it’s a wrong decision to assume that an overlay won’t interfere with any of the thousands of existing themes.

— 

I always find it quite amazing when people receive a WordPress update and are immediately critical of certain elements of it (particularly with new/changed UI). Then I remember, I used to do exactly the same thing… before I started contributing to core.

When it comes to contributing to WordPress, I have the great pleasure of working with some of the most driven and intelligent people who I’ve ever met in my life. If you think that any decision has been made flippantly by these people after 8 months of development and 5 Release Candidates (as was the case with 3.1)… well… you’re out of your mind.

We aren’t perfect. Far from it. But if there’s something you don’t like in WordPress then the chances are that the core team have already had a lively (constructive) argument about it, and the end result is a seriously considered approach.

In WordPress 3.1 we added an administrative bar to the front-end of all sites. This admin bar has been on WordPress.com for years, where it’s worked extremely well, and we wanted to bring it across to .org to allow administrative users easy access to frequently used functions when using their own sites.

When the brief for this new feature came in, I was one of the most vocal people opposing it. I thought it sucked, was unnecessary, and would break hundreds-if-not-thousands of themes and plugins. I wasn’t the only person who fighting for its death, but equally there were plenty of people fighting for its inclusion.

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/15851

For most of you, that argument took place before you even knew the admin bar existed. My disagreement with the admin bar lead to an obscene amount of testing of said admin bar. I literally wanted to prove that it sucked, and that it would break themes. I was successful in my quest, and you know what the outcome was? An updated admin bar that became more and more solid every time someone disliked it and found new ways to break it.

Working with opposing opinions makes for a stronger end result.

Is the admin bar perfect? No, cause nothing ever is. Is it a seriously solid implementation of the first version of this feature? Absolutely. 

If your theme breaks then I’m personally sorry - all of us should have tried harder to break the admin bar when were testing it for months (and months) on end. But, hopefully, you’re in a very small minority. Hopefully, you’ll take a few minutes to figure out what’s making it break and let us know, so we can fix it for the next release.

Don’t forget that the admin bar is only visible for logged-in users, and not only can you can turn it off if you need to, but you can also override/modify any of its styles using your own CSS file.

It’s impossible to keep all 30million users happy, but we do our best.

For the past few months now I’ve been hinting that I’ve been working on something huge and exciting but couldn’t tell anyone what it was all about. Well today I can finally reveal what it is that’s been keeping me busy and excited and I’m sure you’re going to love it. I’ve teamed up with John O’Nolan and together we are about rock the WordPress world. “How?” I hear you scream. Well by launching a new WordPress company called BioThemes. Now before I go any further I’m sure you might be thinking “oh great, another WordPress theme company”. But let me assure you that what BioThemes is about to do will change the WordPress theme landscape significantly. I’m not going to say too much here because we are not quite ready to launch yet, but rest assured it’s going to rock! So make sure to follow BioThemes on Twitter and Facebook to stay up to date with our progress and you can also sign up to our newsletter to find out when we launch.

— 

Gilbert Pellegrom’s Blog: BioThemes

Exclusive Interview: Phosr Founders, John O’Nolan, Phil Barker, Rick Nunn

startuplistinterviews:

There has been a steadily growing hype of what the mysterious, yet stunning holding page with Phosr gently placed in the middle, was really aiming to become.  Now, the creative team behind it, accepted our invite for an interview to explain what Phosr truly is.  We hope you enjoy this completely exclusive, engaging, and inspiring interview of the team behind Phosr, who let’s the world in on their biggest secret, and gives some helpful advice for young entrepreneurs.  

Read More

kittensaysdie:

This is @RickNunn taking photos of @JohnONolan getting covered in water thrown by @Japh. Funny.

See the final shot here:

ricknunn:

I love John and I make him wet. This is the sequence shot from todays Project 50!

GPL, WooThemes and a bit of credit →

I don’t want this to turn into some giant argument but just hear me out.

Everyone raves about GPL, the community, giving back, blah blah. This kind of stuff generally drives me a bit mad but whatever, drop in the ocean stuff.

WordPress 3.0 features a brand new way to organize your navigation….

Some facts need to be corrected here:

• Did WooThemes contribute code and concept to WP3.0 custom menus? Yes.
• Did they get credit for it? Yes.
• Did they get a large amount of publicity around the interwebs for this? Yes.

On the flipside:

• Was 90% of the code rewritten by not WooThemes? Yes.
• Was the UI changed to be completely different from the Woo concept? Yes.
• Were the original hooks left in for Woo to harness this functionality however they want to as originally agreed? Yes.

And finally:

• There were (if memory serves) just under 200 other contributors to 3.0 (myself included), why should Woo get any more credit than anyone else?
• The biggest part of 3.0 is the WPMU merge, but have you heard the founders of WPMU mentioned by name even once? No one is getting singled out here.
• Technically speaking, they should get no credit at all. In the same way that technically speaking you don’t have to give WordPress any credit if you build a site with it.

In summary… I don’t think there’s any BS here, per the original post.