If you’ve been around the WordPress journalism / blogosphere / whatever-you-want-to-call-it enough, then you’ve likely seen the rise and fall of several news sites. Some of them were great and then went completely dark; others have been slowly going on the up and up.

Right now, I can definitively say that my two favorite journalism sites for WordPress are WP Tavern and Post Status. I’ve gotta give props to the Tavern because they’ve been around for quite a while, and just before we thought they were going to have to close their doors, they ended up receiving corporate backing.

Good news for us, right? One thing that makes me a little skeptical about that is that it can occasionally influence how stories are written but, to be fair, that doesn’t seem to be the case with The Tavern.

But then this past week, Brian Krogsgard introduced the new premium subscription service for Post Status. I’m a fan and I think this is something that many of us need to think critically about before joining.

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I’ve been working on a very simple plugin lately – more of which I’ll talk about next month – that’s serving as a demo for a larger project that I’ve been working on.

In short, the plugin gives editors the ability to exclude posts from the main index feed of the WordPress blog. This means that the blog post is still accessible via direct URL, but it won’t show up in the main feed of the site.

This is achieved by the following process:

• Introduce a meta box into the post editor dashboard
• Add a check box that gives the user the ability to check whether or not to exclude the post
• Use a hook to exclude those posts form the dashboard

It sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

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A few days ago, I was talking with a friend about a post I’ve recently written in which I had disabled the comments.

The general question is basically:

Why disable comments?

And though it was a good question. Generally speaking, though not always, I try to be very deliberate with the choices that I make as it comes to how this blog looks (though it’s getting dated, I fear), functions, and what I opt to share.

But what kind of answer is that?  It’s not.  Continue reading

Over the last year or so, I’ve been hesitant to open source Mayer. I mean, by default, the theme is open source, but I mean placing it on GitHub. Coincidentally, I’ve never had a problem open sourcing any of my plugins no matter how low-quality they were (at least at the time – I mean, I didn’t know any better!).

I still have a lot to learn but that’s a topic for another post.

Anyway, so what’s the rub? That is, why is the only way to grab a copy of the source code of open source WordPress themes to purchase them? It kind of feels a little bit anti-GPL doesn’t it (and to be clear, I do not want to start a debate on this)?

The current GitHub page for Pressware

But the software should be freely available. It’s the support – and the other perks that come with that – that matters the most, right? And I’ve watched other people be wildly successful with open sourcing their work (Pippin Williamson being one of them). Continue reading