Last week, Royal Pingdom released their annual analysis of the top 100 blogs, based on site linking behavior and categorization over a 6 month time frame as collected by Technorati (a debatable, but reasonable metric). Royal Pingdom has pointed out that 52% of the sites are built on WordPress. Comparing this list to last year’s list, we see that WordPress’s dominance as a publishing platform rose from 48% to 52%. At the same time, competing publishing formats like Drupal and MoveableType have dropped or remained constant.

The news for 10up is even better: we’ve provided direct service for 8 of the blogs on the list. TechCrunch moved up into the top five. 9to5mac moved up two spaces from #33 to #31. Deadline maintained its place on the list at #26. Two of our clients made the list for the first time:  Consumerist at #90 and hip2save.com at #98. Three other blogs enlisted our web strategy services.

With more than a dozen core WordPress contributors on our team, including a guest core committer, we’ve actually written code running on each of the other 44 WordPress-backed blogs. Add in our modest jQuery core contributions, and we’ve made some small contribution to every site on the list!

We’d like to congratulate everyone who made the list! You can find the WordPress statistics at Royal Pingdom and the original list over at Technorati.

This coming week I’ll be participating in and speaking at the annual CMS Expo in Chicago. CMS Expo educates and informs business leaders, content marketers, website implementors, and other professionals looking for an in-depth review of the latest web-based publishing solutions. With three full days of content and more than 50 speakers, CMS Expo covers a cross-section of popular content management systems, including Drupal, Joomla, MODx, and of our favorite, WordPress. I’ll be one of four speakers offering insight and content focused on WordPress.

Assuming planes run on time, I’ll be there on Monday evening for the Welcome Kickoff Meetup at the Orrington Conference Center, where I’ll look forward to joining lead WordPress developer Andrew Nacin’s WordPress breakout meetup.

The conference fully kicks off on Tuesday, May 14, where I’ll be presenting Publishing Workflows for WordPress at 4:30 pm CST.  On the heels of a session reviewing WordPress’s CMS chops, I’ll dive into scenarios where light weight, out-of-the-box WordPress just doesn’t cut it. Here’s my session description:

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When adding an action or a filter to WordPress, the third parameter allows you to adjust priority. In this way, multiple bits of code can determine the order that they should execute without having to rely on the order that PHP actually parses them.

Generally, there are no minimums or maximum limits (other than those imposed by PHP itself) for priority, but there’s a very good reason to give consideration to when your code runs. Here’s an example:

Widget registration should be hooked to ‘widgets_init’ as in the following code:

function mytheme_register_widgets() {
  register_widget( 'Mytheme_Widget' );
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'mytheme_register_widgets' );

This is also the hook used internally by WordPress to take all the registered widgets and create a global array, $wp_registered_widgets. Specifically, this is in the WP_Widget_Factory class’s constructor function which is called once in wp-settings.php, immediately before the ‘setup_theme’ action hook.

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We’re proud to formally announce the opening of our first office in Portland, Oregon this month. Portland has an incredible online media community, second only to mega-metropolises like New York City and San Francisco, without the high cost of living. As a distributed company, we find the best strategy, creative, WordPress engineering, and systems talent from across the United States. As it turns out, 5 of our 25 full-time employees live in the Portland metro area, with two more living just a three hour drive (or train ride!) away in greater Seattle.

In short, this expanding, thriving technology community is the perfect atmosphere for 10up to begin growing its distributed roots into brick and mortar hubs.

Our Portland team is excited to have a local hub, and anticipate working out of our office for more than half of their working hours. Other 10uppers from across the country have already expressed an eagerness to visit the office throughout the year.

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