Bing catching up with Google? Um, no.

Looking through the Analytics stats for this site, WPMU.org, for August (our biggest ever btw with 188,290 visits and 304,541 page views!) I figured I’d take a look at the Search engines traffic sources.

Which are (he says, congratulating himself ;) rather good – but more of interest to your guys, demonstrate the absolute paucity of use of Bing for search in our area (one I’d guestimate reflects 19-40 year old, mostly male, early adopters).

In case you didn’t see the caption – that’s Bing with a woeful 0.4% of referrals.

And Google with a 98.5% share.

Despite plenty of articles suggesting that Bing is pushing 30% of market share.

Now, you could well argue that Bing isn’t really after us, after all we don’t click on ads (as a rule) and hardly compose the largest section of your general society… but still, it’s worthy of note, especially if you’ve considered looking into SEO and Bing of late.

The short answer to that would seem to be ‘why bother’.

The tragic element of which being that, mostly, when playing 3 search engine monte I tend to choose bing :/

Have you had a different experience? Do you give a rats about Bing when you’re thinking about SEO?

Should BuddyPress Sites Be Worried By New Facebook Patent?

Yesterday, the US Patent Office officially approved this patent by Facebook which was filed way back in May of 2004.

The patent has two main parts:

1. Profile viewing – the members of a social network can manage who can see their profiles and “limited profiles” are shown to non-approved members or the public

2. Messaging – there is a method for members who have an approved relationship to message and contact each other, including through text and email

I’m definitely no lawyer, but I have been trying to decipher all of this to figure out if many BuddyPress sites might be using similar enough features that Facebook could potentially file suit.

The ZDNet blog post about this makes the claim that many tech companies hold patents for “defense purposes” only and don’t necessarily enforce them.

But still it is kind of scary that Facebook would potentially now have one more weapon to stop any BuddyPress powered social network that gets too big for their britches, don’t you think!?

Any thoughts or reassurances?

Daily Tip: Get Notified of New bbPress Forum Posts by Email

Stop checking your forum for new activity and get email notices instead. bbPress New Topic Notifications sends an e-mail notification to specific addresses when a new topic has been posted.

The notification emails sent out can be customized in the settings page:

This plugin is for use with the bbPress plugin, which recently put out bbPress RC4, featuring tightened integration with Multisite, BuddyPress, and Akismet. bbPress New Topic Notifications is an add-on that you can download for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

10 WordPress Themes for Photographers

This week’s showcase is a collection of themes for photographers. WordPress is a great platform for photographers as it’s quick and easy to update, and there are loads of themes available to show your photographs off to their best. Also, as you read this I’m off in New England taking photographs myself – suckers!

Specere

Demo | Purchase

Kin

Demo | Purchase

 Village

Demo | Purchase

Photocrati

Demo | Purchase (nb – Photocrati has 15 themes included. Image is just one of them)

Invictus

Demo | Purchase

Immense

Demo | Purchase

Exposito

Demo | Download

Sideways

Demo | Purchase

Altas

Demo | Purchase

Widescreen

Demo | Purchase

(header image CC license by Gueorgui)

BuddyPress 1.5 Resources: Tutorials, Videos and Info to Help You Get Ready

BuddyPress 1.5 Beta 3 was released yesterday with many bugs squashed in Beta 2 and is now 99% complete. A full release is due out any day now and we’re here to help you get up to speed with all of the new features.

What’s New in BuddyPress 1.5

This is an excellent video from John James Jacoby’s presentation at WordCamp San Francisco. He reviews the development process for BuddyPress throughout the past year and a half and offers an introduction to what’s coming with the 1.5 release.

BuddyPress Overview from Boone Gorges

This is a BuddyPress 1.Kickass video series from Boone Gorges at WordPressNYC. The first video is posted below so that you can get an idea of the presentation and click through to watch the other videos.

BuddyPress 1.5 Menus and Components Will Be Better Than Ever

BuddyPress 1.5 has a completely new component API. Components can now be placed on regular WordPress pages and structuring your site’s menus is easier than it ever has been. You can actually use the built-in WordPress menus and map the root components to regular WordPress pages.

For more information check out the codex article I wrote for a complete walkthrough of how to set up your main site navigation for BuddyPress 1.5:

How to Set up Your Main Site Navigation Using the Built-in WordPress Menus

Goodbye BuddyBar!

The BuddyBar is now integrated with the WordPress admin bar. It’s being phased out and they won’t be two separate menu bars in the future.

Documentation is Greatly Improved

With all the things that have been rewritten for Buddypress 1.5, the development team has made certain to comment all of the code that they’ve worked with so that you can get in there and find out how it works.

BuddyPress Plugin and Theme Compatibility Information

The BuddyPress codex has an awesome resource for finding out if the plugins you’re using having been updated for BuddyPress 1.5. Check out the full list to find out which plugins will need to be updated before you’ll be able to upgrade your community to 1.5 when it is released.

There’s also a list starting to form for theme compatibility with BuddyPress 1.5, but it’s still very much in progress. Check back at the 1.5 Theme Compatibility codex page to look up your site’s theme.

BuddyPress 1.5 Developer and Designer Information

This section of the codex has links to some more technical information that will be helpful to those of you who are developing themes and plugins. It’s organized into relevant links to the BuddyPress Development blog.

There are just a few tickets currently active for BuddyPress 1.5. If you want to test it out ahead of time, download BuddyPress 1.5 Beta 3, available at the bottom of the Trac page. PS. This beta is only suitable for use on a test site. Make sure you review some of these resources to get familiar with what you’ll be jumping into when you upgrade in the coming days.

Post Your Status to Your Website with the Free WPMU DEV Status Plugin

Posting a link on Facebook is pretty awesome. You can’t really beat the way that Facebook parses a link, feeding through the image and description of that link. Like this:

Wouldn’t it be nice to do just that on your WordPress website? Or even across your Multisite Network? Well, now you can – and easily, with the WPMU DEV Status plugin. Check it out in action!

Install the plugin and check out the new widget on your dashboard:

Insert your link to see it parsed:

Check it out on your blog:

You can download it now for free from WPMU DEV!

Status Premium

We also have a premium version of the plugin for WPMU DEV Members and for anyone who wants to pay $39 for the extra functionality. With the premium version of the plugin you don’t have to be in your dashboard, you can post your status from your homepage as well:

In fact, you can post it from any page on your site.

Here’s the difference between the free version and the premium version:

Grab it now from the WPMU DEV homepage!

(header image CC license Outsanity Photos)

An Update on the bbPress Plugin: RC4 Released with Multisite and BuddyPress Integration

Many users are there have been asking for updates on the status of the bbPress plugin. It is well on its way and with RC4 out today. The plugin is still pre-release but can now be used on live sites. This release candidate offers tightened integration with Multisite, BuddyPress, and Akismet.

Here’s what’s new with bbPress RC4:

• BuddyPress 1.5 activity streams and @mention integration
• Improved Akismet integration
• Improved update process
• Improved importer
• Improved multisite integration
• Improved spam/deleted user handling
• Added blacklist_keys support
• Added actions to topic/reply forms
• Updated green admin color scheme for WordPress 3.2

Please note that you’ll need to be using the latest beta of BuddyPress in order to take advantage of the integration that’s been added.

You can download the bbPress plugin from the WordPress repository. Please make sure to share any bugs with the development team to help speed the process of delivering the final release.

Introducing DeployMint: A Staging and Deployment System Made for WordPress Multisite

Having a separate staging environment for your WordPress site is important when you need to test and roll out some major changes. It can also be a lifesaver, if the staging environment is a decent copy of the production state. I’d like to introduce you DeployMint, a system for staging and deployment that was specifically created for use with WordPress Multisite.

DeployMint requires that multisite is enabled in order to work. It then allows you to take snapshots of sites within WordPress multisite. DeployMint runs as a plugin to turn your snapshots into the staging environment(s), and features robust version control and zero down-time during deployments. It uses the Git version control system to safely and efficiently store site snapshots.

Here’s the basic flow: take a snapshot, modify it and then redeploy it.

DeployMint is designed to integrate with existing multisite network sites, and you can create as many subdomains as you like. For example:

development.example.com
staging.example.com
example.com (your live site)

Here’s how DeployMint works behind the scenes:

When you install the plugin, you’ll need to create a data directory that is not under your web root, but is writable by your web server. As you create a new project, a new Git repository is created. When you use DeployMint to take a snapshot of one of your sites, it dumps all the tables belonging to that particular site into individual files. These files are then checked into a ‘Git’ repository. Every snapshot you create is a new branch in the repository and only the changes are stored.

What happens when you deploy?
DeployMint checks out the branch you want to deploy and imports it into a temporary database. The plugin will preserve the comments on the site that it is deploying to. It also modifies hostnames, when necessary.

The best part is that before deploying your changes, DeployMint will take a full backup of your entire multisite database, which includes all of your sites. It stores these backups just in case something goes wrong or you need to revert back to the way your site was before the changes.

Check out the demo video of DeployMint in action:

Essentially, you’re able to change themes, plugins, and content in your staging environment and then simply deploy to your live site. You can do this without losing any comments or data that has been added or changed on the live site in the meantime of your development efforts on the staging site.

While you may really want to be able to use this plugin with non-multisite installations, here’s why the plugin’s author has decided to start with multisite networks:

…it was a tough call to choose not to support non MU sites initially. I can probably add this in a future version, but the reason I chose to only support MU is so that you can install themes and plugins on the MU server and have it available for dev/staging and live blogs without having to transfer the files across to a different WP installation. It radically reduces the complexity and the only thing you need to worry about deploying when you’re on MU is data.

The ability to deploy from remote Git repositories would be a hugely beneficial feature for this plugin, and this is something the author is considering based on his reply to visitor’s comments on his blog.

If you are one of our many readers who operates a Multisite network and need a reliable staging and deployment system, you’ll want to consider using DeployMint. Not only is it a huge timeseaver, but it also performs the backups you need for extra assurance in the deployment process.

Download DeployMint for free from its project home at Google Code. If you have any questions, make sure to check out plugin author Mark Maunder’s blog post announcing DeployMint where many common questions have already been answered.

WordPress in Enterprise: Interview with Dave Coveney

Back when I was at WordCamp UK I attended a session on using WordPress in Enterprise. I made a video of the session but I went to upload it yesterday, fired up my laptop and it wouldn’t switch on :( In the meantime, however, I interviewed a couple of the panel members by email so that any of you who couldn’t make the session can still have the benefit of some of their sage advice.

Today’s interview is with Dave Coveney. Dave is Director of Interconnect IT, a Liverpool-based web company that has built websites for the likes of Telegraph Media Group, Greenwich PCT and Informa PLC. He also gave my favorite presentation at WordCamp UK – he even gave away Skittles! Yum.

Okay, here he is:

1) How do you use WordPress in Enterprise?

We don’t! We’re not really a large company, so we have a WP website, of course, and we will probably use WP for our ticketing system in the future. However, we do implement WP for a number of Enterprise clients. For example, one multinational gas company uses a WP site as a way for users to anonymously flag up safety concerns. They also use various other blogs for internal communications on a range of matters.

2) What applications do you run alongside WordPress?

One of our clients, Lloyds List Group, uses WP for marketing landing pages. The forms on these (Gravity Forms based, incidentally) then feed directly to Salesforce.com, allowing their sales teams to follow up the generated leads. Other clients use APIs from other systems to help show information, for example flight information on the NATS (National Air Traffic Service) corporate site.

3) What sort of issues do you face?

Getting WP into the intranet is a tricky one. Ultimately, Sharepoint is the corporate darling – and for good reason. The infrastructure it requires is well understood, it has amazing workflow and security capabilities, and at the same time it can power a corporate intranet and even, should you wish, an external facing website. However, Sharepoint is clumsy for standard corporate communications. Trying to face off Sharepoint with WP will *always* fail, because they are not the same offering. Instead, WP should be sold as an ideal solution for running hub pages and internal and external communications sites. For now, WP for intranets is going to be largely limited to smaller organisations. It’s brilliant for companies of, say, twenty or so people and probably up to around 100+. But in an organisation of 50,000 it just doesn’t have the tools required, and they’re a long way from being available.

4) How do you deal with the fast release cycle?

We don’t! We actually review the reasons for changes and then carry out upgrades at our convenience. However, that’s not for everybody – you have to understand what the security bulletins mean, you have to have a properly secured server, and you have to have good working practices. It would be nice if there were frequently patched, stable enterprise releases that had no more than annual release schedules. One day, a company with a lot of enterprise clients will fork or create a WP distro in such a way and it will be one step closer to getting broad acceptance of the system.

5) What sort of processes do you have in place for upgrading WordPress?

We have staging servers running copies of the live site. We test the upgrades here first, and develop an upgrade plan. We then use this to upgrade the main sites promptly. There are always backups available in order to allow for a rapid roll-back if required.

6) What advice would you give to anyone planning to use WordPress at enterprise level?

Go for it, but don’t think it’s the panacea to all costs and savings. Be prepared for resistance in many quarters, and get your explanations of the benefits *and* disadvantages in order.

7) What your essential plugins for using WordPress for enterprise?

That’s an open ended question and I don’t think there’s any answer as each implementation is different! WPDirAuth is useful for LDAP authentication. A lot of our stuff is custom and unreleased, so we can’t really list those out.

(header image CC license Dunechaser)

Add Sliding Tabs to Display Social Media on Your WordPress Site

Displaying recent posts from your various social media outlets can take up quite a bit of real estate within your sidebar. A tabbed display has long been one of the best ways to maximize the content you can include on one page and now you can make use of tabs for your social accounts with the new Social Media Tabs plugin.

This plugin essentially gives you a widget, which adds sliding tabs, each with a social network profile or media feed. The tabs can be added to either a widget area or set to slide out from the side of the browser. Visitors will be able to view all of your social media feeds from one compact with smooth slideout transitions.

This is one highly configurable widget:

• Custom Icons – To change the icons used for the facebook, google, rss and twitter tabs enter the full URL to your new icon image in the text boxes. The current active icons will show in the right-hand column.
• Default Skin – Check this box to disable the default skin that comes with the plugin.
• Open Links In New Window – Check the box if you wish all links within the media tabs open in a new browser window.
• Google +1 Options – Add Statistics – Check the box to include statistics about your google profile at the top of the tab. The statistics panel is provided by socialstatistics.com
• Twitter Options – Show Replies – Uncheck the box if you do not wish replies to be included in the list of tweets

On top of those options available in the plugin’s settings, you also have more in the widget control panel. These options enable you to easily change the height and width of the widget, choose between static or slide out tabs, change the slide out tab location, offset, auto-close, load options, default open tab, and much more.

View the live demo on the plugin’s homepage to see it in action.

If you’re a fan of sliding panels, then I highly recommend the Social Media Tabs plugin for a slightly more interactive approach to displaying your feeds. Download it for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

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