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Responsive Design: WordPress NYC Meetup Recap

April 19, 2012 By Chrisdigital 12 Comments

To say “responsive design” is a hot topic right now is an understatement. As proof, just google it, and you’ll find great resources and articles about it online. In addition, as it relates to this specific meetup (agenda listed on that page) – I was one of 60+ people that were on a waiting list for this CBS Local venue that holds 120 and I was lucky to get in.

The WPNYC community definitely wanted to hear what the speakers had to say. Sonja Liex (link to slides below), and Jack Reichert (link to slides below) were game and I thought they gave a great overview of the issues developers face with the explosive growth of web-enabled devices. This post hopefully compliments and extends what was covered by the speakers Tuesday night. Slides and video will be available so I’m just rounding out my own thoughts here.

Down The Rabbit Hole Of History

The speakers chose a topic that is very timely because as more and more end users choose to digest content from a diverse collection of devices, developers are asking themselves how can they keep up?… and still have their content look great. After all, content is king and if you don’t serve your users in a manner they expect, you’ll get left behind. One by one content publishers are taking a look at their vistor stats and making changes, Actual Insights Blog relates their experience with “responsive WordPress” and shares a great recommended reading list. I won’t go down the rabbit hole of history of this topic too much, mainly because Jared Ponchot of Lulabot (of Drupal fame) does a great job of doing that here.

Wait, This Sounds Familiar

Responsive design has evolved into a broad concept in product development, and it’s larger than WordPress.

‘Our understanding of “responsive design” should be broadened to cover any approach that delivers elegant visual experiences regardless of the size of the user’s display and the limitations or capabilities of the device.’ – Jeffrey Zeldman.

He also has another popular quote in this post that takes me back in time- ‘It’s what some of us were going for with “liquid” web design back in the 1990s, only it doesn’t suck.’

This meetup also reminded me of my experience connecting with Filipe Fortes at a Technology “Watercooler” Talk at Time Inc. last year (then of Treesaver, now of Flipboard.) I tried to get him introduced to the higher-ups at one of my previous employers but they were content to stay with Zinio. If his name sounds familiar, it should. He was part of the crew that worked on the awesome, yet killed Microsoft Courier. Recently, some of his associates made noise releasing or being associated with the release of some interesting iPad apps.

Challenging Conversation

To prepare my mind for the meetup, I did some related research on the Interwebs and I saw that .Net magazine did a feature on “Responsive WordPress” and then ran across this interesting related dustup between Josh Clark and Jacob Nielson (the comments sections on both positions are a priceless read.) Also this post addresses some of Nielson’s comebacks.

Mostly, the Web industry is treating Nielson like the guy at the party that forgot his pants. Web professionals found Nielson’s comments about publishers needing multiple site versions curious because he skipped over the entire responsive design movement. I mention this because it may be relevant if you have some challenges dealing with clients and stake holders in your business dealings and discussion of responsive design. This stuff also plays off of some of the arguments in Jack Reichert’s presentation as I would find out Tuesday evening.

Why Are We Even Catering To These Devices?

There are a diverse range of opinions out there… take this comment by Justin Tadlock I found recently “Honestly, I’m still questioning the entire responsiveness movement. I like what can be done, but it’s steering Web design in the wrong direction. What I mean by this is that the device should know what to do with standards-based code. The code shouldn’t be catering to the device. That’s kind of backwards. Those are my thoughts. Responsive designs are definitely on my radar.”

This was something that came up in group discussion at the meetup. Some of us have clients that would rather have the end users cater to their “fixed” way of presenting content and be done with it. The counter to this is obvious ofcourse- how much are you willing to risk alienating any part of your audience due to a crappy user experience? Bringing the focus back to reality and starting to talk hard numbers– relating to who can effectively see your content and who can’t, should steer the conversation to where it needs to go.

Content.Users.Content.Users.

The presentation wasn’t necessarily WordPress specific much to the chagrin of some of the attendees but that was sort of the point. When you start to break down the genesis of “Responsive Design” it’s about content strategy as it is about design or technical implementation. (If you want to talk implementation scroll down to the stuff about themes.)

There seems to be two situations a developer will face, trying to upgrade a current site or accounting for responsive design at a site’s inception. Either way, in both situations there is homework to do and two philosophies are at the center of this homework. Graceful degration vs. progressive enhancement.

Graceful degradation is loosely described as cutting things away from a core “desktop” site depending on the end user device.

Progressive enhancement is the opposite, where content publishers focus on the “base” of their content (acceptable to all devices) and add content to extend their offering based on capabilities of the end user device that can handle the enhanced experience.

At it’s core, this is a conversation about how to best serve your content and understanding how to get it to your audience with minimum preconceived assumptions about how your users absorb it, allowing for some flexibility. After doing your due diligence you come with a game plan that divides your investment in your content into “vital” presentation items and what is “optional” per device. Here’s a great post on simplebits that illustrates my meaning.

Broad Strokes

Sonja covered formulas and techniques with the flexible fluid grid + CSS3 media queries to address styling issues per targeted device. Her explanation of all the ratio-based relationships between element and container was helpful. She discusses the “target / context = results” forumla and it cascades down the dom tree to get the desired responsive effect. Please reference her slides to get my meaning.

Jack got into stuff like “Graceful degradation” vs. “Progressive enhancement” and “crafting experiences that honor your content and your user.” His Camel vs. Stallion analogy about typical “design by committee” situations hit home for me. His main point was to find whats really important in the content (see the “Mobile First” philosophy) and that implementing a responsive approach does add a level of complexity to your building process but not compared with maintaining multiple versions of a site.

Principles of Responsive Design

Jack also presented what he called the “Principles of Responsive Design,” I’m paraphrasing here… please reference his slides when they are available.

1. Keep content king- respect your content, respect your users
2. Think mobile
3. Be progressive in your approach
4. Be semantic in your code
5. Labeling your dom elements is Key: Ids, classifications, microformats, ARIA
6. “C” is for cascade, hacks, know your selectors
7. Hide advanced CSS from older browsers
8. All javascript must be unobtrusive
9. Update your scripts, and gain features from the new code
10. Optimize your assets, minify, gzip

The Mechanics

When you pull back the curtain on the mechanics of a responsive design, it’s simple in theory- ideally, some kind of server-side technology (like PHP or Ruby) receives the request for data, server-side scripting “feature sensing” or “user-agent sniffing” of the client is initiated, the server decides what modules to load, re-position (or hide depending on your logic.)

There are lots of pros and cons, so there is an emphasis on early scope. Don’t over promise because your presentation won’t look perfect on every device, the idea is to have some kind of representation or version on most devices and to be practical.

Take Your Time

Start small, every content publisher’s solution should be tailored to their content and site architecture. Narrow your focus to core of content, essentials, build from there. It’s not practical to have a desktop site and use display:none to hide things as the base responsive solution. The example was given that you don’t want to download a data heavy media player to a mobile device, only to hide it because it’s not being used. Strategies must be put in place that take care with download time versus is a user missing important content.

There was also talk of client backlash rejecting responsive sites such as (old school) magazine-minded people that have a print mindset that desire their layout to be unchanging, pixel locked and the challenges involved.

Book Learnin’

A few books were mentioned by the presenters and during the back and forth with the audience, looks like good reading:

1. Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

2. Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte

3. Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson

4. Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke (Someone mentioned this book during the Q&A)

Plugins were mentioned as a possible way to introduce responsive features to a current theme. A quick search of the WordPress.org plugin repository seems to back this up. Here are three examples:
1. Respond.js
2. Responsive 2010
3. WP Fluid Images

Using WordPress body class to show or hide content, customize presentation in one theme, across multiple sites or views, etc. was discussed. There is a lot online about this technique.

Issue of dealing with the Apple high resolution Retina display and images was posed, this post on css-tricks.com makes some suggestions.

Someone in the crowd mentioned Nicole Sullivan’s Object Oriented CSS in a question.

Examples Of Responsive Sites

CSS-tricks.com, Studiopress.com, Smashingmagazine.com were all cited as examples as good responsive designed sites.

Somebody Mention Theming?

Before I get into themes, since this is as much about content strategy as it is about design- I want to sneak in this link to an interesting post about Implementing Taxonomy for Better User Experiences and this recent one I found of Mobile Interface design principles.

During the presentation there was a lot of talk about Studiopress’ Genesis and DIYThemes’ Thesis ( because of timeliness of updates and available support) but here are some responsive theme resources I found after doing some cursory searching:

1. Responsive Web Design for WordPress Theme Designers

2. What’s Your Favourite WordPress Responsive Theme Framework?

3. How to Choose the Right Responsive CSS Framework

4. 15 Responsive CSS Frameworks Worth Considering

5. Brave the Seas of HTML5 WordPress Development with Bones

6. 40 Best Responsive WordPress Themes

7. 65 Stylish and Lightweight Responsive WordPress Themes

8. 10 HTML5-Ready Blank, Bare-Bones and Naked Themes for WordPress

9. Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and the Less Framework 3

10. Origin: Responsive parent theme for Hybrid

Sonja’s Presentation Slides & Notes

Sonja was nice enough to post her assets online here: Sonja’s Slides, and Sonja’s notes.

Jack’s Presentation Slides & Notes

View Jack’s slides (best viewed in Safari- use the keyboard arrows, and spacebar to advance.) Read Jack’s notes.

Don’t Email Steve :-)

I’m recapping Steve’s introduction to the group here… His main point was don’t email him :-) We have 1900+ members, and our meetup is run through here: WordPressNYC. We meet every third Tuesday of the month. We will not meet in June (because of Wordcamp NYC 2012, see below for more information.) Our community is run though this Website here: WPNYC.org. Separate sites, separate logins – don’t confuse them. WPNYC.org has a pretty robust jobs board and helpful forums. Don’t email Steve :-)

WordCamp NYC 2012

Did I mention don’t email Steve? Go here: Wordcamp New York City http://2012.nyc.wordcamp.org/ … 800 slots for newbies to pros, on June 9-10 @ Baruch college. Tickets go onsale in May, sign up for the email newsletter (below the countdown timer on the right of the Wordcamp page) to get your notice. Oh, he’s taking submissions for presenters and sponsors, so you guys can email him :-)

The Wrapup

This meetup was a collision of a lot of worlds for me. Many of the issues discussed I have backburnered or I was dealing with only in theory and this presentation brought them into the forefront. Personally, I have been trying to come up with my own “bootstrap” (my own personal base Web app starter suite.) So far, with my recent experiences with Ruby, Compass, Blueprint, and SASS/SCSS- I am really interested in working with LESS and messing with Twitter Bootstrap, or Foundation. But, now after looking at this again because of this meetup and revisiting my research, I’m releaved to know I have a lot of options if I want to leverage what I already know about WordPress into my future prototyping with a “responsive” theme. This Bones theme might be what I am after. Stay tuned.

Rumor Has It

The next meetup with be all about WordPress multisite (WordPress MU) Stay tuned for that…

Hope To See You At A Meetup

Want to bump into me at a meetup? Check out my profile on meetup.com

Please Comment, Share Your Experiences

Feel free to add corrections, links and updates to this post in the comments if I missed anything. I especially want to hear what your takeaways were from the meetup or dealing with the issues involved. Thanks for visiting.

NYC Tech Startup Tour Meetup Recap: ideeli and Skillshare

April 15, 2012 By Chrisdigital 9 Comments

A little luck shined on me a while back on February 16th, when I was contacted by the organizer of the “NYC Tech Startup Tour Meetup: For Curious Developers.” It seems she was just starting up the group and was trying to roundup the founding membership for the fledgling endeavor and offered me an invitation.

I joined up thinking it was a great idea. The prospect of meeting some new people in the context of learning how they run their businesses was intriguing, and I was very curious what they would present to a room filled with visitors.

False Start

Unfortunately for me, I missed the first Meetup out of the gate at Squarespace & Zoc Doc due to a job interview scheduling conflict. I was really bummed because I’ve long been a fan of Squarespace since they started a few years back. I even reached out to them early on to see if they planned a white-label product for designers and developers (like Pagelime or Perch for example – products that I don’t think even existed yet during this time period.) This was way before I got into WordPress and some other CMS products. I just really liked how they were pioneering some interesting UI elements, and client accessible controls that I feel were the precursor to a lot of things people like about Tumblr, Posterous, Flavors.me, About.me, and similar services. It’s even been suggested recently with their 6.0 release Squarespace is gunning to cut into WordPress’ market share. That’s not likely mainly for flexibility reasons, and WordPress’ massive community support. They are more of threat to proprietary Website builder businesses like Intuit and Adobe’s Business Catalyst.

Escape To Chinatown

Fast-forward to the second meetup at iDeeli/Skillshare, both of which are in the Chinatown area of New York City. Everything was well organized and I was pleased my $5 got me dinner (at the Bongo Brothers Cuban food truck – @bongobros) and beer to go with meeting some nice people. The organizers Jovena (@skillfer) and Jenn (@missjenshaw) were very engaging and kept the scheduled events moving along. They incidentally also run the NY Tech Women Meetup Group. I was also impressed with both companies’ presentations which I describe below.

ideeli

(Taken from their Linkedin Profile) ideeli is a leading online retail site dedicated to delivering a unique, exciting daily shopping experience with a curated selection of offerings across the apparel, accessories, home, shoes, kids, travel and lifestyle categories. Each limited-time sale event offers privileged prices on the best brands and experiences. Most sale events start at noon ET and last only 40 hours.

Looks Like Fun

Ideeli was first up. A substantial crowd was already in attendance when I arrived, and the ideeli space didn’t allow too much free range movement with a horde of visitors milling about. However, under normal circumstances it looks like a fun place to work with a decent view of Chinatown. I walked around a bit and noticed a friendly dog policy and a ping pong game in progress amongst some top of the line computer hardware and a well kept office.

Their Presentation

The presentation was lead by Jim Menard and Leslie Borrell and three other intrepid souls: Jeff Wolski (dev) pictured in foreground, Patrick Brisbin (dev) and Malcolm Preston (ops.) Their showcase focused heavily on technology, backend architecture and operations. I have to say I was blown away and 50% of the discussion was slightly over my head. Who knew short run online sales of ladies apparel and accessories was so hardcore. It was all surprisingly transparent and certainly impressive.

Ideeli seems from the outside looking in, to be a dream work place for any developer. They covered team collaboration, construction of scrum teams, how they conceive ideas for sprints, general ideas about their agile workflow, caching schemas, network design, load balancing server requests for the traffic spikes, their trails and tribulations with third party vendors, traffic monitoring and analytics. They roughly got into everything they’ve tried over the last 5 years and where they imagine they’re going in the present and future. It was amazing. Other than one or two questions from the crowd I think we were collectively just trying to process it all. Speaking for myself, I watched with a great deal of professional admiration. Their desire to not be boxed into any one solution was apparent, and their eye for detail shined greatly.

Skillshare

(Taken from their Linkedin Profile) Skillshare is a platform to learn anything, from anyone. Our mission is to flip the traditional notion of education on its head and revolutionize learning. We are challenging the assumption that learning only occurs within the four walls of a classroom. Instead, we’ll tap into existing communities and networks, which we believe are the world’s largest universities.

On To The Next One

Skillshare was up second, and we were organized in groups of eight due to the tiny elevator at Skillshare HQ. I took the lead of one of the groups and headed north up the block and left to the next location. I must say fitting eight grown people in an old school Chinatown elevator was an amusing circus “clown car” act since my group was mostly six-foot dudes.

Education For All

Skillshare’s presentation was different for a lot of reasons but mostly because they were bright, shiny, and new (contrasting with ideeli’s five years in business.) I personally became aware of Skillshare a few weeks ago through a twitter contact, around the same time I ran across Treehouse.

Skillshare’s space is set up “Japanese” or “agency” style with no walls and rows of tables, as they encourage their team to move around to switch up who they interact with regularly. They share the space with another company and have a large kitchen area and a couple of decently sized rooms they actually teach classes in. I especially got a kick out of their “creative corner” where all the whiteboards were set up.

There was plenty of room to spread out and we were immediately introduced to the entire Skillshare team that was there for the evening. Skillshare’s team consists of less than 15 staff here in New York and they recounted the story of starting out with just two founders (Malcolm Ong @malcolmcasey, Mike Karnjanaprakorn @mikekarnj) and scaling up here in NY and then to various major cities around the country. I appreciated immediately how careful they are about who they bring on board, fostering a collaborative environment, and controlling growth. I like the team members I talked to, and I made sure I got all their cards: Malcolm, Michael, Abigail, Jake and Danya. I especially enjoyed Danya’s evangelistic attitude to try to convert me into a teacher.

You Should Teach!

As we listened to the Skillshare story, I was personally present to the fact they are all about community and team focus. The topics and vibe at Skillshare contrasted somewhat with ideeli since they are selling class slots and encouraging education to the masses, not retail products. The group conservation ran the gamut: company strategy, technical infrastructure, revenue streams, challenges finding or training teachers, course content, product promotion, perceived competition, etc. as Malcolm and Danya lead the tour into the kitchen.

Danya and I hit it off during the talk and she started working me over pretty good to start teaching a class when everyone started mingling afterwards. This was after I piped up a couple times in the Q&A and related the story about trying the find a good school for my son and the state of U.S. education in general. I think Skillshare’s goal of “democratizing education” and their belief “almost anyone can be a teacher” is an refreshing conversation to be involved in right now in our society.

Skillshare Takeaways

Some things I noted in our conversation were Skillshare encourages team members to wear many hats and jump into other “lanes,” they shared an anecdote about how one of their designers is often sharing links about topics involving education and spurring group discussion. I also found it interesting that they are not yet involved in online learning (in the works.) Most significantly, they plan to have cross-over and group collaborations with other companies in the education sector. Possibly planning and encouraging an “expo” of like-minded companies. They have no interest in viewing these other companies as threats. I think Knewton was mentioned as an example.

The Wrapup

I had a good time and I made some new friends, networked with developers and established contacts. I even have some thoughts on courses I might teach at Skillshare and learned some strategies that might improve hobby concepts I have in the works. I especially want to find time to go over my notes on vendors I want to check out, like the YII framework that Skillshare uses. I will certainly attend another NYC Tech Startup Tour if time allows.

Hope To See You At A Meetup

Want to bump into me at a meetup? Check out my profile on meetup.com

1. My WordCamp NYC 2012 Recap : 800 WordPress fans assemble

2. The Importance of Social Media and Your Online Persona

3. Responsive Design: WordPress NYC Meetup Recap

Intro to WordPress Plugin Development : NYC Meetup Recap

March 24, 2011 By Chrisdigital 8 Comments

It’s been an interesting last few weeks for my personal development, and metaphorically speaking you could say that it has mirrored what’s been going on with WordPress over the last few months. I’ve been optimizing, learning, and expanding the scope of how I see myself, and how others view me, plus I finally got around to launching some online design samples. As far as what’s going on with WordPress, the “little blog platform that could” has matured greatly and now launched (at the time of this writing) a full upgrade to WordPress 3.1.

Many consider WordPress to be a full blown Content Management System (CMS) even more than before, with the recent introduction of custom post types (and admin UI to match) and the fact that you can hack the admin interface to your liking with plugins like White Label CMS. It seems (at least for me personally,) all that remains is learning how to use the WordPress core smarter in my projects, plus figuring out whats a nice add-on (plugins, themes, hacks, and custom code) versus what practices should just be abandoned in lieu of improvements in WordPress 3. So, eager to find out what I could do with WordPress outside the norm, enter the latest WordPress NYC Meetup.

After missing a few WordPress meetups I really wanted to attend, I made time this week to head out to the WordPress Meetup NYC at it’s new location hosted at NYU Poly, and I made sure I RSVP’ed to get a slot. Especially, since in this edition the topic was a hot one, Brad Williams of WebDevStudios presented Intro to WordPress Plugin Development. Brad coincidentally runs the Philly WordPress meetup and if this presentation was any indication it’s also definitely worth attending on a regular basis as well.

A few changes since my last meetup were apparent this time around. NYU Poly is now the venue sponsor replacing Oracle in midtown. I must say the sunlight coming in through the window made for a nice feel. The environment definitely felt less corporate than the Oracle space and I recommend getting there early to find a good perch to view the screen.

Brad Williams’s slides were straight forward and focused on laying the foundation of good WordPress optimized code. He’s a great presenter that made nice with the NYC crowd sporting a “I Love NY” undershirt, and using fun examples like walking us through his faux plugin that engaged “Rage mode” on a mock blog to teach us his philosophy on plugin construction. There was a lively Q&A session but mainly the crowd wanted his slides. Other interesting things to note are – there was a heavy presence from designers, and a large group of newcomers to the meetup which was nice to see.

I won’t re-hash Brad’s slides but here are my main takeaways from the presentation and the Q&A:

A complete grasp of the anatomy of a plugin
Better understanding of introducing my own short codes
The concept of “conflicting” function names with other plugins and how to combat this
Two examples of high-selling premium plugins are Gravity Forms and Backup Buddy
Taking advantage of code hooks in WordPress and there are thousands of them, some undocumented in codex and detailed info only exists in WordPress core code.
His anecdote about the folks behind Gravity Forms “building a better mouse trap” contact form and then turning down client work to focus strictly on product development, hit home. In addition, his comments on finding plugins you like – which development has stalled on, might be a good place to start for ideas on your own plugins.
Brad also discussed “pay models” and licensing for your potential products: give it away free with paid support, versus pay up front and offer varying levels of support and upgrades, etc.

Brad’s presentation got people excited, after which the crowd broke up into two rooms: WordPress Newbies (in which Chris Cochran of Webdevstudios fielded questions) and the more advanced WordPress crew stayed in the main room with Brad Williams and Steve Bruner.

Sponsors Nrelate and Themeforest.net were on hand to make their presence felt. Nrelate is running a contest you can learn more about by subscribing to their newsletter on their blog, Oliver Wellington basically announced you can style (using css) the output from their Nrelate Related Content plugin anyway you want, which they boast can improve your click-through rates on your site by at least 5%. Submit your styling for their review and you can win some cash and credit in the source code if your styling gets integrated into the next version of the plugin. Also Steve Bruner and Mark Brodhuber of Themeforest.net handed out 23 t-shirts to some lucky early birds.
The other treat for the attendees was that 3 copies of Professional WordPress Plugin Development, and 3 copies of Professional WordPress (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) were raffled off after Brad’s presentation. Still bummed I didn’t win any.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next one, and seeing some familiar faces and meeting new friends. Especially, since I will have knocked out a “Hello World” plugin or perhaps my own “Rage mode” plugin by then. Cheers.

More thoughts on WordPress, Custom Post Types, and Plugin Development

1. Brad William’s slides for Intro to WordPress Plugin Development

2. The CMS Power of WordPress

3. Tutorial – Custom Post Types for WordPress

4. Registering and Displaying WordPress Custom Post Types In a Very Easy Way

5. Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know

6. How to Write a WordPress Plugin: 12 Essential Guides and Resources

7. Do we do enough to support WordPress Plugin Developers?

1. My WordCamp NYC 2012 Recap : 800 WordPress fans assemble

2. The Importance of Social Media and Your Online Persona

3. Responsive Design: WordPress NYC Meetup Recap

Looking behind the curtain of WordPress 3.0

May 19, 2010 By Chrisdigital 2 Comments

I went to my first WordPress NYC Meetup yesterday, and I was pretty excited about it. It was serendipity that my work load started to ease up when this meetup was scheduled, and I wanted to hear directly from others what they were up to with WordPress. Since I’ve had my head down the last few months fine tuning this blog, I also wanted to know about issues I might run into down the line with the pending release of WordPress 3.0 coming later this year. At the time of this writing it’s currently in its second beta and a lot is still in flux. This topic was a hot one and it was reported 94 souls braved the rain and schlepped it to mid-town NYC to get some insight into what’s coming next for WordPress fans.
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So, how was it?

Many thanks to the presenters Steve Bruner and Boone Gorges (who covered WordPress 3.0 MultiSite functionality) for their time and energy. They kept things moving and hosted a lively discussion. I got the most out of hearing what people were actually doing with WordPress currently and possible answers to their functionality questions. In addition to covering the new standard theme for 3.0 “2010“, how to retrofit old themes for 3.0, the new native parent/child theme functionality, custom taxonomies, custom posts, some minor changes to WordPress semantics, etc. (here’s a full list of announced features of WordPress 3.0), I also left with a short list of plugins I need to look into that might help me with some of my current work.

Do you need to care about WordPress 3.0?

The short answer is “No, not yet.”
To be perfectly honest I’ve been ignoring 3.0 since I heard about it because I haven’t worked on multi-user or a network of sites that require one back-end database, which is one of big selling points of 3.0. My indifference apparently is being rewarded as I heard the unofficial word yesterday that there will be support of WordPress 2.9.x for sometime even after 3.0’s release, while people sort out how their world is changing. As of right now and on the horizon, there is no immediate need to make the jump to the latest beta or new release as in the past (usually for critical security patches) because 2.9 is so stable. As you can see by this project plan 3.0’s release is a little behind, no doubt due to issues that pop up in real world application of the new release.

Laying the ground work for migration and upgrading

I did walk away with some sound advice from the Meetup, which is – there is functionality in the new release that makes your life a lot easier, ESPECIALLY if you’re running multi-user sites and doing advanced tweaks to your templates and themes. However, using a beta on live client sites is inadvisable due to the fact the product is still in beta testing. What you should be doing is copying your live sites in a “sandbox” environment or doing local installs of the beta and seeing how your data interacts with it. This will help you be ahead of the curve when WordPress 3.0 officially drops later this year. This is especially prudent if you have to describe functionality to others or train your clients on new features. You can peek behind the curtain on the WordPress development blog to get on idea of how furiously developers are working to get 3.0 released.

Is this app going to be a beast?

This is one of the questions that came up at the Meetup, and how your Website will scale is definitely a concern that WordPress 3.0 will have people talking about. Using this software certainly comes with the responsibility of understanding the hosting infrastructure you’re installing it on. There are sure to be some hosts that ban or at least discourage installing multi-user site features on their network for fear of them being resource hogs. Come on… who wouldn’t want a potential open faucet that could scale to thousands of users in a matter of months on each hosting account? The politics behind this should be interesting to watch. The first thought I had when this crossed my mind was the possibility of modified version releases or some ability to disable core functionality with tiered license keys so that hosts could feel comfortable that they can control the install base on their network. I’m curious if this will be a serious push to have WP 3.0 sites hosted on “cloud” platforms. It’s probably also likely a lot more Web hosts are going to get into the CDN business in one form or another as a result of WordPress 3.0’s release.

What’s next?

WordPress 2.9 is stable and fine for most people right now. WP 3.0 beta introduces functionality fixes, and some changes to UI quibbles users had with previous versions. But I’m really interested in what the WordPress plugin and theme framework developers will do with 3.0. I’ll take my cues from that community, which will most likely push WordPress very far from being known as a “blog platform.” For example, Steve Bruner showed a demo of RoloPress, his version of “Contact Manager” built on WordPress backend at last night’s Meetup. WordPress 2.9 introduced a lot of concepts and GUI goodness that will be in 3.0 final release, but 3.0 kicks it up a notch for 2.9 users with features like the “drag and drop” menu builder. In the past building something equivalent and having the associated admin UI to manage that feature would have to been a code hack or involved searching for a pretty specialized and heavy duty plugin. Doing less code hacks and slimming down on the use of plugins is always good because it simplifies your software upgrade path, giving you easier access to the next latest and greatest thing. Everyone likes that :-)

Notes

Looking forward to Wordcamp NYC later in the year (planning was announced for October or November 2010.) The book I mentioned in the Q&A that covers WordPress basics quite nicely is Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read and having Jeremy Clarke there answering questions was awesome also.

More Thoughts on WordPress 3.0

1. WordPress 3.0 – What Lies Ahead? Awesomeness

2. What’s coming up in WordPress 3.0

3. What’s Coming in WordPress 3.0 (Features)

4. It’s coming! WordPress 3.0 – Pros and Cons

5. How to Enable Multisite in WordPress 3.0

Down The Rabbit Hole Of History

Wait, This Sounds Familiar

Challenging Conversation

Why Are We Even Catering To These Devices?

Content.Users.Content.Users.

Broad Strokes

Principles of Responsive Design

The Mechanics

Take Your Time

Book Learnin’

Resources & Links, Stuff From Q&A

Examples Of Responsive Sites

Somebody Mention Theming?

Sonja’s Presentation Slides & Notes

Jack’s Presentation Slides & Notes

Don’t Email Steve :-)

WordCamp NYC 2012

The Wrapup

Rumor Has It

Hope To See You At A Meetup

Please Comment, Share Your Experiences

False Start

Escape To Chinatown

ideeli

Looks Like Fun

Their Presentation

Skillshare

On To The Next One

Education For All

You Should Teach!

Skillshare Takeaways

The Wrapup

Hope To See You At A Meetup

Read more on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog:

1. My WordCamp NYC 2012 Recap : 800 WordPress fans assemble

2. The Importance of Social Media and Your Online Persona

3. Responsive Design: WordPress NYC Meetup Recap

More thoughts on WordPress, Custom Post Types, and Plugin Development

Read more on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog:

1. My WordCamp NYC 2012 Recap : 800 WordPress fans assemble

2. The Importance of Social Media and Your Online Persona

3. Responsive Design: WordPress NYC Meetup Recap

So, how was it?

Do you need to care about WordPress 3.0?

Laying the ground work for migration and upgrading

Is this app going to be a beast?

What’s next?

Notes

More Thoughts on WordPress 3.0