress.org plugin directory along with 5300+ other Open Source GPL plugins: Peter’s Post Notes and Peter’s Collaboration E-mails.

Elance, a marketplace “where businesses connect with independent professionals to get work done”, has published their latest Elance Online Work Index. In this index they rate which skills are most in demand in their marketplace based on 100,000 new jobs posted on Elance over recent months:

The #1 in demand skill is PHP, followed in the #2 slot by MySQL. The top publishing platform, with an overall ranking of #13, is WordPress, up 2 spots from #15 since the last index. Joomla comes in at #29, previously 18th overall, and the next publishing platform listed is Drupal at #75, previously 46th in the last index.

Since WordPress is PHP/MySQL, WordPress professionals out there are in a great position with the most in demand skills.

You may recall back in January oDesk posted about similar trends in their marketplace as well.

[ Read more on the Elance blog ]

Great to see that Army Live, the official blog of the United States Army, is powered by WordPress:

Launched in early April, the blog is maintained by the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, Online and Social Media Division. It’s running a nice clean custom theme, and seeing lots of Gravatars in the comments.

[ Visit armylive.dodlive.mil ]

Thanks to Dale for writing in to let us know.

Sonin.mn, a daily digest of Mongolian top newspapers, has joined the WordPress.com VIP program:

According to Sansar Jiimen who runs the site, Sonin.mn reaches over 100,000 daily visitors – a really impressive achievement given that Mongolia is a country with a population of 2.5 million.

The Sonin.mn site was started in early 2004 and has been using WordPress since 2005.  Now that they are on WordPress.com VIP they’ve started to stream popular songs from the former Soviet era days of Mongolia, with plans to bring new video content online soon.

The team at Sonin has also announced that they will be spearheading a new effort to help improve the community-driven WordPress.com translation of Mongolian.

[ Visit Sonin.mn ]

BuddyPress, a set of plugins which will transform an installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform,  is nearing a 1.0 final release  – scheduled for Thursday February 12th.

We’ve received lots of interest about this project, and to help provide more info we’ve produced a short video with a great overview of BuddyPress and a hint as to what’s possible with this great new platform:

[ Visit BuddyPress.org ]

For publishers looking for great video tutorials on how to get the most out of WordPress, WordPress.tv offers an amazing wealth of resources:

Our goal with WordPress.tv is simple:
To make it easy for you to find up-to-date, WordPress-themed video content within a couple of clicks. Without having to wade through spammy promotional videos, out-of-date content, and missing chunks of presentations. There’s a quick intro video if you’re curious:

[ Visit WordPress.tv & Read More on the WordPress.tv blog ]