There’s a new version of WordPress out. Dubbed “Green” in honor of guitarist Grant Green, this release is mainly a feature and under-the-hood update. There are no critical security fixes.
Integration between Facebook and WordPress just got a whole lot easier, as Facebook have announced an official plugin for WordPress.
After Facebook announced its new plugin for WordPress, the relationship between the two popular applications just became stronger. With the new plugin, features like publishing and @mentions has become easy for WordPress publishers, many of whom have never written a line of code in their lives.
Once users install this plugin, they can start posting their WordPress content to their Facebook Timelines and Facebook Pages. We think that this is a really good move because it makes content sharing a whole lot easier.
Historic Milestone for the Internet’s Domain Name System
New gTLD Reveal Day
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today revealed who has applied for which generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) names in what is expected to become the largest expansion in the history of the Internet’s Domain Name System.
A total of 1,930 new gTLD applications were received during the application period of the new generic Top-Level Domain program.
“We are standing at the cusp of a new era of online innovation,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer. “That means new businesses, new marketing tools, new jobs, and new ways to link communities and share information.”
Beckstrom made the comments during a London news conference, where it was revealed which organizations have applied for which specific domain names.
Senior Vice President Kurt Pritz noted that the applications will now be subject to a public comment and objection period, and a rigorous, objective and independent evaluation system.
“A 60-day comment period begins today, allowing anyone in the world to submit comments on any application, and the evaluation panels will consider them,” said Pritz. “If anyone objects to an application and believes they have the grounds to do so, they can file a formal objection to the application. And they will have seven months to do that.”
Of the 1,930 applications received:
66 are geographic name applications.
116 applications are for Internationalized Domain Names, or IDNs, for strings in scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, and Cyrillic.
Applications were received from 60 countries and territories, broken down by ICANN’s geographic regions;
The countdown for a huge tranche of new top level domain names is well underway* and the list of applied for domains will shortly be made public. One applicant is making their option known now at GlobalINET which is taking place this week in Geneva.
dotAfrica
dotAfrica branding
The .Africa top level domain application is a African Union sanctioned bid to establish a regional internet identity of Africa. Mohamed El Bashir, Chair of the dotAfrica steering committee describes the reason for the domain:
“Africa’s new top-level domain (dotAfrica) will be utilised as a mechanism to promote the development of Africa’s Internet services and ecosystem, and to showcase African pride, identity and know-how.”
The registry will be run by non-profit .za (South Africa) operator, UniForumSA, and they hope the new domain will stimulate the whole African domain name market. Pricing and availability (including any restrictions) will be announced closer to launch.
*The countdown hit a bump in the road in April due to a security issue with the online platform ICANN uses for the process.
Release your inner geek at a tech conference this year
Here are some of the tech events taking place in 2012
NEXT Elevator, Germany (May 8-9). The NEXT Elevator is renowned for creating platforms for new ideas and giving startup founders an opportunity to pitch before investors and opinion leaders. elevator.nextconf.eu
Thinking Digital, UK (May 29-31). 3 day event built for people who believe in the power of innovation and creativity to create positive change in their work, organisations and communities. thinkingdigital.co.uk
Digital Shoreditch, UK (May 21-June 2). A festival celebrating the outstanding creative, technical and entrepreneurial talent of East London and Tech City. digitalshoreditch.com
Over the Air, UK (June 1-2). Over the Air is a unique tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs; and tutorial sessions that feature real business cases & new insights. overtheair.org
Picnic, Amsterdam (September 17-18). A leading creativity and innovation platform. It functions as an incubator and accelerator for game-changing ideas, concepts, products and services. picnicnetwork.org
MADE: The Entrepreneur Festival, UK (September 19-21). Whether you’re a startup, a high growth business or a well established business looking for inspiration and idea, MADE is for you. madefestival.com
Wired 2012, UK (October 25-26). WIRED’s first conference in October last year was a compelling event that was sold out and attended by more than 440 delegates. This years event will be jam-packed with stimulating content, networking and inspiring talks from people reshaping our world. wiredevent.co.uk
WIRED Magazine (UK) is currently offering discounts and the chance to win tickes to some of these events – email tilly.bull@condenast.co.uk if you are interested.
Graham Armfield presented his favourite WordPress plugins and invited others to share theirs too. They are linked to in the comment to this article. As SlideShare isn’t the quickest way to see them, I’ve picked out a few here:
Relevanssi
Replaces the default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance. It also indexes comments and shortcode content.
wp-twitter-feed
Place a twitter feed on your site with shortcode
Point and Stare CMS Functions
This plugin generates special functions to convert your WordPress install into a CMS, add security and generally white label the admin.
WP Better Emails
Adds a good looking HTML template to all WP default plain/text emails and lets you set a custom sender name and email address.
Our own picks can be seen on this blog, on the right hand side.
Talk 2 – Multi-lingual WP
Rich Holman discussed methods, things to look for and consider, design considerations and plugins that can help you build a multi-lingual site with WordPress.
In a detailed and well explained talk, Rich took us through the pitfalls and shortcuts to building WordPress sites in more than one language. The easy option is just to install seperate copies of WordPress for each language. This approach works well if you can build common elements to your theme, and it’s appropriate for the project. This is best if the content on the different sites does not need to be equivalent. A more common requirement is for the same content to be readable in several languages. This will involve several considerations.
Design
Allow enough space in menus and other areas. Verbose languages like German can really mess up your lovely neat menu!
Be aware you are designing blind. Often the designer won’t know the other languages and good communication is the key.
Right to Left (RTL) languages could mean moving your content around – for example moving the sidebars from right to left.
HTML Language codes. Make sure you declare the language being used in your underlying code. This way plugins like Facebook’s Like button will automatically change it’s text to match.
Rich Holman
Development
The admin screen in WordPress already have translations.
Theme translations use .po and .mo files. Use Poedit to create and manage. Some of the translation plugins available will read your theme and create translation files ready for editing.
Problem areas
Tags and Taxonomy
Queries – one home page had over 1000 queries to load.
Rich advised that switching plugins is not a good idea – they don’t really work together or store data in a consistent way.
If you actually need translations to be done for your content, Rich suggested ICanLocalize, which is part of the WPML family. Rates are around $0.07 per word. One final word from the audience was a note to check the font you are using has support for all the characters in your chosen languages. Many fonts from providers such as Google Fonts and Typekit only contain the Latin character set.
Talk 3 – Human Centred Design
Tammie Lister presented a call to action to bring back human focused design.
Tammie Lister
Tammie related her views on how the web recently has become very structured what with grids, templates and stock photography proliferating. She called on designers and developers to “make it personal”. Inspired by Aarron Walters work on MailChimp, and using examples such as the Twitter “Fail Whale” and Google Logos she showed how even large companies can humanise their image. Another personal dislike of Tammie’s is seeing “Submit” on forms. When in real life does anyone “submit” something? Jargon like this should be excised from the new web.
WordPress allows content to be created freely so stock phrasology and stock photography can be avoided, plus it supports custom error pages, custom headers and backgrounds in many themes, and language files in many themes allow the nuts and bolts to be humanised. Tammie suggests customising the Admin part of WordPress so that users you are designing for only get what they need, and removing the clutter that gets put in by default.
One member of the audience took a counter view and said how he’d tried in the past to get clients to go for a jargon-free website but because the client and their audience were within the same related sphere, some jargon was inevitable.
Social
As always after the talks proper, discussions and informal networking carried on ’til closing time at the nearby pub.
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