WordPress developer and self-described “prolific plugin developer” Scott Reilly has joined Audrey Capital, Matt Mullenweg’s angel investment and research company. Reilly joins Audrey’s other developers Andrew Nacin and Samuel (Otto) Wood to work on WordPress.org and whatever other special projects come their way.

Reilly has contributed to WordPress since 2004, both by contributing patches to core and by developing and releasing many, many plugins. Odds are you’ve used at least one of his slew of plugins at one point or another — I’ve certainly praised his plugin work time and time again.

Developers at Audrey Capital, put simply, work on whatever projects Mullenweg assigns. Their work often includes work on WordPress.org (the website) and other community initiatives. The work often coincides with the consumption of barbecue, as it did this past week.

WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Austin are happening this weekend. Actually, they’re happening right now. Since it’s far too late to snag a ticket and run over there (far, far too late), I suggest you attend the events in whatever way you can:

• WordCamp Seattle: #wcsea hashtag on Twitter and the livestream of all three stages
• WordCamp Austin: #wcatx hashtag on Twitter

Just because you can’t be there doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy (part of) the show. And hey, while you’re here in this post, why don’t you share the next WordCamp you plan to attend in the flesh. Visit WordCamp Central to see the events happening all over planet Earth in the near future.

“I’m just a huge supporter of having all these small businesses built around WordPress, whether individuals or small companies,” Pete Davies told me over the phone. “And I know there’s stuff that people struggle with everyday, and stuff you can’t help them with in the WordPress forums.”

Davies is the Premium Services Lead at Automattic, and the lead on the latest Code Poet project. He and his team have expanded CodePoet.com from a directory of high-end WordPress consultants into a resource site for anyone building website — or ”making things” — with WordPress.

The new CodePoet.com, or rather build.CodePoet.com, offers two free ebooks, interviews with WordPress professionals, and a collection of resources the team has curated that they think other Code Poets would find useful. The listings, or Code Poet Directory, can now be found at directory.codepoet.com.

For builders, not just developers

When other members of Automattic looked over the new Code Poet drafts, some said “Okay, but where’s all the code at?” Davies chuckled a bit as he told the story, since Automattic’s work usually includes clever bits of code here or there. The new site is “for builders, not just developers.”

In addition to original interviews (like the ones with business owners Wes Chyrchel and Jonathan Greeley and Ruth Thompson on the site now) Code Poet offers two free ebooks tackling big questions in professional WordPress circles right now: pricing and responsive design.

Above: Getting Pricing Right (left) features Mark Jaquith, Shane Pearlman, and Remkus de Vries walking through their own pricing strategies. WordPress and Responsive Design (right) tackles responsive design with Chris Coyier, Ian Stewart and Sara Cannon.

The new site is “for builders, not just developers.”

One of the more playful parts of the new site is the WordPress IQ Test, powered by Smarterer and featuring questions such as:

• How do you deactivate a plugin?,
• What is the default user role?, and
• How do you delete the Uncategorized category?

Smarterer scores your answers based on their accuracy and the time it takes you to answer correctly. I ended up with a 777, just three points short of the “Master” level.

Clearly the quiz is fundamentally flawed.

Once taken, the Code Poet site will pull in the information from Smarterer and rank Code Poets based on high scores. Eternal bragging rights not necessarily included.

The future of Code Poet

“Normally [for us] there aren’t hard deadlines for much,” Davies said. “We reached out to Seattle and Austin six weeks ago and said we wanted to do this, and having a date fixed, where we had to have everything ready by, has been an interesting experience for Automattic.” Davies and Michael Pick (who also designed the new Code Poet) will be presenting at both camps today. Each will include an announcement of the new Code Poet. The talks are called “Things We Learned the Hard Way” and are partly based on the findings of the WordPress survey taken last year.

WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Austin will be the first to hear about the new Code Poet, but it won’t be stop there. In the near future CodePoet.com will be replacing Jetpack as the default brand representing Automattic when they sponsor WordCamps.

Aside from the specific offerings with the new Code Poet, it was clear from talking to Davies that he, and it sounded like his whole team, is very excited about the new project. He emphasized that this is just a start, and hopes to find out more about what the community would like to see as Code Poet continues to grow.

“If we get to a point where we bring in people who actually don’t event use WordPress right now, but do some website design and things like that,” Davies said, “and we can introduce them to the concepts to make WordPress work for them, then all the better.”

Art Blogazine is a simple and minimalist theme with HTML5 markup.

Outline is a beautiful, simple, elegant, monochrome theme for blogs or websites with a simple floral motif in the header.

Phire is a modern and easily customizable dark theme.

WPstart is a simple parent theme allowing you to create any type of website you want.

Trying out new themes is fun, isn’t it? I think so! The thing about changing my blog’s theme that has traditionally bugged me, though, is the 10-15 minutes right after you click “Activate” when you have to rush through uploading a new custom header, maybe resetting the background, fiddling with a new sidebar configuration, and other transition adjustments so that people won’t see your site in a half-switched state. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to that — I don’t like to leave things half-painted either — but luckily for me we’ve just finished a new feature to improve this very thing. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to our new theme customization tool* and say good-bye to half-painted websites.

The customizer provides a live preview as you play with Appearance settings, and can be used to customize a live preview of a new theme before you activate it, or to make changes to your existing theme. It allows you to edit the site title and tagline, custom headers and backgrounds, navigation placement, front page selection, and other options that vary by theme. It works with both free themes and premium themes. Shall we take a test drive?

Imagine you want to change themes. As you are browsing on the Themes screen, notice the new “Live Preview” link and click it.

You’re taken to the customizer. As you make changes, the preview in the right-hand part of the screen updates live so you can get things just right.

When things look the way you want them, click the Save & Activate button in the lower left (or Save & Purchase if it is a premium theme) and boom, your new theme and custom settings are live!

You can also use the live preview feature to customize your existing theme. On the themes screen in your dashboard, you’ll now see a “Customize” button that launches the previewer.

And don’t worry, you still have access to the regular screens for adjusting these and other features. Just use the navigation for the Appearance section like you always have.

So, please try it out, and let us know what you think in the comments! I hope you like  it as much as we do. If you hit any snags, let us know in the forums so that we can help.

But wait, there’s more!

Yes, more! Here are a couple of smaller additions also aimed at making it easier to customize your site and make it look just the way you want it.

• When choosing a custom header image, you can now choose from your Media Library. I looove this, because I have uploaded the same header image at least a dozen times to re-use it when I changed themes.
• For themes that support it, custom headers now have a recommended size rather than a fixed required size, so you can be flexible with the height and width of your header images. I love this too, because sometimes I really like a theme but the header image I want to use is taller or shorter than the theme design allows. Now, the power is in your hands to decide! The goal is for as many themes as possible on WordPress.com to support this feature, but you can see if we’ve added it to yours yet by checking the list of supported themes.

And one last thing…
If you know HTML, you can now add links and a little bit of formatting to your image captions. This is great for people who want to link a photo credit to the photographer’s blog or to a Creative Commons license, or want to make some text bold or italicized. At some point in the future we may add a WYSIWYG option, but for now you’ll just need to learn some basic HTML tags if you want to use this one. Just type the HTML right into the caption field in the image uploader, and your links will appear like magic. So this:

becomes this:

You can adopt adorable kittens at your local Humane Society.
Make a new friend and save a life today!
Photo by Jane Wells, saver of kittens

I’ve been wanting this feature for four years now, so I’m really excited.

Have fun with these new features!

*Fun Fact: While this feature was in development, it was originally conceived as a wizard, or guided walkthrough. We codenamed it Gandalf.

For the third year now I’m over in Memphis for the World Championship of BBQ, joined by Otto, Nacin, Scott, and Rose. Last year due to flooding the festival was moved to a fairgrounds inland, but there’s nothing quite like being right on the Mississippi with the sweet aroma of pork all around you. (An aroma that, incidentally, follows you home in your clothes. ) The team we sponsor, the Moody Ques, put together an impressive booth this year, which you can see coming up in the below timelapse:

The video doesn’t do justice to the delicious food being cooked inside, though, which you have to experience in person.

Mark Jaquith writes How I built “Have Baby. Need Stuff!” — a nice overview of the latest and greatest in modern WP development.

I’m happy to present episode number two of the WPCandy Roundtable Podcast, this time with the BuddyPress Core Team of John James Jacoby, Boone Gorges, and Paul Gibbs. They spoke for just over an hour about issues of interest to them within the BuddyPress community, and where things are going in the near future.

This episode is sponsored by the upcoming WordPress service Raft.io and the Typecase plugin by UpThemes.

• MP3 file (41.8 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes (coming soon!)
• Audio RSS Feed

The gentleman also wanted me to say that if there were further questions you had about BuddyPress after listening, you’re welcome to leave them here and they will stop by and have a look at them.

There’s something about this time of year that always makes me wistful for the good old days—the simpler times, if you will—when all that mattered were family, friends, and a whole lotta blogging about everything under the sun. I miss those days, don’t you?

Fear not, my fellow blogging friends. We’ve got you all covered today with a theme that will make you want to stop time and write about everything in your lives until you can’t write anymore.

A Simpler Time, designed by Denise Chandler, is a theme that’s beautiful, bold, and memorable—pretty much exactly like the types of stories you’ll be writing alongside it on your WordPress.com blog:

A Simpler Time: Single Post

It’s a traditional blog theme in the sense that it offers everything you’ve come to expect from a WordPress theme—widgets, custom menus, and custom headers, and more—and it also looks incredible. If you’d also like to mix it up with different colors and fonts, try the Custom Design upgrade. You can do all of that and more.

A Simpler Time is a premium upgrade for your blog; read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

When you decide that you want to do something great for your business or yourself you might think about building a website. This is an amazing way to promote your business, it helps you become recognized, and believe it or not, it will not cost you much money at all. However, if you have never used an online site builder before there are some tips that you are going to want to keep in mind and follow.

Search on Google

One of the first tips that you are going to want to follow would be to search for an online site builder that is going to offer you templates. You do not want to worry about gathering photographs and artwork to put on your site. You may need to pay for this and there is a lot of time and effort that goes into searching for these items. So, you will want to make sure that you are verifying that the site builder will offer you templates that you can work from.

Customer Support Service

Next, always search for a website builder that is going to be able to offer you support when you need it. You will find that there are many site builders out there that are going to give you forums that you can read and participate in but this may not be helpful to someone that is building a site for the first time. You want to have support in the form of online chat, phone calls or even webinars. Yes, that is right! You can find site builders out there that are going to offer you webinars and tutorials that you can watch and participate in to learn as much as possible before you get started.

Contact Information

Third, always think about how you want your customers or fans to be able to contact you. You will look a lot more professional if you have an email address that people can use to contact you. It will be even better if this is an email address that is not tied to your personal email. So, you will want to be sure that you are going to have an email account with your site when you are finished building it and it is up and running. It really can be helpful to you and it will make you look much more professional.

Free Trail

Last, but not least, you are going to see that there are some website builders out there that are going to offer you a free trial but they are going to require you to enter your credit card information. You might want to stay away from these types of online site builders. This is because if you forget to cancel your membership and you are not happy with the site builder you may be billed on your credit card. You should not have to worry about this and face unnecessary charges that you may not be able to have removed. Therefore, you are going to want to search for a site builder that is not going to require you to enter a credit card number in order to get started.