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Meeting Information

Meeting Notes: Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts

Notes of our Meetup on September 21, 2017 at Rocket Lounge in Fort Myers.

WordPress News

4.8.2 Maintenance and Security Release is out. Upgrade now.

There are plenty of security vulnerabilities fixed. Read more

What’s to come in 4.9?

All the information about the upcoming release of 4.9 is available on the make blog. Today we look at the Custom Widget for Galleries – mergee of current feature plugin for testing

You can download Core Media Widget from the Repository

While the audio, video and single image widget section were already merged into Core with 4.8, the Gallery widget is slated to be merged into core for the 4.9 release.

If you test it, please report any issues on GitHub. Sarah Gooding tested things and posted an article on WPTavern

We did our own test on our test site. I really like it:-) It also shows, that you need to be consistent when uploading images to your library. The Widget displays the caption section for the image underneath the image, and it looks much nicer if you fill out the caption field for all images to be displayed in the Widget.

How to use the Gallery Widget?

  • Got to Appearance > Widget
  • Click on Galllery widget and select the widget section
  • Give the widget a Title
  • Click on “Add Media” to select the respective images from the Media Library
  • Make adjustments to other settings, like column number and type of display
  • Click on “Insert Gallery” button
  • Preview in Gallery Widget admin screen
  • Click on Save

Note: You might see in the video that the desired number of columns is set to 2, however, the display in the widget admin screen shows 3 columns. That is a known issue and already in the issue tracker as #190

WordCamp US Dec 1 -3, 2017,

Gutenberg – 1.3

Since our meeting, there were two more updates to the plugins. It’s now in version 1.3. If you’d like to test it but don’t want to set-up a new test site, send me birgit.pauli@gmail.com an email and I will give you access to the tt.wpswfl.org site where we keep the Gutenberg plugin updated

You can catch up all things Gutenberg on this Storify including links to online discussions, documentation, blog posts on how to interact w/ Gutenberg in Themes and Plugins.

WordPress ditched React… see what happened next.

Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org will not use Reactjs as it’s new javascript library because of the license that is attached to the open-source library. This decision requires a rewrite of Gutenberg, once the decision is made with of alternative Javascript libraries, the Gutenberg time will change over to the new framework.

This will delay the release of Gutenberg a few weeks and with it the 5.0 release.

Made it Techcrunch pay attention

And then Facebook announced they will release the next version and other open-source projects without the patent clause. And on the subsequent post by Matt Mullenweg more discussion happened. Seems like a never-ending story.

Topics survey results

Topic Survey Results and Upcoming Meetups

Schedule & Speakers

Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts

Plugins to handle Open-Graph meta tags

Plugins for auto-post / cross-posting to Social web

Tools for scheduling

  • Sprout Social – awesome bulk scheduling feature
  • Hootsuite
  • CoSchedule – WordPress plugin right from your post screen
  • Buffer – Long time around – always relevant
  • SocialOomph – nice Twitter features on the free account, with bulk upload.
  • HopperHQ – only scheduling tool for Instagram

Mini-Tip

if you have a Gmail account and you need more email addresses, you don’t need to create a new account. Just add a + sign after the handle and another string before the @ sign. Example:

Categories
WordPress Community WordPress: What's New?

Five of the Best Podcasts

Over the last four weeks, I have screened some of the best podcasts via Stitcher. I found some excellent shows around WordPress, too.

I may not have found all WordPress-related podcasts, but let’s start with the five shown below which include links to apps. The podcasts cover different topics. They are created by WordPress enthusiasts who share their expertise, their insights and even offer free advice about freelance work.

You can download the apps to your mobile phones and download links to learn more on how to make podcasts.

WordPress Weekly by WPTavern

WordPress Weekly WordPress Weekly is hosted by Jeff Chandler, contributing writer to WP Tavern site, & Marcus Couch. Recorded on Wednesday nights, Chandler and Couch cover all news around WordPress and interview presenters of recent WordCamps. Nearly every podcast has a section about Plugins, where Couch shares newly discovered Plugins. The show features WordPress royalties like Matt Mullenweg, and last month covered WordPress’ 12-year anniversary.

During last week’s episode Chandler and Couch took a closer look at the upcoming WordPress 4.3 release. Right now, WordPress Core 4.3 is in Beta 3, and the final release is scheduled for August 18, 2015. They also discussed the community’s take on how to handle old content on WordPress TV, which has content dating back to 2007 when there was still a 2 in front of the WordPress version numbering.

Congratulations to Jeff Chandler, who will host WordPress weekly’s 200th episode this week!

WPElevation WordPress Business Podcast

WPElecation PodcastTroy Dean, owner of WPElevation.com, discusses how to create a business as WordPress freelancer or consultant. He talks about how specific tools and concepts can help make better WordPress Plugins or themes to better serve your clients. Dean built his own business providing specialized advice to Plugin developers, themes designers or website implementation consultants. His guests include business owners working within the field of WordPress. Dean brings you behind the scenes of their businesses, and lets you in on their failure, struggles and triumphs.

This week’s episode was a real treat – Dean featured Seth Godin who advised Kristina Romero, who has been struggling with the conundrum of having less and less time available to work but still needs to earn additional income.

I also enjoyed one of the previous episodes when Dean interviewed Kronda Adair, a fellow member of NTEN Community of Practice and a volunteer for Black Girls Code. You can learn more here.

Next show is already online:

WordPress Plugins from A to Z

WordPress Plugins AtoZWho is able to keep track of all the thousands of Plugins beyond the most popular 100?

It seems Jeff Overall and Marcus Couch can.

During their weekly podcast they review new Plugins and separate the wheat from the chaff. They cover all aspects of WordPress – ecommerce, multi-site, handling of graphics and BuddyPress, as well as maintenance, security and speed. I always appreciate their wit and wisdom, sorting through the vast amount of Plugins available on WordPress.org as well as around the universe of Premium plugins. Once in a while, I go on a binge listening session, mostly when I need to procrastinate. Listening to Overall and Couch always makes me want to improve the various WordPress sites in my portfolio.

Latest Show announcement:

Kitchen Sink WordPress

KitchenSinkWPAdam Silver, organizer of the South Bay WordPress Meetup and former stand-up comedian, hosts the weekly Kitchen Sink Podcast. The format of his show varies. Sometimes he creates an educational segment and other times he features guest interviews. But Silver always covers Upcoming events, WordPress News and includes a Tip of the Week. This week Silver interviews Kyle Maurer of Real Big Marketing. Maurer is a speaker at WordCamps and develops WordPress Plugins and themes. Silver also offers you, the listener, to leave him a voicemail–via SpeakPipe–asking him a WordPress question. Go check it out!

This week’s podcast, Episode 73, is online here

WPCast.fm

WPCast.fmDave Hehenberger and Doug Yuen host the WPCast.fm, a podcast for WordPress professionals by WordPress professionals.

Yuen runs a successful WordPress hosting and online service business, and Hehenberger runs a WordPress Plugin business. They don’t number their episodes, and their format varies from time to time, depending upon what’s going on in their own professional lives.

Hehenberger just returned from WordPress Europe. He gives a recap of his experiences and talks with Yuen about the progress on their business while giving shout-outs to other great WordPress professionals. It’ll be worth going back to some of their podcasts to “binge listen.”

How to listen to podcasts on your mobile phone?

 

Inspired to create your own podcast?

Photo by Patrick Breitenback on flickr

Categories
Meeting Information Presentations

Resources: How to find the right WordPress plugins?

Great discussions ensued about using plugins and how to choose them. We went over the plugins repository screens in details and also looked at 3rd party sites with plugin reviews and directories. You’ll find all the links discussed in the Google Slides embedded below.

WordPress Plugins from A to Z

If you like podcasts and learn more about WordPress Plugins I recommend you listen to episodes on the WordPress Plugins from A to Z podcast, hosted by John Overall and Marcus Couch
The WordPress Plugins A-Z Podcast can be found on iTunes, Stitcher Radio and also on WordPress Radio. I have found it very helpful. Both hosts come prepared to their shows and it’s fast paced. The selection is always well rounded and I learned about new plugins and use cases for plugins, I haven’t considered yet.

Links to find more

John Elcik shared these links via our online survey:

  • http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/top-100-wordpress-plugins
  • http://wpplugindirectory.org/
  • http://www.bloggingwizard.com/must-have-wordpress-plugins/
  • http://www.wphub.com/essential-wordpress-plugins-2014/

If you too, like to share some resources regarding WordPress Plugins, use the comments sections below.

The search is over. We have a new venue sponsor: Candels On Call.

Candels LLC logoMark and Linda Candels generously let us use their state of the art training room at their offices for the rest of the year. Please thank them and give them a shout-out on the social webs:

 

Categories
WordPress Community

The State of the Word – Matt Mullenweg and more

Video of Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” at WordCamp San Francisco couple month ago. I always find listening to Mullenweg talk about WordPress fascinating. His poise and his passion has not diminished since he started out ‘Democratizing Publishing’ through Blogging and WordPress in 2003, when he forked an earlier blogging software and created an open-source community that span the whole world. Get yourself some coffee, sit back and listen in on “The State of the Word 2014”

The WordPress in Numbers

  • 23.6% of the web is powered by WordPress, from 17.4% in 2012.
  • 785 contributers to WordPress core
  • 6,458 new plugins have been approved, bringing the total of plugins in the WordPress.org repository to 34, 016.
  • 684 new themes were approved, an increase of 36% to a total of 2,781 Themes on WordPress.org. Note: this doesn’t count the 3rd party and premium themes that are available for WordPress ecosystem.
  • A total of 1,000,000 commits in the SVN repository (WordPress’s version control system), 22% happened alone in 2014

WordPress Version used around the Internet

WordPress Versions Installed

If you haven’t installed 4.0 yet, don’t procrastinate any longer! 

See Slides of 2014 WordCamps in Florida:

  • Tampa (the slides are link from the sessions pages)
  • Orlando (no slide page yet)
  • Miami

 

After his presentation, Matt Mullenweg stayed around for a 45 min Q & A session.