In February 2003, I started the team at cnp_studio with the help of the partners at Clark/Nikdel/Powell. It started with my handling most aspects of the development process until being able to add Pete to the team in 2004. From that point forward we slowly grew the team by adding Sean, then Mike and then finally Chris last October. The team has experienced modest growth while remaining true to our philosophy of great user experience built on top of great content platforms. We have flourished even in a down market as a result every member of the team sharing the same vision and the same desire to use great new technologies to do things few others can.
Content and great user experience
Great content platforms and user experience have been at the core of our projects, but if I'm truly honest with myself, a gap always existed in the communications strategy. When building a communication tool such as a website, a communication strategy really needs to be a cornerstone of the program for its ultimate success.
This is what we found in projects involving Voce. Our team would build solid tools for their programs while Voce managed the overall content strategy and measurement of these projects. It ensured that projects we started would continue to succeed well beyond our initial deployment and also that the successes of these programs could be communicated back to the client in a meaningful way. Beautiful.
What this means…
This means good things because Voce has always challenged our team to do great things. Our ability to pursue new ideas, platforms, and technologies is unchanged. Our clients benefit from the expertise of Voce while Voce's clients benefit from the platform developer working in direct contact with their strategists.
We're still in Florida (25 minutes from Disney if you care to visit). We're still the same team of developers doing what we've done for years, but now part of a larger family that rounds out our programs perfectly.
It's where this business is heading and the team as a whole is very excited about this. More to come... stay tuned.
WordPress has been an amazing platform for our business and has an even more amazing community surrounding it. As a result, I'm both proud and excited to say we're currently planning Orlando's first WordCamp for this December 5, 2009.
The lack of BlogOrlando this year left a bit of a void in the Orlando area's social media conference schedule for 2009 so we're working with Josh on how to ensure we include what he did so well with Blog Orlando.
Exact details are a bit thin still at this point, but are firming up quickly. We had to get the date out there so schedules are cleared. WordPress will be an obvious focus, but in no way is this a conference geared towards just the developer. Follow WordCamp Orlando on Twitter and check the WordCamp Orlando Web Site for details as they come available and if you'd like to help, we're definitely going to need it so let us know (comment or message @wordcamporlando on Twitter).
Today is the kick-off of WWDC and specifically the keynote (1p.m. eastern) where we learn about the next device we'll be buying.
To keep up we'll be following Gizmodo's Live Blog of the event for several reasons:
Brian Lam and his team over at Gizmodo are the best damn live-bloggers out there. They'll post it all with great pics to boot.
The blog is hosted with WordPress.com and these guys know how to handle traffic spikes, so I won't lose the site right before the new iPhone photos start.
No refreshing.
We've all done it… we go to our favorite live blog site (or the one that hasn't crumbled under the traffic crush yet) and pound the refresh button to see the next post. It's no longer necessary on Gizmodo's Live Blog.
A huge thanks to the guys at Automattic for doing most of the legwork here. If you haven't used it, their P2 theme for WordPress automatically adds new posts to the page as soon as they're available without refreshing. We took this foundation and applied it to live.gizmodo.com and now you can watch as the posts pour in without ever hitting refresh. Now that's progress.
Internet Explorer 6 is almost 8 years old. Try to think of another program, browser, piece of equipment or anything else used in our tech-world that is 8 years old and still viable. How is that LaserDisc system of yours working? Is it still with the times? Every product reaches that point where it simply needs to go. You may argue 'But it still works...' but if you developed web sites for a living you would know it really doesn't. If developers, like myself, didn't spend extra time and code writing specific styles just for IE6 then it wouldn't work. Apart from the extra markup, styles and time wasted, it keeps a developer from being able to take advantage of simple things like PNGs. Sure therearenumerousPNG hacks and other ways to get IE6 to behave like a modern browser, but why are we still accommodating?
Even though Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 in 2006 and just recently released the non-beta version of Internet Explorer 8, IE 6 still holds a 17% browser share. Between Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and more than a handful of lesser-known but viable browsers, a lack of options is not the problem. So what do we do?
I'd love to say we should just develop our sites and never bother checking it in IE6, I mean I'd really love to. At last year's An Event Apart in New Orleans, I sat through a nice presentation of how powerful CSS can be done by Andy Clarke. Ok, to be honest I was actually sitting there getting a little annoyed because he was showing how little CSS he could use to accomplish nice looking techniques. But the whole time I'm thinking "That's not going to be that easy if you want it to work in IE6. Nope you can't make it that clean." So I approached him afterward and said "What about IE6, it can't be done that easy AND work in IE6?" His response, "I've made a career not worrying about IE6." How did that make me feel? In a word, jealous. I, like many developers, do have to worry about IE6. I've come across a couple of techniques that could help us get to the days where we can enjoy Mr. Clarke's freedom. I'll list them below, use at your (boss') discretion. These are just 5 of many.
Each year at WordCamp San Francisco Matt Mullenweg gives his "State of the Word" speech. The talk always includes some great stats to show the health of the platform and here are some highlights...
User Suggestions
A number of features added to WordPress in its releases come from suggestions people submit through the WordPress.org site.
2007 - 713 (with 36,676 votes)
2008 - 931 (with 12,932 votes*)
* Matt is not sure why this number is so low... said it could be a bug.
Akismet caught five billion spam comments with 99.925% accuracy.
WordCamps
14 this year with 50-400+ attendees at each.
Features added to WordPress this year
Over the past year the following features were added to WordPress:
Tagging
Non-sucky wysiwyg
Dashboard widdgets
Update notifications
Pending review
Canonical urls
Admin redesign
Multi-file upload
Galleries
One-click plugin upgrades
Gears
Revision tracking
Captions
Word count
SSL support
iPhone App
To date it is estimated that there have been 70,000 installs and 154 reviews. Matt says the installs number is a bit fuzzy though because they don't get the best numbers from Apple.
WordPress.org Usage
It is estimated that there are 2.6 million WordPress.org blogs (a number Matt says is much higher than they anticipated). Of those 2.6 million 1.77 million are running version 2.5.1+. Basically, that means that 1.77 million of those are up-to-date on security patches leaving 800,000+ installs out there vulnerable to known exploits.
PHP
When will WordPress move beyond supporting PHP 4? Currently PHP 5 adoption among WordPress.org blogs is about 65%. Matt says they will look to stop supporting PHP 4 when that adoption percentage hits mid to high 90th percentile.
Matt says there are an average of 4.9 active plugins per blog
WordPress Upgrades
Matt concedes that there is work to be done with the WordPress upgrade process. Things have improved with the addition of the update notifications, but Matt says they are currently working towards in-core upgrades. Basically, the latest version would be downloaded as soon as it becomes available. You would then be notified it is time to upgrade and with the click of a button you will be updated to the latest version. Until then, he says that as a community we need to advocate that people keep their versions up-to-date, offer to assist those who need help upgrading and encourage web hosts that provide WordPress hosting to keep their versions current.
WordPress Crazyhorse
Matt briefly mentioned Crazyhorse in his presentation, but Liz Danzico's presentation went much more in-depth. More to come on that soon.
WordCamp San Francisco is coming up this Saturday and I'm pretty stoked about it. Since last year's WordCamp our team has developed projects for some of the biggest brands out there (Sony, eBay, Yahoo), released a few plugins, and developed a site hosted on WordPress VIP. Bottom line is it's been a good year for our WordPress projects and looking ahead things look even better. Look for future posts on how we're stretching the platform even further as a full CMS on sites, using widgets, new plugins and more.
I'm very excited to say that we are sponsoring WordCamp this year. If you're going, find me or Sean and say hello.
The PlayStation Blog, (and specifically how the blog has been a social media turnaround for Sony PlayStation) was featured in this week's issue of PRWeek. I can't tell you how proud we are to be part of such a great program. A huge congratulations to Mike, Josh, Ryan, Shanee and the rest of the gang over at Voce.
Winter Haven Chamber of Commerce:
A super-sized congratulations to the entire team and cnp-studio/Voce Connect from t...
mike:
@Bernd, the SCEE blog is using the new version that should released soon. Though, ...
Bernd:
Hey mike, great news and thanks for your work. Is the SCEE blog now using the same...
mike:
Hey guys, I should have a new version of this plugin coming out later this month o...
AlvienRizki:
hello, i need your help for my blog. When i put this code on my blog theme,...