Automattic looking to open a professional office in Austin

A post from Andy Skelton that Automattic might be looking to open a professional office here in Austin.

I for one would love to work on an office with other Austin WordPress professional. I’ve made 90% of my living these past 10 months working on WordPress client project and do not intend to stop anytime soon.

A WordPress professional office could be something like the co-working locations that are now springing up in cities all across the nation. This would be somewhat different in that instead of everyone working on a broad range of projects, everyone would be working on WordPress client projects. From a collaboration perspective this could be huge.

I’ve had a chance to roll this around in my head a few time and have started thinking about some of the downside issue for me.

• Considering the current state of real estate in general, finding a short-term lease location in central Austin might be an issue.
• what will be the user cost of this venture? Will I be locked into a lease commitment for space in the office?
• Why would I want to consider this option if I can work for free out of my house already? Meaning I’d need to drive to an office to do basically the same think I can do at home. I do realize the upside is the potential collaboration with Andy and other Austin WordPress professionals. Question is if it’s enough of a consistent gain. Can the same or similar collaboration be gained from the wp-hackers mailing list?
• What will be the price of gasoline by the time this concept is realized? Considering gas in Austin is now $4.00/gallon what is my added (if any) cost for driving into an office 3-5 days a week?

How about a little Faith for Minister Joe Barron

As I read the Monday Austin American Statesman I came across an interesting article that really makes me question organized religion.

In case you’ve not seen the story, it’s about Minister Joe Barron, from a very large church in Dallas who drove nearly 200 miles to meet a 13-year-old girl supposedly for sex. The girl was fake. She was setup as part of a sting operation. For the past few months the minister and girl have exchanged messages about sex and other topics. The minister solicited her to meet in person. He was picked up last week.

My problem is not the article as a whole nor the actual alleged crime. I’m well aware what people are capable of be it a religions figure or your next door neighbor. What really upset me was a comment made in the article by Rev. Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church. The same church where Minister Joe Barron was also employed. Upon reading this part of the story I almost feel sorry for the fallen minister.

The quote is

“you need to know that we are appalled and we are disgraced by this terrible action, an unacceptable action, by a minister on our staff.”

I consider myself a well rounded person in the area of general religion and faith. I’m under the impression that most faiths offer some resolution for things done wrong no matter what. Sure attempting to sleep with an underaged girl it dead wrong, no question. But so are many other things like adultery and stealing. The tone of the Reverend’s comment is such it makes me think he has totally written off Joe Barron as if he is never to be heard from again. I would expect to see a little more compassion and faith from the leader of the church flock.

Maybe is was just his words to the press to enforce that the church also thinks the act is wrong. Something like a moral cover. I’m sorry it just disgusts me.

Are you a Geek living around the Austin area?

Calling all Geeks in the Austin area. There is a planned meetup between the Geek Austin / Refresh Austin and WordPress Austin groups this May 21. The meeting location is Union Park on W. 6th St. For more information check the Geek Austin page. So bring some cards and plan on some serious networking with fellow geeks in Austin.

Revisions WordPress plugin update 1.8

I’ve just released an update to my Revisions plugin released just a few short weeks ago, Revisions. The update to the plugins are in areas both architectural and UI based.

Architectural Improvements

On the architectural side one big improvement was made in the way the plugin created new Revisions of content. In the old version of the plugin a revision was made too late on the post update process after the user clicked the Save/Publish buttons. Effectively the updated post content and the latest revision were the same. In the newer version of the plugin the revision is generated earlier in the WP core processing. This mean we can take a copy of the post content before it is updated by WP core. This means the latest revision is the real previous version of the content.

UI Improvements

For the UI changes there are quite a few.

1. Above the revision listing I added two new checkboxes, Minor Edit and a Revisions Status. The Minor Edit checkbox is a single-use option to tell the plugin NOT to generate a new revision when you save the post item. This functions like most wikis. The Revisions Status allow you to totally disable revision generation for the post. This is handy if you just don’t want to use revisions on certain post items. Or if you are like me trying to make some complex edits and just want to disable new revisions because you will be making a dozen or so minor edits. So you can turn it off make you changes then turn it back on.
2. I’ve added logic to limit the display of revisions to the last 5 items. Below the list of revisions is a link. When you click this link the page will slide to reveal the older revisions.
3. Added checkboxes at each revision to allow deletions. This is pretty handy is you just want to clean house. Not that if you delete revision 5 of 8 the numbering will NOT re sequence itself. But if you delete the latest revision then the revision number will be reused.
4. On WP 2.5 and higher I added the Minor Edit and Revision Status checkboxes to the sidebar. This will make it easier to set the checkboxes to keep from scrolling to the bottom of the editor form. And with some jQuery magic when the sidebar checkboxes are set the lower checkboxes are also set.

Future Changes

I still have a long list of changes I’m reviewing for possible inclusionin future releases.

1. One change was submitted that included actual changes to plugin to support versioning categories and tags. This was great. But I’m still holding on the change. In my view categories and tags are not as volatile as text content. Beside if a revision used a category that had since been deleted what should the action be?
2. How to handle delete of the main post/page. Currently the plugin will delete all revisions when the parent post/page is deleted. I don’t like this. I want to build an interface to allow recreation of a post from a revision.

I also have some other small items on the list but they are not work mentioning. If you have any other suggestions please feel free to send them my way.

Download

You can download version 1.8 of the Revisions plugin from the WordPress.org plugin repository.