Ad Code Manager is a plugin designed to help you deal with ad codes, those short snippets of Javascript used to display advertisements on your website. This week, Rinat Khaziev of Doejo, Jeremy Felt of 10up, and I pushed v0.2, which includes these improvements:

• Completely reworked user interface, one that now looks and feels like much of the rest of the WordPress admin.
• Abstracted ad network logic, so you can integrate additional ad networks. Currently, Ad Code Manager fully supports Double Click for Publishers. Pull requests with support for other ad networks are always welcome.
• In-plugin contextual help to get you properly configured.
• Priorities for ad codes, which allow you to work around conflicts.
• An [acm-tag] shortcode for placing ad codes within posts.
• A widget for placing ad codes in widget areas. Thanks to Justin Sternburg at WebDevStudios for the contribution.

Rewrite Rules Inspector is a simple development tool for viewing all of the rewrite rules registered with your site. It’s been available for VIPs hosted on WordPress.com for a while — today it’s available for download from the WordPress.org repository.

Specifically, the Rewrite Rules Inspector helps you:

• View a listing of all your rewrite rules.
• See which rewrite rules match a given URL (and the priorites they match in).
• Filter by different sources of rewrite rules.
• Know when rewrite rules are missing in the database by showing an error message.

Both plugins are available for forking in the Automattic Github repo, and pull requests are always welcome. Coming up next are improvements to Co-Authors Plus, P2 Resolved Posts, and a new round of development on Edit Flow…

Within the admin however, you can hit “Save Draft” and WordPress will redirect you to the login. This means you’ve lost all of your content. If you’ve been logged out for a while too, WordPress hasn’t been autosaving.

It would be nice to bring that P2-style notification to the admin.

• AJAX user search is back to searching against first name, last name, display name, email address and user ID. The method introduced in v2.6.2 didn’t scale well across hundreds of users.
• French translation courtesy of Sylvain Bérubé.
• Spanish translation courtesy of Alejandro Arcos.
• Bug fix: Resolved incorrect caps check against user editing an already published post. Thanks to Doug in the WordPress.org forums for the help.

Please post any questions, bug reports, feature requests, etc. in the WordPress.org forums. If you want to contribute code, I’m eyeballing co-author management in Quick Edit and guest author functionality for v2.7.

For WordPress.com VIPs, this update has already been deployed to the shared plugins repo.

To showcase the awesome things happening in our local WordPress community, we’ve decided to give 8 to 10 lucky folks the opportunity to pitch a plugin, theme, project, or history of their business. If it’s not technical, no problem — the only requirements are that it relates to WordPress in some way, you can present it in five minutes or less, and that the other attendees will find it useful, fascinating, humorous, or have some other generally positive reaction.

Want to apply? Fill out our quick survey by April 18th, and we’ll let you know shortly after whether you get picked.

Demo night will be the usual time and place: April 23rd, 6 pm at the US Bancorp Tower conference rooms.

Hope to see you apply!

VIP Workshop, Class of 2012. Courtesy of Adam Tow.

WordPress on the menu.

On Friday, I finally pushed P2 Resolved Posts live in the WordPress.org directory. Based on Nacin’s gist of the same name, it’s a “lightweight GTD plugin for WordPress and the P2 theme.”

Mark a thread as “unresolved” when the topic needs resolution, and mark it as “resolved” when you’ve achieved that state. There are also sidebar widgets to let you see all unresolved posts, optionally filtered to a specific tag.

We use P2 extensively at Automattic, for a variety of purposes. I improved Nacin’s code last November because I wanted a simple way to encourage the culture of coming to a resolution on a topic. All too often, conversations are left hanging. This is a problem for those participating, and an even larger problem for those reviewing the conversation at a later date.

The plugin is in-development on Github. Please post any feedback, issues, feature requests, etc. in the WordPress.org forums.

Considering making the switch to WordPress? Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wrangler for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, to learn how to make open source work for your publication. We’ll discuss whether WordPress is the right fit for you, how to assess other options, and what steps you need to take if you’d like to make the switch.

Most of the people attending had been to at least one of my other sessions, so it was a quicker review of the slides and then more of a general Q&A session. A lot of the questions revolved around the different types of hosting, where you should go for support, etc.

You publish with WordPress, are comfortable with editing theme templates and making basic CSS changes, and you’re ready to take your site to the next level. Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wranger for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, to learn what you need to know. We’ll discuss topics like version control, performance and optimization, debugging, and other development best practices. This session will be geared towards the tech-savvy with a practical knowledge of WordPress.

It ended up being a little less ambitious. We started out with (the importance of) setting up a local environment, reviewed what makes a plugin, and introduced a few project ideas. Between a dozen and two dozen students attended; for almost all, the information was completely new.

The most important note on this subject: there are lots of jobs available.

Also, come hit us up with WordPress questions at our Happiness Bar!

Session notes are below the slides.

Do it locally

• Set up a sandbox
  • MAMP is an awesome way to get going on a Mac and there’s a way for Windows too
  • Sequel Pro allows you to easily access your database
  • Use ‘ack’ to find functions
    • Example: ack –before-context=10 –ignore-dir=wp-admin ‘function esc_’
    • Code is gospel. You might read tutorials or examples on the web that say one thing or the other; code will tell you the truth.
    • Reading code is a literacy of WordPress development. Dive into it to figure out what’s going on.
• Learn how to properly debug – fix those bugs as they’re happening
  • Enable WP_DEBUG in your local environment
    • It’s a quick and easy way to see what’s going wrong with your code for fatal errors
    • See PHP notices and other things you might normally miss
    • Make sure you’re using the best WordPress functions for the job
  • “5 ways to debug WordPress” and “Debugging WordPress” – Andrew Nacin
• Commit to version control and deploy to production
  • Why?
    • More easily communicate the changes you’re making with the rest of your team.
    • Work on multiple features at the same time.
    • Roll back if necessary; better than backups.
    • Automated deployment — no more copy and pasting over FTP.
  • What makes a good commit message:
    • Consider your audience: writing for coworkers and for historical purposes.
    • Explain why you made the change, not what it was. What it was should be self-explanatory from the code
    • Link to Trac tickets or other relevant conversation.

Anatomy of a plugin

• First, a quick introduction to PHP
  • functions, variables, and how the code is executed
• What are plugins then?
  • Description
  • Functions and variables
  • Do something useful
• How to audit a plugin
  • Reviewing on WordPress.org
    • Compatible with most recent version of WordPress?
    • Regular release cycle with clear changelog
    • Positive dialog in the WordPress.org forums
    • Reputable plugin author has other plugins released
    • Licensed under the GPL
  • Install it locally and test it out. Make sure it does what you want it to do.
  • Formal code review?
    • Follows best practices and coding standards
    • Uses core APIs and the proper hook
    • Secure and performant
  • Common problems with plugins
    • Doesn’t do what you need it to
    • Plays poorly with the rest of your site
    • Performance problems with queries or remote requests
    • Security holes
• How to write your own plugin

What to do?

• Making your design responsive across many screens
  • What is responsive design?
    • Design for many different browser widths
    • Different than creating a mobile-specific website
  • Examples
    • Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
    • BU Pipe Dream: http://www.bupipedream.com/
• Multi-format publishing (post formatsand custom post types)
  • Post formats:
    • Customize the presentation of your content based on the type of content
    • Types include links, galleries, videos, statuses, audio, etc.
  • Custom post types allow you define arbitrary content types
  • Examples:
    • ONA11 conference website uses custom post types and post formats: http://ona11.journalists.org/sessions/friday-lunch-keynote-a-conversation-on-the-front-lines-of-the-arab-revolution/
    • WSJ Story Streams: http://stream.wsj.com/story/oscars-2012/SS-2-112/
• Moar plugins!
  • Edit Flow
  • Zoninator
  • JSON API
• Multisite blog network
  • Let students create sites for their organizations, etc.
  • Quick introduction to multisite
• Follow the five tenets to mastering WordPress development
• Read others’ code and have others read yours; work in public on Github