In-depth article by Siobahn McKeown that breaks down how commercial plugin developers are monetizing their efforts through the WordPress.org plugin respository. The article covers the guidelines that plugin authors should follow, examples of successful plugins as well as plugins that didn’t meet the guidelines, and various ideas plugin authors can try. One of the things I learned through that article is the existence of a detailed plugin guidelines page which didn’t exist before. It’s about time something like this was created as it answers questions up-front instead of leaving a ton of uncertainty up to the plugin author.    ∞

Related posts:

1. Plugin Repository And Commercial Plugins
2. Plugin Developers Receive A Christmas Gift
3. What Plugin Authors Shouldn’t Do

If you’re using the self installed version of WordPress and looking to participate in the internet blackout day today, check out the SOPA Blackout Plugin. This plugin contains flexibility so that you don’t have to turn your entire website into a black hole. Instead, you get to set blackout dates as well as a myriad of other options to configure when and who sees your blackout message. One of the nice things about this particular plugin is that when it’s deactivated, all of its settings will be removed.

Related posts:

1. Plugin Review: Technical Support

Earlier today WordPress.org announced its participation in the January 18th protests against the USA’s Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Earlier this evening the blackout went into effect, and will block access (initially) to all of WordPress.org including the Codex, support forums, plugin directory and theme directory. The blackout will be in effect for 24 hours.

For more about the acts and protest in question visit sopastrike.com.

But the blackout on WordPress.org is not unavoidable. Scrolling to the bottom of a page will give you a link to clear the blackout for an hour and continue on to the website. On her blog, Jane Wells explained that while she originally wanted to see the whole site blacked out, instead the WordPress.org team opted to make the blackout only partial for the sake of those who depend on WordPress.org:

The reason we did this instead of a full shut-down is that there are many businesses and people who help drive the independent web that need access to the WordPress Codex, forums, plugin/theme repos, and APIs. We wouldn’t want to penalize them in our protest, so we just made it impossible to ignore instead.

In addition to WordPress.org, Automattic’s hosted blogging service at WordPress.com has selectively blacked out its “Freshly Pressed” section, where normally visitors can find hand-picked blog posts across WordPress.com to read. WordPress.com users can also join the protest in a variety of ways by visiting the “Settings → Protest SOPA/PIPA” page on their dashboard. If you blog at WordPress.com visit their explanatory post for more about how to add it to your site.

The plugins in use on WordPress.com are also available to WordPress.org users via the WordPress.org plugin directory. If you’d like to pick a specific one up, just visit the “sopa” tag on the directory.

WordPress isn’t the only large website out there that’s protesting in this way. What others have you heard about? Will you be protesting using your blog?

As part of the SOPA Strike, here’s the homepage of WordPress.com today. We got started a little bit early, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to go more than 24 hours.

On WP.com we’ve activated an option for any of the bloggers there to put a ribbon on their site or black it out entirely, and we’ll be participating on WordPress.org as well.

Have you been paying attention to all the hubbub online about the proposed U.S. legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that threatens internet freedom? I wrote about it last week over on WordPress.org, but the gist is this: there’s a bill in the U.S. Senate that if passed would put publishing freedom severely at risk, and could shut down entire sites at the whim of media companies. Fight for the Future created this nifty video to sum it up better than I can.

On January 18, 2012, sites all over the internet will be blacking out to protest and try to mobilize more people to speak out against this bill coming up in the Senate next week — S. 968: the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — in an attempt to let U.S. lawmakers know how much opposition there is. WordPress.org, Wikipedia, and even WordPress.com VIP I Can Has Cheezburger? will be participating in the blackout to raise awareness and spur you to action.

Here on WordPress.com, we want to participate as well. Freshly Pressed will be blacked out during the strike. Sorry to take away your daily fix of yummy web content, but this bill threatens to do that on a much wider scale. You don’t want that, do you?

More importantly, we are making it possible for you to participate in the protest. There are two options: a “Stop Censorship” ribbon and a full blackout. The blackout portion will be in effect January 18 from 8am to 8pm EST, while the ribbon will be displayed until January 24. Here’s how to join in:

1. Go to Settings → Protest SOPA/PIPA in your dashboard.
2. Select if you want to join the blackout or show a ribbon.
3. If you choose to join the blackout, you can edit the message that will be shown on your site during the blackout.
4. Preview what your protest will look like.
5. Click “Save Changes” button to activate your protest.

That’s it! Easy-peasy activism right at your fingertips.

The “Stop Censorship” ribbon will display in the upper corner of your site and links to americancensorship.org. It will display until January 24, 2012 (the Senate vote date).

If you choose to do the blackout in addition to the ribbon, then we will black out your site from 8am to 8pm EST along with the official strike. You can customize the message that will appear on your blacked-out site to tell people why this issue is important to you. Your site will return to just displaying the ribbon after the strike is over.

I hope that a significant number of you on WordPress.com will join in this protest. Publishing freedom is a right we must protect.

And one last pitch: whatever you decide to do about your site, please take a few minutes to head over to americancensorship.org and take action. It only takes a few moments of your time to be an agent of change!

I’m excited to (finally, I know) post the recording of the first episode of WP Late Night, a production that myself, Brad Williams, and Dre Armeda put together. If you missed the live recording—and let’s face it, relatively speaking the world did—you can check it out now, lovingly crafted into a variety of media formats.

The video (yup, we recorded video for this podcast) is embedded at the top of this post’s page. Alternatively, you can listen to the audio only just after the jump. I’ll have an iTunes subscription available soon.

Episode 001: Shame Edition

In this episode (which is embedded above, and also on Vimeo and YouTube if you prefer), Brad and Dre and I discussed:

• The release of WordPress 3.3.1
• 10-year-old Jesse’s first WordPress plugin
• Dre’s tattoo
• Twenty Twelve
• WordPress.org’s recent improvements
• The Top 10 Reasons WordPress is not a Cult
• Mailbag: WordCamp sessions, speeding up websites, and WordPress security

We’ll be recording future shows live as well, so watch this blog for news about when to catch our recording.

If you’d like to get in touch with the show for the mailbag, or anything else really, here’s how:

• Leave a comment on this post, we’ll see it.
• Shoot an email over to wplatenight@wpcandy.com.
• Leave a voicemail for us at 815-322-WPLN.
• Tweet about us using the #wplatenight hashtag.

Late last year we first learned about the next rocketgenius project called Gravity Charge. Carl Hancock, founder of Gravity Forms and rocketgenius, recently mentioned that he has already been in discussion with the WooThemes team about integration between Gravity Charge and WooCommerce.

I caught up with Carl about the new integration, and this is what he had to say about it:

Because Gravity Charge will have extensive and powerful content access control capabilities, one of the logical integrations would be to use Gravity Charge for controlling access to content, files and downloads and enabling WooCommerce users to use WooCommerce for the checkout process itself.

With those plans in mind from Carl, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to be a powerful and functional plugin, providing a great utility for e-commerce website owners.

Recently NASA announced that it was launching a new Open Source section of its website: http://code.nasa.gov. This is just another step that NASA is taking to help make its code available to the public. The web team over at NASA looked at a number of content management systems available for the website. At the end of their search they decided on using WordPress.

To take it a step further, they ended up using the Twitter Bootstrap framework for building their theme. One really awesome tool that they get to use with this framework is something called “Less.” Less gives greater control over CSS, which allows for the use of variables and many other things within the CSS itself. Normally those kinds of things are not available in CSS, but Less makes that happen.

They also decided to use Super Cache as their caching mechanism for the site.

As I’m such a huge fan of WordPress, I can easily say they made a great choice and that I’m looking forward to seeing what they release on the NASA code blog.

Ian Stewart of Themeshaper.com wants to know, what do you really need in a WordPress starter theme? It’s an interesting question to ask these days because of the wide assortment of not only starter themes, but theme frameworks that are available. Two years ago, theme developers were using themes that they created themselves. While that still occurs today, many are using themes such as Genesis to build out websites.    ∞

Related posts:

1. Roots – WordPress Starter Theme
2. Compilation Of Theme Frameworks
3. Which Theme Framework To Use?

WP-Snippets has gone through a few changes as of late. Among them is a responsive design, a button to mark snippets as favorites, better ways of filtering snippets, and a few other enhancements. WP-Snippets is one of those really cool ideas that I talked about during the early days of WordPress Weekly and I’m stoked to see someone out there actually turn the idea into a reality.

Related posts:

1. What Would You Do With WP-Hackers.com?
2. Turning Your WordPress Powered Site Into An iPhone App
3. 5 Tips To Create A Great Site About WordPress