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.

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!

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.

A “Drafts” link is added to the admin bar.

Clicking this drops down a drawer with your drafts.

The new version also updates the styling, improves performance, and will make you younger, fitter and better looking. Enjoy!

Developers, we’re in the process of moving active development of our WordPress code into GitHub to encourage more community involvement. Please fork and contribute as appropriate.

Download

This thing is really cool, for a number of reasons. I’ll dive into those in a bit, but first head on over to the MailChimp blog to see the official release announcement. Over there you can see the plugin in action, pulling in Tweets and Facebook comments along with comments authenticated via Twitter and Facebook right there on the blog post.

This is the second opportunity my Crowd Favorite team and I have had to build a plugin with the great folks at MailChimp. They really care about putting out a stellar product for the WordPress community, and as a bonus we had the privilege of working directly with Aarron Walter (user experience guru at MailChimp) who designed the comment layout in Social.

Ok, so on to the juicy tech details. Social has a bunch of really awesome features that allow your WordPress site to interact with the social web more easily and completely than ever. After trying to write this up a few different ways, I’m going to try to tackle them in an O’Grady-style Q & A.

You mention a bunch of features, want to hit on a few to get this started?

Sure, in no particular order:

• Twitter and Facebook authentication for commentors
• Automatically pull in reactions on Facebook and Twitter as comments to your blog posts
• Optionally broadcast posts to Twitter and Facebook
• Per-user accounts for broadcasting
• Customizable broadcast format
• Easiest set-up of any Twitter/Facebook plugin for WordPress
• A base for other social integrations with WordPress

That is a bunch, how did this get started?

The MailChimp folks had some good ideas already when we first started talking about this, particularly around commenting. What you see today is very much what they had in mind, however they were also open to some of our suggestions, brought more of their own ideas along the way, and I think the result here is a great win for the WordPress community.

Let’s talk about the commenting bit, why is this a big deal? How does it work?

The state of blog comments has been constantly evolving with the social web. Conversations that used to happen exclusively in blog comment threads are now spread out across Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. In addition, comments have become targets for SPAM, trolls and other web undesirables.

Social addresses this in two ways:

1. Searching Twitter and Facebook for reactions to your post, and importing those as comments on the post. This helps keep the conversation available right at the source, even if it happens elsewhere.
2. By offering authentication through Twitter and Facebook, you can force commentors to attach an online identity to their words. Folks seem to be a bit more civil when they can’t be anonymous.

Aren’t there services that pull in social web reactions already?

Definitely, but Social is pretty smart about this. It searches for responses (and retweets) to your broadcasts, and also looks for mentions by URL on Twitter. It does it all on your own site, creating comments that you are in control of.

You mention that Social supports broadcasting, there are lots of plugins that do this already. How is this different?

There are a lot of plugins that do this, but Social does it in a really elegant way. I wrote Twitter Tools, one of the more popular plugins that broadcasts to Twitter. In talking with MailChimp about the feature set for Social, I outlined a bunch of enhancements that I wanted to make in the next version of Twitter Tools. Since Social needed to support broadcasting, we took all of the things I wanted to add to and improve on in Twitter Tools and instead put them right into Social.

Social has per-author broadcasting accounts. You can still authenticate sitewide Twitter and Facebook accounts that can be broadcast to by any author. And additionally each author can also authenticate their own accounts that only they can broadcast to.

A great example of this is the MailChimp blog. Social could be configured so that any author posting there can send tweets to the @mailchimp account, while Aarron can also connect his @aarron account as well. Then when he posts to the blog, he can send a tweet out to either or both accounts (on a per-post basis).

We also drastically improved the flexibility of what you send out in the broadcast. Twitter Tools had a hard-coded format:

New blog post: My Post Title http://example.com/my-post-title

Social allows you to set a default format using the title, content, etc. as desired, but also gives you the chance to customize what goes out on a per-service and per-post basis. It’s really slick. You publish a post, then you’re taken to a screen that has the broadcast items ready for you to send, and you can edit them and tell them where to go.

The biggest improvement over Twitter Tools isn’t the broadcasting though, it’s the ease of set-up.

Making things easy for users is always good, but how is Social different here?

When Twitter changed a year ago to require OAuth for authentication, I said it would be a Bad Thing for users of Open Source tools like Twitter Tools. The process of creating an app sucks, I’ve botched it myself. Facebook has the same requirements.

In discussing the features we wanted to create for Social, we kept coming back to the lousy user experience of creating apps, etc. on these sites. This is where MailChimp really stepped up to make Social a great tool for the WordPress community.

We told them what all of us WordPress developers had run into with the Open Source issues around OAuth secrets, and that the only real way to solve it would be to run an app as a service that could be used by Open Source tools like WordPress plugins. And when we were done explaining the situation, they said: let’s do it.

They have created and are hosting a secure service that connects to Twitter and Facebook on your behalf. They’ve created the app so that you don’t have to. No need to copy keys around, make sure you check the right boxes on your app set-up, etc. – all you have to do is install, add your accounts with the normal web pop-up authentication, and you’re good to go.

So MailChimp is hosting this app for all of us for free?

Yep, I think I already mentioned they are awesome… indeed they are.

How is Social, to use your words, a base for other social integrations with WordPress

Social is more than the features you see on the outside. On the inside, it is a set of libraries that can connect to the social web (via the MailChimp provided app). Other plugins can leverage this to make additional calls to these services. I previously mentioned that Social out-shines Twitter Tools for broadcasting, and it does. But Social doesn’t include the Tweet archiving, blog post from Tweet, or recent Tweets features of Twitter Tools.

We are putting the finishing touches on a new version of Twitter Tools that will piggy-back on Social. Social will handle the account authentication and broadcasting, Twitter Tools will do the Tweet archiving, recent Tweets, blog post from Tweets, etc. – it’s going to be a huge upgrade.

Anything else you’d like to add here?

We’ve already started on some new features for the next version, and we’d love to get more feedback from the community as they use the plugin. There are already some great suggestions in the comments on the MailChimp blog post that we’ll be integrating; and we’ll try to keep an eye on the WordPress support forums too.

I think we’ll see a few more services added in the near future as well. I’ve been lobbying for one that I want to build a little integration with myself.

Fellow WordPress developers, if you’d like to extend Social please stop by and say hi at WordCamp San Francisco this weekend. I look forward to hearing your ideas and seeing how we can work together to make great things for the WordPress community.

There were versions of WordPress prior to 3.1 that had a bug that caused pages and some custom post types to have non-unique GUID values. This was fixed in WordPress 3.1, but the data has never been cleaned up. This means that pages and/or custom post types on your site that were created back in the 3.0 days may have this problem, while other pages and/or custom post type content is just fine.

It’s a real problem for RAMP customers because RAMP relies on GUIDs being unique. RAMP uses GUIDs to properly associate content between WordPress instances (staging and production), and to maintain relationships between posts, pages, attachments, etc. If the GUIDs are not unique, then RAMP might update the wrong page when trying to push content from staging to production. We are adding a few additional safeguards around this issue within RAMP for the next release (it will prompt you to run the GUID-Fix if needed).

Our CF GUID-Fix plugin will clean up this data in your database. It’s a “run-once, then delete” type of plugin.

This fix is crucial for RAMP customers, but it’s a good idea for everyone. GUIDs are exposed in feeds, so if your WordPress site is generating feeds that include pages or custom post types that were created in WordPress 3.0, your feeds may be invalid due to non-unique (duplicate) GUIDs for items in the feed. And any other plugins or WordPress tools that (reasonably) expect GUIDs to be unique will be pleased as well.

Hopefully this will be addressed in a future WordPress release but as with anything in a project as big as WordPress, it’s never as easy as we’d all hope. You never want the cure to be worse than the disease, so moving judiciously is always the right thing to do.

1. If you are a RAMP customer, you should have received an email with this information and more yesterday afternoon. If you didn’t receive this, please let me know. [back]

At Crowd Favorite we are fortunate to have some really great clients. These clients are running some pretty big web properties on WordPress, and they need to stage their content, review it internally, revise it, etc. before they put it live. It’s a pretty universal need – we just did it on our own site as we were preparing the web page and documentation for RAMP on our own site. This has always been difficult with WordPress, and had often resulted in SQL export/import followed by update scripts and/or manual copy-paste steps. RAMP solves this problem elegantly. You simply:

1. Install the RAMP plugin on your staging and production servers, and enter the auth key and URL from production in the settings for your staging server.
2. Select the changes you’d like to send and save them as a batch.
3. RAMP the batch up to your production server.

RAMP doesn’t just support posts and pages either; it fully supports custom post types, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, users, menus, links and more.

We’re really proud of the underlying architecture of RAMP. We spent a long time working out just the right way to implement this type of functionality for WordPress, and I’m really pleased with the solution. We utilize core WordPress functionality and APIs, the XMLRPC layer for transport between servers, and built everything on top of an wonderfully extensible system (which uses the core WordPress hook and filter system) to allow any WordPress content to participate in a RAMP batch. We’ve already done this to Carrington Build.

RAMP is a commercial product priced at $99 per staging/production server pair. This includes documentation and support in our customer forum.

I’ve got an idea…

I love it when I get a note like this from internet superhero Dave Pell. It normally means I’m going to get a chance to help build something I’m going to love.

Our latest project together is Delivereads. You may have read about it already on Daring Fireball, Gizmodo or the TypeKit blog. If you haven’t, here’s the 30 second overview:

• Some articles that are available online are too long to comfortably read in your browser, they’d be better to read on your Kindle.
• Dave wanted a way to send these articles to his own Kindle, and thought that others might be interested in them as well.¹

Yep, I certainly wanted to receive Dave’s selected articles on my Kindle. The system would be pretty straightforward to create… let’s do it!

The basic workflow is pretty straightforward:

1. Dave does the hard work finding the great content. When he does find something, he uses the Delivereads bookmarklet to add it to the system.

   

2. When adding the article, Dave can add commentary to it as well. This commentary will be included in the Kindle delivery.

   

3. Once a good selection of articles is ready, Dave creates a delivery and selects the articles he wants to be included. These can be re-ordered as desired (using drag and drop).

   

4. Once the articles are set, the commentary has been added and everything is ready to go, there are both preview and test-run features to make sure that everything is just right. The preview allows for a quick review on the web to find any obvious issues, then the test run sends the delivery to Dave so he can proof it before it’s sent out to everyone. As we all know, there is no “unsend” button for email, so being a little careful here is important.

   

5. Once everything is reviewed and ready, Dave hits the magic button and you get the deliveread on your Kindle.

   

The articles that you receive on your Kindle go through a few transformations before they are ready to send. The first step is to grab the article content. The articles are then arranged in the deliveread, along with the table of contents, commentary and various “back” links.

We went through a lot of revisions and tweaking to try to get the deliveread format right. What we have now is basically:

• Table of Contents
• Intro with article list and commentary (your Kindle opens to this page)
• Article 1
• Commentary on Article 2
• Article 2
• Commentary on Article 3
• Article 3
• Unsubscribe instructions

There is a link to the table of contents at the beginning and end of the article, and a link to original article on the web at the end of each article. We chose to intersperse the commentary on each article after the first article. We do this because these are long form articles and by the time you get to Article 2, you have likely forgotten the commentary from the introduction. However, the links from the introduction and the table of contents go directly to the article (skipping the interstitial commentary) since you likely have that context already. Dave and I are definitely open to feedback and suggestions that might improve the service or deliveread format, so if you have ideas please let us know.

The Delivereads service is built on our Oxygen web application platform. This provides a very robust set of web application features and best practices so that when we build a web application like Delivereads we are able to focus on building the bits that are of high value instead of spending time on user management, permissions, collision detection, item revision history, etc., etc. We’ve created a wide variety of apps, services and web APIs with Oxygen and it is proving to be an excellent platform.

Does building a service like Delivereads sound like fun? It is! Join our team, we’re hiring! (Previous blog posts: PHP Web Developer, Technical Project Manager)

1. Dave is a great curator of content. [back]

We are hiring immediately for 2 PHP developers to join our team. You should have the following core qualities and experience:

• A love for new challenges. We are constantly taking on new projects for high profile clients, building new integrations, and pushing the limits of what can be done with WordPress.
• A desire to work in a developer-centric environment.
• A solid knowledge of general web architecture, PHP, JavaScript and some decent HTML and CSS chops.
• A self-starter who loves taking ownership of projects.
• Experience working in a team environment and a desire to do so.
• High standards and willingness to always adhere to our “don’t ship crap” policy.
• A willingness to be open and honest about bugs and mistakes.

This position is available immediately in our Denver office, and we are only considering local candidates¹ at this time.

All of this sound good? I hope so, and I look forward to hearing from you.

1. We are willing to consider candidates who wish to relocate to Denver. [back]

At Crowd Favorite we build cool things for the web. You will join us to enjoy the privilege of working with great clients and a sharp and dedicated team on fun and challenging projects.

The project manager position is a management role – but we have a very flat structure and a collaborative team atmosphere. You will be coordinating with clients to understand their project requirements and to provide ideas and suggestions as to how projects can be improved. At the same time you will coordinate our internal resources to produce top quality work on time. You’ll do all of this while managing expectations on both sides to keep things running smoothly. It’s a challenging role, but you’ll have the support of a talented and experienced team that can really deliver for you.

You should have the following core qualities and experience:

• The ability to “get things” quickly. This isn’t a place for the complacent. We enjoy the chance to play with new technology and are always taking on new challenges.
• The desire to organize and manage and a willingness to juggle. Each project has its own unique path with challenges that arise throughout. The project manager has key responsibility throughout the project’s entire life cycle.
• A general understanding of how web technologies work and interact. We build things from the ground up, we customize, we integrate. You’ll learn something new on each project, but there has to be a solid base to start from.
• A willingness to make decisions, even if they end up being mistakes. Mistakes happen, it’s how we learn. The key is to make them with good intentions and to always make new ones.
• Excellent communication skills (written and verbal) and an understanding of nuance.
• High standards and a willingness to stand up and say so if you believe standards aren’t being met.
• You do not need to have prior project management experience.

This position is available immediately in our Denver office, and we are only considering local candidates¹ at this time.

All of this sound good? I hope so, and I look forward to hearing from you.

1. We are willing to consider candidates who wish to relocate to Denver. [back]

I talk quite a bit about Crowd Favorite and running a WordPress development business in the first 15 minutes or so, then chime in here and there throughout the rest of the hour.

My thanks to Shane for putting together a great panel and doing a fantastic job as the moderator, and to my fellow panelists Brandon and Sonia for their great contributions to the panel and making it a fun experience (and hopefully interesting to the audience).

1. The direct MP3 download is also available. [back]

As this does fix some bugs, it is a recommended upgrade for all users. As long as your customizations have been made in a child theme, they should be retained in the upgrade.

Carrington Build has been a great product for us. We’re building bigger and bigger sites with it, and we’ve seen it work just like we anticipated: we’ve given our clients the power to manage their own sites, including sophisticated design and layout changes.

We have made a bunch of improvements in Carrington Build since our 1.0 release. Here is a short list of some of the changes and enhancements in the new release:

• Added a carousel module.
• Created an extension framework to the WordPress revision system and implemented it in Build so that Build pages have all of their custom layout data saved within the WordPress revision system. This framework will actually be released as a public plugin soon on wordpress.org.
• Enhance the Loop module to support custom post types, taxonomies, etc. and add feature to allow it to be used in order to create multi-column lists of items.
• WordPress 3.1 compatibility.
• Lost of misc. changes and bug fixes.
• We’ve posted our QA checklist for Build in our news release, in case you’re interested in seeing what we run through on every release candidate.

This is just a sampling, the full changelog (included in the download) is about 75 items long. And we’ve got a bunch more stuff we’re excited about for the next version.

Check it out, I hope you like it.

We’ll be on stage bright and early at 9:30am on Sunday. Get coffee on the way.

I think it will be a pretty interesting discussion. We’ve got the major WordPress revenue streams (products, services, content) well covered, and each of us has a unique viewpoint on the WordPress community, ecosystem and marketplace.

I expect to be talking primarily about my experience working with large engagements and building the team and complimentary services (BackupMoxie, CloudMoxie) at Crowd Favorite along with some lessons learned from my WordPress HelpCenter experiment. But it’s a panel, so really the discussion could go anywhere. And that’s why it’s fun!

If you’d like to meet up at SxSW, please get in touch.

1. My thanks to Shane for doing all the hard work and inviting me to participate. [back]