WordPress.org

What do Boeing, Microsoft, and WordPress have in common? Not much, except we’re all sponsors of the Blog Business Summit taking place August 17–19 in San Francisco. (Hope you weren’t expecting a better punchline.) That’s nice and all, but what does that mean? It means that you get $300 off registration just for being a WordPress user and using this link. If you’re interested in business blogging this is the premier event I know of, and thanks to our partnership you can register cheaper through us than anywhere else. Finally, if you ping or trackback this entry and blog about the summit they’ll take an additional $100 off.

Register for Blog Business Summit with WordPress discount »

We’ll also try to put together a WordPress meetup one of the nights people will be in town.

It appears that the inimitable Ryan Boren is going to be in Northern California this week so it seemed like a perfect opportunity for a WordPress meetup and geek dinner. Although Ryan is the other main developer of WordPress and we’ve worked together for a long while now, we’ve never actually met in person so this promises to be a momentous occasion. We’re going to start with dinner at Chaat Cafe at 6 PM this Saturday (July 23) and see where it goes from there. Here are the details:

Chaat Cafe
320 Third Street, San Francisco 94105
Saturday July 23rd, 6 PM

This is the same place Scoble’s geek dinner was and one of the early WordPress meetups, so it’s a fun location. Come by, bring a friend, and all your WordPress feature requests and stories. The tag for the event will be WPRyaninSF.

July 23-30 is WordPress Backup Week. The WordPress Forum and Codex are working together to remind you to backup your WordPress site and database and eat your veggies. Even if your host does it (or should be doing it) no one was ever hurt by too many backups. It should be done on a regular basis and we’re taking the time now to remind you to back it up (like a pickup truck). To help you out, we’ve put together articles on WordPress Backups and Backing Up Your Database. If something happens to your data, we’re still here with another article on Restoring Your Database From Backup. Of course if you have any problems, the WordPress Support Forum is there to help.

The WordPress Loop is the brains behind your WordPress site. A simple yet sophisticated bit of PHP coding, it generates the content and information displayed on your site, in fact, on each template page on your site. Understanding how the Loop works and how you can customize it to your needs is covered extensively in the article on The Loop in Action.

This is just one of the more than 450 articles on the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress users, available to help you.

By the way, this week we’re moving the Codex to a new and fully redundant hosting situation that will guarantee 100% availability of all documentation regardless of anything happening to wordpress.org.

WordPress Template Tags are the backbone of your WordPress site, giving you the power to generate content on your site. Template Tags allow you to change the way the categories and date and time are posted in your post meta data section. They control how categories, Pages, and posts are displayed on your site. Almost everything you see generated on your WordPress web page comes from the use of a Template Tag within a template file. If you are new to Templates and Template Tags, read Stepping Into Template Tags to get started understanding the power of WordPress Template Tags.

This is just an example of the information you will find in the WordPress Codex the official online manual for WordPress.

At the last WordPress IRC meetup there was a consensus that this development blog isn’t used enough for spreading general news and information about WP, and one of the ways we’ve decided to address that is with weekly roundup posts summarizing some activity and highlighting some of the amazing resources in the Codex. The posts will be written by the community itself using the Codex, and posted every Thursday. We’ve got two bits to kick it off:

Upgrading WordPress

With this week’s announcement of a new security release for WordPress, 1.5.1.3, consider upgrading your WordPress site. You will find information and details on upgrading WordPress on the WordPress Codex at Upgrading WordPress.

If you are considering the bigger upgrade from a previous older version, like from WordPress v1.2 to the latest version, we have a step-by-step guide that will take you through the upgrade of your site and into the new WordPress Themes at Upgrading 1.2 to the Newest Version.

Volunteers Sought for Fundraising and Publicity for WordPress Activities

Exciting and fun events are coming up in the near future on the WordPress Forum and Codex and we are seeking volunteers to help with the publicity and promotion of these events and future fundraising campaigns. If you are interested in participating, visit the Fundraising and Promotions page on the WordPress Codex and sign up.