WordPress recently posted news of version 4.2.3, a security and maintenance release:
WordPress 4.2.3 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
[Source]
Via Security Week.
“Today WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day. Those run through its cloud-hosted service, which lets anybody create a free website online, attract 330 million visitors who view 3.4 billion pages every month.”
Given the ubiquity of WordPress, why isn’t [WordPress founder Matt] Mullenweg, now 28, a billionaire? Since its founding in 2005 Automattic has chosen scale over scratch, giving away much for free. Only 1% of WordPress.com devotees pay. Not among them: users of WordPress.org (the open-source version), who run servers and implement the software themselves. A small percentage has only recently been coaxed into paying for additional features like file backups. Automattic implemented an ad-sharing service–on a limited basis–just last year.
… a massive community of developers and consultants make a living directly off of WordPress. In a recent survey, the company found 20,000 people across the globe hosting blogs, designing websites and offering maintenance services for WordPress users.”
[Source: forbes.com]
Alex King compares two techniques for customizing WordPress: Custom Fields and Taxonomies.
Custom fields are still the right choice for misc. data that is used for display purposes only, or descriptive data about a post that is used by a behind-the-scenes process. You can serialize data here to store the equivalent of cached relational data. You can set flags for various behavior triggers, etc. You can also create a custom user interface for adding and editing the data you need to store.
Where you should use a custom taxonomy instead is for any data that you need to query on. For example, getting all posts that were broadcast to Twitter; all posts that were created by an outside process; all posts that have a certain workflow status.
The reason to favor a custom taxonomy in these situations has to do with the WordPress database structure. Queries by taxonomy are well optimized as this is a primary front-end presentation feature in WordPress core. Conversely, querying by custom field key and value is slow. The value column in the custom field table is not indexed – you are basically doing a search through data that is not intended for that purpose.
Bottom line: database queries are faster for taxonomies, slower for custom fields.
A new theme for WordPress:
“A clean, single page portfolio theme with a sleek style and smooth jQuery effects. Automatic scrolling and expanding project display are just some of the features that will help make your work look even more amazing.”
http://themetrust.com/themes/solo
Via Web Design Ledger.
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reports this depressing news about WordPress:
Siobhan Ambrose went looking for a WordPress theme; of the top ten free WordPress theme sites listed on Google, eight had hidden, obfuscated, or encrypted code buried in them that rendered spammy keyword links that were part of a deceptive search engine optimization scheme; in some cases, Siobhan couldn’t figure out what the offending code did and speculates that it might contain malware. Of the remaining two, one hosted themes that didn’t validate. The remaining site, WordPress.org, is the only site in the first ten Google results for “free wordpress theme” whose themes don’t contain deceptive backlinks, obfuscated code, or non-validating themes.
— Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing
Various plugins are available to make your WordPress site mobile-friendly:
What do these plugins actually do? What is a mobile-friendly WordPress site?
1. Themes designed for mobile devices
— This is what visitors see when they browse the site
2. Admin panels for mobile devices
— These tools allow you, the WordPress admin, to write blog posts and do other admin tasks from your mobile device
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