If you’re in Australia (or Australasia) and work with WordPress, you should get along to WordCamp Sydney 2012.
Australia had 2 WordCamps last year – Melbourne & Gold Coast. Both of which were fantastic events full of fun and learning for all who attended. This year, Sydney is set to be flying solo, so it’s you’re only chance for 2012.
I hope to see you there!
Tacking a post_type parameter to any search URL in WordPress filters the search results by a post type.
For example:
http://example.com/?s=speak+easy&post_type=events
Will return only events which include the terms speak and easy.
But when setting the post_type parameter to page, something unusual happens.
When you request only search results that are pages, you’ll get results of all post types. This comes about due to the publicly_queryable value for pages being set to false and a bug in core (Trac ticket).
There is an easy fix, just set publicly_queryable to true. For example:
/**
* Sets the 'publicly_queryable' value of the page post type to true
* so that search results can be filtered by page.
*
* @author Brent Shepherd
*/
function eg_make_pages_queryable() {
global $wp_post_types;
$wp_post_types['page']->publicly_queryable = true;
}
add_action( 'init', 'eg_make_pages_queryable', 20 );
Changing a setting directly on the global is not ideal, but I couldn’t find an API function for changing the publicly_queryable or any other post type setting. Did I miss it?
When publishing a post on WordPress.com these days, authors receive a new sidebar alongside their post. The most interesting feature in this sidebar is a game-like progress bar.
Arbitrary goals are now being set on WordPress.com to encourage blogging. Publish a post, level up. WordPress.com just got gamified (I hope players don’t lose points for using a made up word).
It’s gratuitous, unnecessary and fun. And the carefully curated quotes below the progress bar bring the pursuit of post count irrationally close to a noble quest.
I think it’s good use of gamification. WordPress.com need all the content they can get to boost page views. That said, I’m quite surprised to see this feature added in light of Automattic’s strategy to simplify the blogging experience on WordPress. Here’s to experimentation though and I hope it works.
The Greeks used fire beacons at the time of the Trojan War, in the twelfth century BC. A bonfire on a mountaintop could be seen from watchtowers twenty miles distant, or in special cases even farther.
…
The meaning of the message had, of course, to be prearranged, effectively condensed into a single bit. A binary choice, something or nothing: the fire signal meant something, which, just this once, meant “Troy has fallen.” To transmit this one bit required immense planning, labor watchfulness, and firewood.— James Gleick: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
How far we’ve come in transporting information.
Early on, Graham envisioned this network as a “replacement for the traditional corporation.”
“You know what’s great about the YC network? It gives the benefit of being part of a large company without being part of a big company,” Graham says. “The problem with doing a startup–even though it’s better in almost every other respect–is that you don’t have the resources of a big company to draw on. It’s very lonely; you have no one to give you advice or help you out. In a big company, you might be horribly constrained, but there are like 1,000 other people you can go to to deal with any number of problems. Now [with YC] you have 1,000 people you can go to to deal with problems, and you don’t have all the restrictions of a big company.”
— Fast Company | Why Y Combinator Replaces The Traditional Corporation.
Paul Graham on the need for incubators.
WordPress 3.1 introduced the best new feature I failed to notice – built-in support for filtering posts by multiple taxonomies.
For a post index or custom post type archive, instead of being constrained to queries for one taxonomy like this:
www.example.com/post-type/taxonomy_x/term_x/
We can do this:
www.example.com/post-type/?taxonomy_y=term_y&taxonomy_x=term_x
WordPress will automatically filter the posts to include only those posts tagged with term_y in taxonomy_y and term_x in taxonomy_x.
this is Brent. Founder of Prospress Inc and creator of WooCommerce Subscriptions, among other things. You can also find me on Twitter.
i blog 