I’ve always struggled to write up the job descriptions we are hiring for. As I was trying to describe our current openings last week, I had a bit of an epiphany. The biggest reason I struggle to write up job descriptions is that we’re looking for certain kinds of people, not someone to fit into a specific position.

Instead of posting a bunch of individual designer or developer positions, we instead have a list of designer and developer skill sets. Everyone on our team has cross-functional skills and we consider this a real strength. For some reason it has taken until now for us to make our “hiring” page reflect this (instead of sticking to the more traditional listing of available positions).

At this time we’re looking for a few developers to join our team. Head on over and take a look. If you like what you see and think you’d be a good fit.

I’m very pleased that we have reached the point where we are hiring to work on internal product initiatives and to shore up our internal systems as well as to contribute to our WordPress consulting and custom development services.

Crowd Favorite is a little unique in that you have the opportunity to work on lots of diverse projects and cutting edge technology, but you don’t have the 60-80 hour work week that demanded by your typical startup.

If you care about building great things on the web – please be in touch.

At today’s team meeting, the Crowd Favorite folks who contributed to the WordPress 3.3 release (including me!) received goodies. I hope to dole out a few more for the 3.4 release.

Related:

If one of your 2012 resolutions is to contribute to core WordPress code development, please read this post: wp.me/pbNCB-ui

— WordPress(@WordPress) January 5, 2012

I have a few things I want to make sure I focus on in my professional life this year:

1. Publish more. I’ve made progress with posting more frequently here and releasing more code. I’m pleased that I’m getting more stuff out there, but I feel like I can do a much better job explaining how to use some of these tools. My team and I build products with depth and I’d like to do a better job detailing some of these nuances.
2. Raise the bar. Professionally, there is nothing more important to me than putting out the very best quality products. I’ve got a great team, and I’m excited to see what we can do together this year. I’m going to drive us all to make sure everything we do is the very best.
3. Manage myself. Constantly make sure that the things I am working on are the things I should be working on. I need to delegate a little more and be more involved in areas I know are particularly important. I need to reduce my distractions and really focus the important stuff.

2012 will be the 10th anniversary of this site and my involvement with WordPress (originally b2); and it will be the 5th anniversary for Crowd Favorite. I’m looking forward to a great year.

Note that this is lightly tested and there is absolutely no information in the README yet. Please contribute via pull requests in GitHub to help write the README with the information you would find useful.

I’m excited about the move to using Social as the platform for Twitter Tools because it fixes the user experience issues that have plagued Twitter Tools since Twitter’s move to OAuth. Read more of my bitching about this here:

• Twitter Tools OAuth Update – June 10, 2010
• Twitter Tools and OAuth Continued – June 13, 2010
• Twitter Tools OAuth Update – August 13, 2010
• Twitter Tools 2.4 (OAuth Support) – August 15, 2010

Please open issues on GitHub for any bugs you find.

Social has a couple of high level features:

1. It enables broadcasting your WordPress content to social networks.
2. It brings back reactions from those social networks to your own site.
3. It lets people log in through social networks to comment – identity generally leads to better conversations.
4. It allows the sharing of comments on your site to social networks.
5. It does all of this without requiring you to register as a developer with the social networks and create your own apps.

This sort of integration is fraught with edge cases and little gotchas. For version 2.0 we looked at what we had with 1.x, looked at our road map for Social, bit down hard and decided to do a full rewrite for 2.0.

The downside of the rewrite was how long it took to get 2.0 released, but by doing it now we have a much more extensible platform on which to add connections to other services (Google+, for example) and we had less to refactor than we would have had we waited.

Along with the full rewrite, there are a bunch of new features in 2.0. Here are a few of them:

• Changed the way authentication works, to improve security.
• Added support for posting to Facebook Pages as well as profiles.
• When someone Likes one of your broadcasts on Facebook, that is pulled in to your site.
• New visual presentation of Retweets and Likes, so that the activity is visible but the discussion is less cluttered. We also have a smart algorithm for trying to match retweets that are not marked as such by Twitter’s API.
• If you respond to a comment imported from Twitter on your site and broadcasting that back to Twitter, the “in reply to” thread is correctly maintained.
• Where possible, comments on your WordPress site are threaded to match discussions that happened on social sites.
• A new queuing system for the checking of for social reactions, along with features that should reduce (hopefully eliminate) reactions from creating duplicate comments.
• Delayed broadcasting for future posts and comments that are held for moderation.
• The ability to enable broadcasting by default on new posts (please use this judiciously) to selected globally authenticated accounts as well as selected personal accounts.
• Convenience links in the admin bar and on the post list page to allow you to manually check for social reactions on a post.
• A ton of edge case handling for things like changing from bit.ly to wp.me URLs after publishing a post, respecting private tweets, etc.

I have a few good examples to demonstrate how Social brings in comments and displays them. Unfortunately some of these were pulled in before I started running the Social 2.0 codeline so not all of the retweets, etc. are displayed as cleanly as they will be in the future.

Big thanks to MailChimp for their support of Social. They are not only the primary benefactor of the plugin, but they also run the service that allows WordPress to connect to Twitter and Facebook without the pain and hassle of registering as a developer and creating apps for each platform.

Social’s source code is hosted on GitHub and built in the open in the best tradition of Open Source. Pull requests, enhancements and feedback are welcome.

As a few of our projects have enjoyed exactly the sort of developer community engagement I was hoping for (pull requests, issues, discussion), I discovered that my team was getting email notifications for these events but I was not. Instead, I would hear a comment from a colleague or get an email from someone every few weeks asking why I hadn’t responded to their issue.

Once you get past a few repositories, it’s not realistic to click through them all and see if there are new issues that need attention – the notifications are quite necessary.

After confirming that all notifications were enabled in my account settings, I eventually sent a note into GitHub support. I quickly got a response with the solution:

Users in the Owners group don’t receive notifications. You need to create a normal team and add yourself to it to get notifications for that team’s repos.

This was indeed the case. If you aren’t getting notifications for your organizations GitHub repositories and you are in the Owners group, add yourself to another group that has access to the repositories – that should do the trick.

Download from GitHub

We are hoping for a general release of version 2.0 on Monday, so please report any issues you find in the WordPress.org support forums. Thanks!

Here is the link to the posting on Craig’s List and our site.

The bar, raised.

What happens when publishers put important data in the post format custom fields, then choose to change to a theme that doesn’t support these fields?

It’s a legitimate concern, and (as noted previously) one that I had an interesting discussion with Ian about at WordCamp SF this year. His idea of core functionality that could tack the data on at output seems like a great solution.

In Open Source, code talks.

I’ve put together a proof-of-concept plugin that does exactly this with the data fields supported by our post formats UI plugin.

With this plugin enabled, the information in custom fields is automatically added to the post content. In the event the publisher switches to a theme that either doesn’t support post formats (or doesn’t support the custom fields our admin UI provides for), they could enable this plugin and their posts would have all the information displayed that they expect.

Once WordPress 3.3 is out the door, I’ll submit these plugins for consideration and discussion to be included in core. In the meantime, this should at least minimize data portability concerns for theme developers.

Fellow developers, please help this improve! Fork it on GitHub, provide feedback and enhancements, etc. This was put together in a few hours yesterday afternoon, so it is very lightly tested and should be considered a starting point. There are some simple checks in place to try to avoid situations where the auto-added content would duplicate content manually inserted into the post, but I’m guessing that can be improved a bit (it’s entirely lacking for image formats, for example).

While it is a great framework feature, it only really exists as something developers leverage to extend WordPress. There is no UI that ships with the feature, which limits its accessibility to users.

My team and I have been working on FavePersonal (the theme you see here) for a while, and one of the features we’ve built is an admin interface for post formats.

We have released this code on GitHub (pull requests welcome) and encourage any and all theme developers to use it, add to it and improve it.

Here are some details on how it works.

The plugin is a completely additive solution that leverages the default WordPress functionality, while improving the UI and standardizing the names and presentation of custom fields that support the various post formats.

A set of tabs are added to the post authoring screen that allow users to select the post format they would like to use. The built-in radio button interface is hidden, and the tabs simply control the selected radio button.

Status posts are treated as “content only” – similar to the short form seen in Facebook status updates and Twitter’s tweets. Behind the scenes, a title for the post is set using the first 50 characters of the content.

Link posts have an additional custom field (_format_link_url) for the URL of the website/page being linked to. This URL is then utilized in the theme to implement linking directly to the external site from the title link (if desired).

Image posts utilize the WordPress built-in Featured Image functionality. The Featured Image is treated as the image for the post, and the theme displays it accordingly for this post format.

Gallery posts display the WordPress gallery in the tab so that it’s clear that these items will appear with the post. The theme then implements the gallery view based on the post format.

Video posts have an additional field added for embed code or an oEmbed URL to be added. This information is stored in a custom field (_format_video_embed). Then the theme can use this to display the video in an elegant way.

Quote posts have two additional fields. One for the name of the person being quoted (_format_quote_source_name), and one for an attribution link (_format_quote_source_url). These can be used in the theme to present the quote and attribution in a consistent manner. Similar to status posts, a title for the quote is created behind the scenes from the first 50 characters of the quote.

You’ll notice that we have adopted a consistent naming convention for custom fields used to support post formats. That convention is:

_format_{format type}_{descriptive data name}

The underscore at the beginning of the key prevents the field from showing up in the default Custom Fields interface (since we are managing it behind the scenes) and the rest is set up to logically describe the type of data being stored.

We look forward to releasing our theme in the near future, and hope that this code will be widely used to help bring adoption of post formats in a way that is truely portable between WordPress themes.

Several people I’ve shown this to have asked if I’d like to see this adopted in WordPress core. Yes, of course! I had an interesting conversation with Ian Stewart about this at WordCamp SF this year. He had some reasonable concerns about the data being stored in custom fields not being portable to themes that don’t implement post formats; while acknowledging that having the data in a structured format (separate fields) was very valuable for presentation purposes.

One possible solution we discussed would be the addition of core functionality that would look for these custom fields and post format support, and would auto-prepend/append the custom fields to the content accordingly (add the featured image, gallery, quote attribution, etc.). A solution like this is definitely preferable to requiring all of the data to be present in a single content field.

UPDATE: see my follow-up on this.

We’ve moved back into our office, but things aren’t going to be done done for a while still. The good news is we can stop paying rent on the temporary space. I’d say we’ll be all wrapped up by Halloween.

Here are some shots of the painting and carpet installation. I’ll do a wrap-up post with photos and notes on the changes we made when things are all in place.

I’m certainly biased, but I think this is a pretty great position. You will get to:

• work with latest web standards
• work on high-profile websites
• conceptualize and create new user experiences and interfaces
• collaborate with other talented team members on design and front-end implementation approaches
• work with a great development team that won’t compromise design during implementation

We have a fast paced environment and you’ll be working on both internal and external (client) projects. You should have the following qualities:

• love for a good challenge
• love of creating usable features and championing the user’s experience
• experience with/interest in product design
• experience with/interest in website design
• experience with/interest in some logo/branding work
• experience with/interest in technical implementation using current front-end web standards

We’re looking for a demanding, detail-oriented, analytical thinker. A pixel off should keep you up at night (or at least from going home until it’s fixed). A well-designed feature should be inspected from all angles to make sure it will work exactly as desired. Things like inconsistencies in animation speeds between different features on the same page should be like nails on your chalkboard.

You’ll be working on a variety of projects and products, many relating to WordPress (prior experience with WordPress is not a requirement). Skills and talent are more important to us than experience, but relevant experience is definitely a plus.

If you want an opportunity to work where everyone around you cares deeply about the quality of their work; a place where you can utilize the latest and greatest solutions and best practices; a place where you can be proud of the work you’ve done; a place that will push you and challenge you – I want to hear from you.

We’re in the process of remodeling the Crowd Favorite office – basically re-configuring the space to make it work better for us. Here are some shots of the progress.

Luckily we were able to move into a temporary space just across the street while the construction is underway. It’s a little darker than our normal space, but we fit and the location was ideal. We were able to move everything over in just a couple of hours.

Is this another social media conference?

Not at all. Think more along the lines of GitHub’s motto: “social coding”. Our speakers will be exploring how social trends can change the way we build and use technology, and how technology in turn can change the way we socialize.

The folks at RedMonk go to a lot of conferences. They know what makes a good conference and early signs for Monktoberfest indicate they will be living up to their own high expectations.

The speaker lineup and attendee list both look fantastic. I know at least one person who does quite a bit of conference globetrotting who is paying out of pocket to make sure he’s there.

As of this writing, there are still a few tickets available – jump on this if you can.

Since the initial conference will smaller (largely due to limitations at the beer venue), it should be easier to connect with new folks as natural crossover with people I already know. As with any conference, the quality of the people is key. I’m looking forward to learning as much in the hallway sessions and after-events as in the sessions themselves.

I’m very proud that Crowd Favorite was able to get in as an early sponsor of the inaugural event.