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Meet Dave Ross, our newest Senior Web Engineer

Thorsten Ott on June 7, 2013

I’m Dave Ross, and I’m thrilled to be joining 10up as a Senior Web Engineer, joining a handful of other Boston-area 10uppers.

While I’m always on the lookout for new and exciting technologies, the WordPress community continues to wow me with its dedication to user experience and support for beginners and power users alike. 10up impressed me in much the same way, by combining top-notch technical skills with an understanding of business, design, and user experience. The enthusiasm here is refreshing and contagious.

I grew up in the Chicago area, where I received a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Roosevelt University. My coursework there ran the gamut from building computers out of raw logic gates to understanding the communication protocols that let the Internet support billions of people online every day. But the web still remains my favorite environment for stretching my engineering muscles.

I’ve been building web sites for almost two decades and love the helping others find a global voice online. I’ve built interactive museum displays for a major Chicago-area museum, web sites explaining pioneering research at particle physics labs around the world, and the online home for a summit of world leaders… as well as plenty of sites that brought small businesses and not-for-profits to a bigger audience. You might have seen me speak at Chicago-area meetups or WordCamp Boston, or providing WordPress support online. Over the years, I’ve released a few WordPress plugins, and I’m starting to get involved with improvements to the core software itself.

WP the People: 10up Hacks the White House

on June 6, 2013 • 2 Comments

Back in February, we applied to We the People‘s second ever White House Hackathon. The event is an open-ended civic hack day where developers of all stripes from across the United States are invited to create applications in languages like Python and JavaScript. The purpose of the event was to create resources for websites, smartphones and other platforms that build on We the People. As a Senior Web Engineer, I had the privilege of representing WordPress at the White House, alongside fellow 10upper Christopher Cochran and Automattic‘s Mo Jangda. Given just how small and selective the event was, we were deeply honored to be accepted and participate.

Inspiration & Education: WordPress.com VIP’s Intensive Developer Workshop

Thorsten Ott on June 4, 2013

As a WordPress.com VIP featured partner, 10up was invited to participate in this year’s VIP Intensive Developer Workshop in Napa, California. I had the pleasure of representing 10up at the event (although our Director of Strategic Engineering managed to make a cameo appearance, too). Hosted at the amazing Carneros Inn and Resort, surrounded by vineyards, a group of roughly 50 VIP developers and 20 Automatticians spent two and a half days digging deep into the WordPress.com VIP platform.

After arriving on Monday, May 13th, the event kicked off with a meet and greet, where I had the chance to chat with representatives from media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Penske Media Corporation, in addition to Automatticians I’d only collaborated with online. The meals we shared all week long were delicious, matched only by the stimulating conversations and the content to come.

on May 30, 2013 • 2 Comments

Thanks to a full sponsorship from Google, I’m currently attending JSConf 2013 (May 29-31, 2013), a three day JavaScript Conference jam-packed with presentations ranging from debugging to site performance. I’m personally attending the Yammer track, which focuses on curated content, and am super excited to see talks by leaders like Remy Sharp, Angus Croll, Rebecca Murphey, Brendan Eich. Today, I’ll be attending the Bitovi NodeBots Event, where I’ll hack Arduino-based robots and program them with JavaScript – not exactly something I have a chance to do every day!

I’m excited to be here, and would love to connect with anyone interested in WordPress, JavaScript, or 10up. You can connect with me on Twitter and look for me at JSConf 2013!

Publishing Workflows for WordPress & CMS Expo 2013

Jake Goldman on May 21, 2013 • 3 Comments

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in CMS Expo 2013, where I presented Publishing Workflows for WordPress. The final talk is broken down into three major sections: (1) a review of inherent WordPress workflow, including some improvements coming with 3.6, (2) a look at plug-ins that enrich its native workflow, from full featured editorial plug-ins like Edit Flow, to narrow, helpful tools like Ice Visual Revisions, and (3) inspiring case studies that illustrate just how far WordPress workflow and curation can be extended in the hands of a strong engineering and user experience team.

I’ve published the slides to YouTube, since a large portion of the presentation includes screen recordings, demoing some built in features, plug-ins, and showcases. I want to thank the awesome, engaged audience, which ranged from fellow WordPress professionals to novices who have never even opened the software.

Tanner Moushey on May 20, 2013

Living just outside of Seattle, I’m proud to share that 10up will be sponsoring and speaking at WordCamp Seattle on June 8. Featuring three tracks, the conference offers focused content for WordPress bloggers, designers, and developers.

Jeremy Felt and I will be joining Kailey Lampert in presenting lightening talks on the topic of WordPress Coding Done Right, followed by some Q&A. Eric Mann will be covering Automated WordPress Development, which reviews best practices for CSS and JavaScript and the use of Grunt to automate preparation of a theme or plugin for release.

Senior Web Strategist Josh Cunnigham, another Seattle local, will also be in attendance. If you’re planning to show up, be sure to say hello to the 10up contingent!

10up in the Top 100

Elizabeth Hillis on May 15, 2013 • 1 Comment

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.

Talking WordPress at CMS Expo this week

Jake Goldman on May 12, 2013

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:

Watch those hook priorities

Taylor Dewey on May 10, 2013 • 1 Comment

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.

10up opens up an office in Portland

Jeremy Felt on May 7, 2013 • 4 Comments

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.