Every website has a purpose. Maybe you want people to buy a product, donate to your cause, download your app, or subscribe to your mailing list. How can you confidently modify your site to make it more effective with respect to this goal?
A/B testing is a process by which multiple variants of a website are presented to different users randomly and statistical tools are used to see whether any variant is more effective, according to an overall goal metric such as conversions or revenue.
While various A/B testing products—many free—exist, none are made from the ground up to work within the WordPress ecosystem. I believe a solution made particularly for WordPress could make A/B testing so much easier and more straightforward, and that such a solution could be greatly beneficial to the platform as a whole.
I’m happy to announce my new project, code-named ShrimpTest,1 which is directly aimed at filling this void. I’ll be working on this project this summer together with the fantastic folks at Automattic.
The best way to keep up with development is on the project’s development blog, the ShrimpTest P2. Most updates will most likely be much shorter than this initial post. You can get less frequent, milestone-like updates by following ShrimpTest on twitter. Development will be open so feel free to check it out (haha) and submit patches as well. As I go along, I’ll also look forward to your feedback.
Five dollars to the first person to correctly guess why I’m calling it ShrimpTest. ↩
This past weekend I gave a couple talks at the inaugural WordCamp Boston. WordCamps are local, community-organized events for WordPress users and enthusiasts. We had about 400 people at the Microsoft Cambridge campus.
Yesterday I gave a talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup. The Boston WordPress Meetup meets monthly at the Microsoft Cambridge Research Center which is a fantastic venue right on the Charles river. Last night we got to be up on the 10th floor which has a great view of Boston right over the river. There was pretty good turnout, with about thirty or fourty people there.
My talk was a general introduction to WordPress plugin development, beginning with the concepts of actions and filters, and concluding with a description of HookPress, my new plugin which enables webhooks in WordPress. Here are the slides:
I recently have spent a little time putting together a new WordPress plugin called HookPress. HookPress lets you add webhooks to WordPress, letting you easily develop push notifications or extend WordPress in languages other than PHP.
WordPress itself is built on a powerful plugin API which provides actions and filters. Actions correspond to events, so you can set a webhook to fire when a post is published or a comment is made.1 Filters let you modify some text when it is saved or displayed, so you can have your external webhook script reformat some text or insert some other content dynamically. Not all actions and filters are supported at this time, but I will continue to add more in.
There’s a webhooks meetup in San Francisco today but I unfortunately left SF this morning, so I created a video which will be played there as a lightning talk. A demo of both types of webhooks are in the video as well.
I’m really excited by this very simple but potentially high-impact plugin. I’d love to get your comments and feedback on this new plugin and hope to hear how you’re using HookPress!
A natural language interface is only “natural” if it’s in your natural language. With this mantra in mind, we’ve been making steady progress on the challenging problem of Ubiquity localization. The first fruit of this research is in the localization of the parser and bundled commands in Ubiquity 0.5. Here today is a visual guide on command localization in Ubiquity and different options we can take in attacking the community command localization problem. (more…)
I recently noticed that some of my blog posts, most notably my Templates in YARPP 3 article, was producing a PHP error:
Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: unrecognized character after (?< at offset 3 in /…/html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-syntax/geshi/geshi.php on line 2132
This seemed to be coming from the version 1.0.8.4 version of Geshi I had installed. A quick google search for “geshi line 2132” gives you over a thousand errors, so this seems to be common issue. Geshi is a fabulous and popular syntax highlighter and is the core component of the WP-Syntax plugin for WordPress.
I did some digging around and realized that the issue was with the compilation of this monstrosity of a regular expression, used (as far as I can tell) to identify PHP code snippets, for example the <?php … ?> keywords:
Not knowing exactly where to start in diagnosing this crazy expression, I simply disabled those “script delimiters” in the geshi/php.php file. The sections I commented out are lines 1080-1101. Now the script delimiters like <?php don’t get highlighted nicely, but I feel that’s a small price to pay for eliminating these errors. Another solution for the WP-Syntax users seems to be to downgrade to 0.9.4. Hopefully in the near future an update to Geshi will come out which fixes this issue once and for all.
A while back I created a count command for Ubiquity to count HTML elements on a page, so I’ll share it here. The idea is super simple: select some text on your page and execute count p to get the number of paragraphs, or count a to get the number of links, or count tr to get the number of table rows. This is super useful when reading articles with charts or lists online and you want to know how many there are without doing something like copy-pasting into Excel.
The count command is built using jQuery so it can even understand targets like p.class or a[href=...]. Give it a try! ^^
In this blog post I describe features in YARPP version 3.0.From those of you who were testing the beta, YARPP templates now go in your theme, and they must be of the form yarpp-template-….php.
If you have a YARPP support question not directly related to the templating feature, please use the YARPP support forums.
Version 3 of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is a major rewrite which adds two new powerful features: caching and templating. Today I’m going to show you how you can use templates to customize the look of your related posts output.1
Previously with YARPP you were relatively limited in the ways you could present related posts. You were able to set some HTML tags to wrap your posts in and choose how much of an excerpt (if any) to display. This limited interface worked great for many users—indeed, these options still exists in YARPP 3.0. However, there’s also a new option for those of you who want to put your PHP skills to work and have complete control over your related posts display. The option will let you choose any files in the templates subdirectory of YARPP.
It’s always interesting to see these release spikes in download traffic. Note that this release was on the Wednesday but that was during the day, so Wednesday’s traffic is still higher than the normal ~300/day level, while the big peak (by day) is on Thursday. Too bad wordpress.org doesn’t give me hourly stats, though I guess that would be a little ridiculous.
YARPP is just about at that 35k download mark. I’m looking forward to the next release. ^^
The advanced WordPress user is intimately familiar with query_posts, the function which controls which posts are displayed in “The Loop.” query_posts gives plugin and theme writers the ability to display only posts written in Janary (query_posts("monthnum=1")) or disallow posts from a certain category (query_posts("cat=-529")1). One of the parameters you can set here is orderby which affects the ordering of the posts returned, with allowed values such as author, date, or title. But what if you want to order your posts in some other order, defined outside of your wp_posts table? Here I’m going to lay out some thoughts on rolling your own external ordering source for WordPress queries.
In order to introduce an external ordering source, we need to do four things:
1. create the external ordering source,
2. hook up (read “join”) the external ordering source
3. make sure we use that order, and
4. make it play nice. ^^
By the way, I’m going to assume you, dear reader, are PHP-savvy, proficient in MySQL, and already know a little about WordPress. This how-to is not for the PHPhobic.
Clicking on a version’s permalink will let you download the plugin. Subscribe now and be the first to find out when the upcoming version 2.1 is released!
I decided to semi-automate this RSS-producing process as well. As a plugin developer using wordpress.org’s plugin hosting, I sync a local copy of the plugin to their server using SVN. I wrote a PHP script to get the modification date information directly from the local files, parse the version log in the read me, and produce the RSS feed. If there’s an interest, perhaps I’ll release this code in the future.
Well, it’s been a while since I updated my plugin YARPP—in my humble opinion the best related posts plugin for WordPress. ^^ Today I release version 2.0, incorporating a number of important requests and bug fixes:
New algorithm which considers tags and categories, by frequent request
I like many others am a big fan of John Gruber’s Markdown, a simple typesetting spec for entering text in a clean, legible plain-text fashion and outputting to (X)HTML. Michel Fortin did the fabulous job of porting the Markdown engine to PHP, making it a plugin for WordPress, bBlog, and TextPattern.
I’ve been using Markdown for all my blog posts here. Recently, though, I was in charge of a bbPress bulletin board (the “less is more” sister project to WordPress) for the Shoreland Scav Hunt team, and wanted to use Markdown formatting there. And I wasn’t the only one wanting to do this.
With some experimenting and research into the filters in the bbPress text flow (different than the WordPress one), I was able to make Markdown work in bbPress. This involved adding a special bbPress plugin wrapper to Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra. I’ve rereleased this plugin as Markdown for WordPress and bbPress, available at both wordpress.org and bbpress.org. Enjoy!
You can get less frequent, milestone-like updates by following ShrimpTest on twitter. Development will be open so feel free to check it out (haha) and submit patches as well. As I go along, I’ll also look forward to your feedback.
