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Expanding autocomplete in the WordPress admin

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Autocomplete is not a new concept in the WordPress admin – tags have had suggestions powered by suggest.js since their introduction six years ago in version 2.5. This, however, remained the only instance of Ajax-powered autocompletion for another four years, until adding users in multisite was enhanced with jQuery UI autocomplete for 3.4. It was originally committed with deliberately unpolished styling, so when I saw a request to make it look better, I decided to take it on. I may not consider myself a creative designer, but I do have an eye and passion for UI consistency. After a little iteration on both the design and code, we had a fully functional instance of autocomplete.

WordPress autocomplete evolution

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A Conversation about the Future of WordPress

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10up is a digital agency that hangs its hat on the viability of open source web platforms – WordPress in particular. We think WordPress is the platform of choice for content management and publishing, and we’ve built a team that shares these open values and grasps WordPress like few others. More than 25 of us have made core contributions, and we’re home to two core committers. Needless to say, as President, I spend significant time thinking about this platform, from its underlying code quality to the healthy – and less healthy – habits of its considerable community.

Where is WordPress heading? Where should it head? Where are the biggest opportunities? How can WordPress continue to dominate the CMS space in another 5 years? Does it make a good app platform? Is there another platform we should be mastering?

So when WP Elevate’s Troy Dean invited me to participate in a live panel on the “future of WordPress” with leaders like WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Woo’s Scott Basgaard, and Modern Tribe’s Shane Pearlman (among others), I didn’t hesitate to accept.

You can catch WP Think Tank tomorrow (February 25) at 8 pm UTC / 12 pm Pacific / 3 pm Eastern.

Rumor has it that, based on the reception, this might not be the only episode of WP Think Tank!

WP Think Tank

Helen Hou-Sandí

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Howdy, Austin! I’m going to be in town for your upcoming WordPress Meetup on Tuesday, February 25. I’ll be at Opal Divine’s Penn Field from 5 until 7 PM for the “WordPress.org Happy Hour”, along with some other members of the WordPress core team and the Automattic “dot org” team. Check out more details over on Meetup, and come find me if you want to talk contributing or 10up!

10up Hosts Scott Berkun in Portland

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Hey there PDX! As you may know, 10up has a brick & mortar office in Portland. So when our friend Scott Berkun reached out to us saying he’d be in Portland next weekend, we thought Why not host a fun, unique opportunity to hear from Scott at the 10up office?

It’s our pleasure to announce we’ll be hosting Scott for a small, intimate chat about his recent book The Year Without Pants and his time running a distributed team working on WordPress.com. If you’re a designer, engineer, project manager or other web savvy Portlander interested in WordPress and/or distributed work, we’d love for you to join us!

The event is next Thursday, 2/27 from 5-7pm at the 10up office located at 618 NW Glisan St #400 Portland, OR 97209 with an informal happy hour around the corner at Pint’s following Scott’s talk. We’d love to see you there!

RSVP by grabbing a (free) ticket on Eventbrite to let us know that you’ll be coming.

Kicking off the WordPress 3.9 development cycle

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After the excitement of the 3.8 release and a typically quiet winter holiday season, it’s time to start in earnest on WordPress 3.9. This is a particularly exciting release for me: after three cycles of being a guest committer, I’ve been granted permanent commit access to core. My goal is to continue to inform and build the admin experience, provide feedback on community contributions, and bring perspectives from real-world client implementation back to our favorite publishing platform. I’m honored to join these trusted ranks!

Drew Jaynes has also been renewed as a guest committer, and is on track to complete the inline documentation for hooks initiative. A few 10uppers have already begun contributing patches, with several working on unit tests. I’m particularly excited to see work by Adam Silverstein on storing revisions of post meta and a ticket on the topic opened by Jake.

colors.css diff

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Varying Vagrant Vagrants: All Grown Up

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Just a bit over a year ago, then-10upper Jeremy Felt decided it was time to part ways with MAMP and make friendly with Vagrant. With a little help from fellow 10up senior engineers and systems experts, Varying Vagrant Vagrants was born, introducing a consistent and shareable approach to a WordPress development environment that better represented the real world production environments agencies like 10up build for.

With a 1.0 release, almost 800 commits, and nearly 40 contributors, it’s safe to say that Varying Vagrant Vagrants, or VVV as it’s become known, is an active and stable open source project. We’re so proud to have served as its founders and creators, and look forward to continuing to play a major role in its development and maintenance.

And now, it’s time to give VVV a community of its own. A new Varying Vagrant Vagrants organization on GitHub has been created, and ownership of the main VVV repository is being transferred there.

It’s a little bittersweet to see your project take on its own life, and this is no different. Yet, as strong advocates for open source and the rising tide it fosters, we’re even more excited to see one of our investments in open R&D take flight, and look forward to contributing to VVV, its community, and its future.

My First Patch: Helen Hou-Sandi

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We’re kicking off a series about first patches that became a part of an open source software project, beginning with my own story. With 25 of 50 10uppers – at the time of writing – credited as core contributors to WordPress, credits in a number of other projects, and communities of hundreds of contributors at large, we won’t run out of material any time soon. We hope that these sometimes inspiring and often humbling stories, from one-time contributors all the way up to the most prolific WordPress core developers, will entertain and offer some perspective to open source’s newest would-be contributors. Do you remember your first patch? Tell us how to get ahold of you in the comments, and we just might feature you!

My first committed patch to WordPress was for #17887 in June 2011, just a few months before I joined 10up. I was running trunk in my testing environment to ensure that our live site would upgrade smoothly and to be able to explain the impending 3.2 redesign to our users at the university. In hindsight, my experience is probably typical for first-time contributors, and may surprise those who know me today.

WordPress Trac ticket #17887

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Helen Hou-Sandí

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I’ll be speaking about “Who is WordPress?” at the New Jersey WordPress Meetup down in Asbury Park, NJ next Tuesday, January 28. We’ll take a look at how WordPress is made and grows with the help of an amazing community, and how you’re already a part of it. This is my first time joining this meetup, and I’m really looking forward to it!

WordCamp in the frozen north

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The frozen wilderness of Norway will not keep a 10upper from attending a WordCamp! I’m heading to WordCamp Norway this weekend to talk about my experience learning WordPress security best practices. I’ll be discussing the (many) mistakes I made along the way, how I learned from them, and how you can learn from them, too.

This is the third WordCamp Norway to be held in the capital city of Oslo. The first day consists of presentations from speakers from countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Ukraine, Sweden, Switzerland, USA, New Zealand, Spain and Norway. Day two is an optional contributor day for anyone wanting to contribute to WordPress core, documentation, or the WordPress.org support forums.

Anyone in Europe interested in WordPress should come join us at WordCamp Norway. If the past two years’ were anything to go by, the 2014 event will be awesome fun for all.

10up on Fire at WordCamp Phoenix 2014

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WordCamp Phoenix holds a special place in my (Paul Clark) heart as a place of many firsts.

In 2012, Taylor Aldridge and I watched 10up’s Helen Hou-Sandi present on Maintaining a Beautiful WordPress Admin UI. It was our first WordCamp as a small agency called Brainstorm Media.

In 2013, I returned for my first time as a speaker, presenting How WordPress Saves Lives: Freedom, Hope, and Custom Post Types.

This year, Taylor Aldridge and I are proud both to be speaking and to a be a part of the 10up team. As the start to an exciting new year, Brainstorm Media joined the talented team of WordPress developers at 10up.

In total, that makes five team members and six talks that will be presenting at WordCamp Phoenix this year. Find us on the schedule, and come chat with us at the after party!