MT has given the typography on WordPress.org a refresh to bring it more in line with our sans-serif (instead of Lucida) approach in the WP dashboard, and also tightened up the vertical space the sub-heads were taking up on the page. Helvetica / Arial is a bit tougher than Lucida at smaller pixel sizes, so drop a comment here if you notice anything funky on the site.

Been giving a lot of thought to how to give plugin authors more control over their plugin pages. In WordPress custom headers have been hugely beneficial in people’s ability to make a theme their own without having to be a designer. (And designers can make them really sing.)

As an experiment we’ve turned on custom headers for the plugin directory. If you’d like to try out this feature:

1. Make a 772×250 pixel jpeg or png. (No animated GIFs. )
2. Check it in to your plugin’s SVN directory with the path assets/banner-772x250.(jpg|png). Note that the assets directory is added to your plugin’s root directory, not trunk.
3. On the next plugin directory refresh (every 15 minutes or so) you should see your image start showing up on the page.

For an example of this in action, check out Hello Dolly, natch. Our goal is to mainly see how people use them, so if you try this out leave comment below with a link to your plugin!

Final note: this is just an experiment, and there is a 98.254% chance the dimensions, placement, and text overlay for this header will change in the future, or the idea might not work at all. But I think it’s a nice toe in the water for letting authors really make their plugin pages shine.

One idea that grew from this thread about the number of developers whose jobs are supported by WordPress was that we should try to get more information about the WP developer community at large. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, that have never registered at WordPress.org, let alone been to a WordCamp or subscribed to this blog. It would be interesting to know about them, and also to give them an opportunity to participate in (and maybe even contribute to) the community.

I’m planning on including a link to a survey in the 3.2 announcement post. Because the email goes to end-users as well as developers, this is a great opportunity to capture some feedback from them too. We’ll open source the anonymized/aggregate raw response data and probably present some of the analysis at WordCamps too, like the upcoming State of the Word at WCSF.

The goals of the survey are:

1. Gather data on the number and nature of companies and independent developers that use WordPress. (How many jobs has WP created?) Use this both for some static reporting, but also to track trends over time if we do a similar survey next year.
2. Provide the community with a picture of the end users. What people and companies use WordPress, and how?
3. Inspire greater participation in the community through awareness and the opportunity to receive more information.

It’s currently sitting in the wiki at http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Pjad/WordPress_User/Developer_Survey

What do you think? Any questions missing or ones we should re-word?

We have a checkbox in profiles where people can say “I make my living from WordPress.” As of today, 19,932 people have checked that box.

It’s a neat data point, but also makes me curious about more.

I’d love to have a yearly survey we promote when we do a release to ask questions of the WP community that we’d love answered, perhaps collecting (and refining) them on a Codex page throughout the year.

What would you ask?

My suggestion on “content types” has gotten completely out of hand, with post styles, post templates…

To clarify, my idea for the completion of that “feature” would be a wiki page with a taxonomy name and a few slugs we all agreed on (aside, gallery, quote, video…) and reaching out to the folks doing tumblelog themes to ask them to support it, noticeably Woo but also 2010, P2, Typographic.

Basically a convention different themes can use so if you switch from one to another you don’t have to redo all your archives.

When is comment moderation going to be not-broken?

Based on some feedback from Lloyd I’ve tweaked the homepage intro again, particularly the last sentence.

I’m curious on some other people’s thoughts on the homepage — I think of our audience coming to the homepage as:

1. people who have no idea what WP is
2. people who know what WP is and want one
3. users of WP who need help
4. users of WP who want a new theme or plugins
5. contributors to: support, docs, themes, plugins, core

Whew. What should be there for each of those people? How do we move folks from one level to another?

My second question would be: what should a download (really a getting started) page look like in the age of one-click installers? Do you know how many people (including my Mom) have an unpacked ZIP of WordPress on their desktop and say the thing is too hard?

Forcing GZIP: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/12/velocity-forcing-gzip-compression/

This would make an excellent WordPress plugin.

Fixed http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14269 as a generalized output buffer for the entire site.

Last night two big changes happened on WordPress.org:

1. Ryan switched over all of the blogs to a single MS install. Given some like the dev blog go back (by definition) to before the first version of WordPress ever released, this is pretty impressive.
2. Mike Adams upgraded the bbPress instances to the latest trunk version.

Things were wonky for a bit, but should be stable now.