ElasticPress 2.0 is a major update, with improvements to search result weighting, expanded query parameters, and better metadata syncing.
Tweaks to the search algorithm’s fuzzy matching limit unwanted results (i.e. searches for “yell” previously returned results for “yeti,” since the terms are only two characters apart) while still correcting for misspellings. Results are more intelligently weighted, with documents containing all search terms boosted 2x, and another 2x boost for documents matching the order of searched terms.
On May 17, 10up launched The Undefeated, the latest project in our longstanding partnership with ESPN. Like Grantland and FiveThirtyEight before it, The Undefeated examines our world through a unique lens, exploring the intersections of race, sports, and culture through “innovative storytelling, original reporting, and provocative commentary.” We’re thrilled to celebrate the release of The Undefeated, which is receiving accolades and high engagement with its community feature, You Got 99 Words.
Join 10up at php[tek] 2016 on May 23-27 in Saint Louis. We are co-sponsoring the event with our cloud infrastructure partner Joyent, and will be demoing our WordPress Docker composition. Plus, team 10up Senior Web Engineer Steve Grunwell will present two sessions.
In Steve’s first talk, “Professional Development for Professional Developers,” he will show how developers can continue to learn new web development skills without being overwhelmed by an industry characterized by new frameworks and tools cropping up weekly. His second talk, “Building for the PHP Command Line Interface,” covers the characteristics of well-written PHP CLI scripts. Steve will also make the case for writing custom commands, and provide an overview of different command line tools, including WP-CLI, Artisan, and Drush.
I am honored to be stepping in for Matt Mullenweg as the WordPress 4.7 release lead, slated to go from mid-August through early December. Being a release lead for such a big and varied project is no small task, especially since it doesn’t mean I stop being a lead developer, core committer, or 10up’s Director of Platform Experience. I previously led the 4.0 release in 2014 and provided the background music for the video – I might make that a tradition, following an upcoming piano performance for my WordCamp Europe 2016 talk in Vienna (a city associated with composers like Mozart and Schoenberg).
The WordPress Importer works reasonably well for smaller, simpler sites, but leaves room for improvement. It exports content, but not site configuration data such as Widget and Customizer configurations, plugins, and site settings. The Importer also struggles to handle a large amount of content. Third party backup plugins that are compatible with site networks offer another solution, but they often involve slow intermediary “cloud” backup and restore steps, and the reliable solutions are mostly commercial. Read More on Streamline migrating to WordPress Multisite with MU-Migration
I will be a panelist at Brightcove PLAY 2016 on May 17 in Boston. The panel, CMS Integrations: Best Practices, will discuss integrating the Brightcove Video Cloud with popular CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal. I will review the Brightcove Video Connect plugin, which we developed as Brightcove’s official WordPress development partner, and present the plugin’s roadmap, which we will advance with the open source community; we opened the Github repo to the public this month.
We’re proud to announce that 10up has partnered with Joyent to bring WordPress to their Docker infrastructure.
Joyent, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) company providing software to power their—and their clients’—cloud platforms, knows the difficulties in prepackaging software installations that can be readily moved across server environments. To solve this, Joyent uses Docker, a technology which packages an application with all of its dependencies into a standardized unit for software development. In plain terms, it creates a fully assembled, preconfigured, and portable software environment.
Docker offers several practical benefits for teams building websites and applications using repeatable configurations and industry best practices like testing environments. First, as simple as the WordPress famous 5-minute install is, it results in a default, out-of-the-box configuration; Docker helps engineers fast forward past the remaining configuration. Second, it ensures that multiple installations (local, staging, production, separate servers) mirror each other, so as to allow worry-free code deployments. We made inroads in solving this problem with Varying Vagrant Vagrants, and Docker takes that solution a step further.
The 2016 Webby Award winners were announced on Tuesday. Of the four nominated 10up client projects, 10up is proud to announce one winner of the professionally selected Webby Award, and three winners of the People’s Voice Webby, selected by open voting.
AMC.com won both the Webby and People’s Voice awards for Website: Television.
BBCAmerica.com won a People’s Voice Webby for Website: Best Homepage/Welcome Page.
Taylor Lovett
John Ragozzine
Nicholas Andre
Vasken Hauri
John Eckman