testing now

One of my favorite things about working on WordPress.com is that improvements get made and pushed out as soon as they’re tested and ready. Just a day after I wrote about manually changing your blog’s timezone to account for Daylight Saving Time, Ryan updated WordPress.com so you can now set your timezone by choosing a city.

Here’s how it works.

Log in to your dashboard, click on Settings > General, and scroll to Timezone. You now have the option to pick a city that’s in your current timezone instead of a UTC timezone. For example, I live in the same timezone as Los Angeles, so I’ve selected that city.

Once you’ve set your timezone this way, you won’t need to change it again to account for Daylight Saving Time. WordPress.com will automatically update your blog’s time settings as needed.

If you’re interested, here’s a full list of the timezones we support for reference.

Ah, spring, when a young person’s fancy turns to … blogging. And time changes. (Maybe baseball too, if that’s your thing.)

WordPress.com blog time settings follow the UTC time standard. This method allows us to keep the stats database lean and fast. That translates into free stats for everyone!

UTC doesn’t change over the course of a year. Because of this, you’ll need to adjust your blog settings to account for Daylight Saving Time manually. If you live in the USA, today – Sunday, March 14 – is the day to spring forward and adjust your WordPress.com blog’s time one hour ahead.

Update: There’s a full listing of when Daylight Saving Time begins around the world in this article on Wikipedia.

To account for Daylight Saving Time, log in to your dashboard, click on Settings > General, and scroll to Timezone. Then change your timezone to one hour ahead of your actual time zone. If you have your timezone set to, for example, UTC-8 (PST), you’ll need to change it to UTC-7.

We’ll make another announcement before the “fall back” change, which is on November 7, 2010.

This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and fans (including many hosted here on WordPress.com) are among the people attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. To celebrate this, we’re throwing a WordPress BBQ at SxSW tomorrow so that there’s a place for us all to get together.

If you’re a WordPress.com user attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in Austin), please join us for lunch after 12pm* tomorrow, Sunday March 14. Come, eat, meet some of the WordPress.com team, talk about the cool things you’re doing with WordPress on your site, let us know what we can do better, talk about some of the new features and themes you’ve been seeing here lately, etc. Think of it like a WordCamp without presentations. See how many WordPress.com staff you can spot chowing down on Matt’s favorite meal.

Location: Conjunctured coworking space, 1309 East 7th St., Austin, TX 78702. From the convention center, walk up to 7th Street, hang a right, and walk until you get to #1309. If you’re tired of walking, taking a cab is a decent option. Note that this is on the other side of I-35 from the convention center.

View Larger Map

* We’ll keep serving until we run out of food, so probably until around 2 or 3? We’ll have a hundred pounds of bbq meat, a bunch of sides, and dozens of gallons of iced tea, so come hungry.

This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and developers are among the people attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. To celebrate this, we’re throwing a WordPress BBQ at SxSW tomorrow so that there’s a place for us all to get together.

If you’re a WordPress fan attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in Austin), please join us for lunch after 12pm* tomorrow, Sunday March 14. We’re getting the BBQ from Rudy’s and the red velvet cake from Central Market. Yum! Come, eat, talk about the cool things you’re doing with WordPress, let us know what we can do better, gossip about Mark Jaquith’s new hairstyle, whatever. Think of it like a WordCamp without presentations. I’ll be there, lead developers Mark Jaquith and Ryan Boren will be there, core contributors will be there, plugin and theme developers will be there, and basically all the most intelligent and attractive people from SxSW will be there. You should be, too!

Location: Conjunctured coworking space, 1309 East 7th St., Austin, TX 78702. From the convention center, walk up to 7th Street, hang a right, and walk until you get to #1309. If you’re tired of walking, taking a cab is a decent option. Note that this is on the other side of I-35 from the convention center.

View WordPress BBQ at SxSW in a larger map

* We’ll keep serving until we run out of food, so probably until around 2 or 3? We’ll have a hundred pounds of bbq meat, a bunch of sides, and dozens of gallons of iced tea, so come hungry.

We recommend open source software whenever we can, and the Firefox browser from Mozilla is one of our favorites. Firefox 3.6 recently came out with persona support, allowing users to skin their browsers with favorite designs and brands. WordPress users everywhere seem to love the W symbol (at WordCamps it shows up on everything from t-shirts to iPhone skins), so it was only natural that WordPress personas would come along.

To kick it off, designer Chad Pugh created two WordPress personas based on the WordPress brand: “Vintage Press” and “Inkwell.” These two designs are a great way to show the WordPress love, even if you’re only showing it to yourself.

	The “Vintage Press” Persona is inspired by the style of old-fashioned printing presses and the mechanics of working with type. This persona might appeal to WordPress developers and users who appreciate the way things work under the hood.
“Inkwell” is more of a palimpsest* & watercolor hybrid that might appeal to the artists among us. Music, script and spills of color combine…

Okay, I’m starting to feel like an art critic so I’ll stop there. Check out the WordPress personas for Firefox and decide for yourselves.

* I never thought I would have occasion to use the word “palimpsest” in a dev blog post. Never.

Titan is a fantastic theme, now available on WordPress.com. It’s a highly readable, clean theme, with lots of options: four widget areas, a customizable header, and more.

Behold Titan!

An enticing color scheme and loads of customization make Titan a wonderful theme for you blog. To start things off the header has some nice social networking and RSS links, making it easy for users to keep up with your blog.

Right below the title is a highly customizable header. There are options to turn on and off categories and pages, allowing you to choose how users navigate your blog.

Titan's Header Options

Aiding in even more customization are four widget areas, including a nice footer widget area.

Titan's Footer Widget Area

Titan was designed by Drew Strojny and is available in the WordPress.org Themes Directory. You can check out Titan for yourself at http://titandemo.wordpress.com

From the tongue twisting name department we welcome PubSubHubbub, or as some people have shortened it to: PuSH. Like rssCloud, PuSH is a way for services that subscribe to updates from your blog (think Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes) to get updates even faster. In a nutshell, instead of having to periodically ask your blog if there are any updates they can now register to automatically receive updates each time you publish new content. In most cases these updates are sent out within a second or two of when you hit the publish button.

Today we’ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. There’s nothing to configure, it’s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts.

For those using the WordPress.org software we are releasing a new PuSH plugin: PuSHPress. This plugin differs from the current PuSH related plugins by including a built-in hub.

For more PuSH related reading check out the PubSubHubbub project site and Google Group. And if you really want to geek out there’s always the PubSubHubbub Spec

You can now send your WordPress.com posts to Facebook.

Joining our Yahoo and Twitter features is the latest in WordPress.com’s Publicize family: Facebook.

The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Facebook account.

These connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Facebook accounts separately.

More details can be found on the Publicize support page.

Update

Some of you may have been getting error messages asking you to authorize your connection with Facebook even though you already did that.

We think we’ve found this bug, so the error message will go away, but you’ll have to re-authorize that connection once more. Go back to My Blogs, uncheck Facebook, recheck Facebook and click the authorization button again. If that doesn’t work go through the steps outlined here. Failing that, we’ll be happy to help you out if you contact support.

Back in April of last year, Matt posted here on the dev blog about the release of BuddyPress 1.0, a plugin that adds a social networking layer to an installation of WordPress MU. Many people were excited about the idea, but were unable to experiment with BuddyPress because they ran single installations of WordPress rather than the multi-site WordPress MU. To those people, good news! A little over a week ago Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress, announced the release of BuddyPress 1.2, which can be used on single installations of WordPress. Congratulations, BuddyPress! And congratulations to all the people who’ve been waiting with bated breath for this to happen.

The first thing I thought when I heard the news was, “Awesome! Now everyone can put BuddyPress on their site if they want it.” The second thought I had was, “Shoot! Average WordPress users won’t want to try BuddyPress if they have to switch their site themes over to the BuddyPress default theme just to try it out.” The third thought I had was, “That can’t be right. I’ll ask Andy.”

As it turned out, you could keep your current theme with BuddyPress if you added a couple of files and made a few file edits. There was even a link on the BuddyPress site to download the necessary files. That still seemed a little clunky, though, so Andy, super awesome guy that he is, went ahead and made a plugin to get you started. The BuddyPress Template Pack can be installed directly from your WordPress admin (Plugins > Add New), and will walk you through the theme additions step by step.*

Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can keep your existing theme. Seriously, could BuddyPress have made it any easier for you to add social networking to your site? I know I can’t wait to try it out this weekend, how about you?

* Don’t forget to install BuddyPress itself, or the template pack plugin won’t do anything!

A Report from the 3.0 Development Cycle

Menus

There’s been a flurry of blog posts about the integration of the WooThemes Custom Navigation into WordPress core, so I thought it was time we posted the official word. For 3.0, the main user-facing feature we wanted to include was a better site menu management system. Currently, dealing with menus is clunky, using Page IDs or in some cases categories, if a theme uses categories instead of pages for the menu. We wanted a menu system that had the drag and drop ease of the widget management screen, could combine Pages, Categories, and Links, was able to be re-ordered, allowed submenus, and enabled hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether. We were in the process of building this when WooThemes introduced their Custom Navigation system. Watching their introductory video, it seemed that their system did pretty much everything we wanted to do for core, so we reached out to them about contributing to core.

As you’ve probably heard, it worked out, and the first patch has been submitted. It does require some code modification, which is happening now. The decision to incorporate the Woo menus happened right before our planned feature freeze for the 3.0 development cycle, so we pushed our freeze date back by two weeks to allow the addition. We’re now targeting the 3.0 release for early May, and we think it will be worth the extra two-week wait.

I’m personally really happy that it worked out this way, because I think it will show commercial theme and plugin authors that contributing to core is a win-win proposition. More people can contribute to and improve the basic functional code now, while WooThemes can continue to innovate on top of it for their customers. They get massive bragging rights (which I have no doubt will lead to even more customers), core gets a nice menu system without having to reinvent the wheel, and WordPress users all over the world will benefit. I’m hoping other plugin and theme developers will take a cue from Woo and look at core as a place for collaboration, rather than competition.

The Merge

It was announced at WordCamp San Francisco last year that WordPress and WordPress MU would be merging codebases. This has now happened in 3.0-alpha, and we’re working on smashing bugs and tidying up a few screens. If you’re currently using a single install of WordPress, when you upgrade to 3.0 you won’t see any of the extra screens associated with running a network of sites. If you’re currently running MU, when you upgrade you’ll notice a few labels changing, but upgrading should be as painless as usual. If you’re going to set up a new WordPress installation, you’ll be asked as part of the setup if you want one site or multiple sites, so that’s pretty simple. If you want to turn your single install into one that supports multiple sites, we’ll have a tool for you to use to do that, too. So if you’ve been worried about the merge, have a cup of chamomile tea and relax; it will all be fine.

Patch Sprint!

Okay, so where are we now? The new feature freeze date is on Monday, March 1, 2010. That means that after that date, no more enhancements or features will be added, and we’ll switch gears to focus solely on crushing bugs and fixing up the features that have already made it in. That means we only have a week to try and finish up the many Trac tickets on the 3.0 milestone that either need a patch or have a patch that needs testing. You can help! From now until noon eastern time on March 1 (that’s 17:00 UTC on March 1), head on over to Trac and pitch in. If you hit a wall, hop into the core development channel at #wordpress-dev on irc.freenode.net and hopefully one of the friendly core contributors can give you a push.