In the 100-million downloads press release, developer Andrew Nacin confirms his commitment to the WordPress community by announcing coming improvments to plug-in architecture. Improvements will enable seemless upgrades, improve communication between users and plug-in developers and expand plug-in statistics access. See the orginal press release below:

WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads yesterday, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads.

The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind:

We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins.

We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and the plugin directory. We’re going to focus on ensuring seamless upgrades by making the best possible determinations about compatibility, and offer continual improvements to the plugin installer. And we also want to give you a better developer tool set like SVN notifications and improvements to the bug tracker.

We’re also going to experiment with other great ideas to help the community help plugin authors. We want it to be easy for you to offer comments to plugin authors and the community, including user reviews and better feedback. We may experiment with an adoption process for abandoned plugins as a way to revitalize hidden gems in the directory. I’m not sure there is a better way to show how extendable WordPress is and how awesome this community is at the same time.

As Matt said in the 3.0 release announcement, our goal isn’t to make everything perfect all at once. But we think incremental improvements can provide us with a great base for 3.1 and beyond, and for the tens of millions of users, and hundreds of millions of plugin downloads to come.

The ability to fully simulate your latest creation in a staging environment is what separates the best from the rest. Once endowed with such powers, publishing to a live site just to see how it looks seems about as smart as dipping your finger into boiling water to see if it’s the right temperature. Staging environments are not simple though – they require a unique install of WordPress, a file comparison interface and a bunch of other things. Plug-in’s are a powerful thing but cloning the entire structure of it’s parent is not something plug-ins are capable of. If you run your WordPress install from something other than a server you have full control over, setting up a staging environment is a near impossibility. Most WordPress users don’t run their own server let alone know what “Apache” really is.

There is hope though! Before I took the reigns and built my own server, I ran WordPress on a paid host. Something I didn’t have complete control over. Luckily, you can use WordPress’s “preview” powers to create your own quick and dirty staging environment.

Here’s how!

1. Log into your FTP and go to [your blog dir]/wp-content/themes/. Copy the directory of your current theme and rename it. Something like “[your current theme]_staging” would make sense.
2. Log into WordPress with your admin account and go to Appearance > Themes. You’ll see your newly copied staging theme here. Right click on it’s “preview” button and copy the link address. Depending on your browser, this will be “Copy link address” or something similar. You could always right click and see it in properties.
3. Now, log into your host and create a new sub domain. Most hosts will give you 10 sub domains or unlimited sub domains free. Name your new sub domain something like “staging.[your blog domain].[com/org/net/whatever you use]“
4. Redirect your new sub domain to your staging theme’s preview link. Paste for the win!
5. Once your new sub domain is created, visit it in your browser. Looks exactly the same as your normal WordPress site, right? Good!

Now, when you want to edit your theme, overwrite the files in your staging theme folder instead of your “production” theme folder. Visit your staging sub domain and see how it look’s in full screen glory. It even has the built in security of WordPress – you can’t see it unless you’re logged in and have permission to preview themes. Is that quick or what?

Here’s the dirty part. If you want to preview your latest post on your latest theme, you can do that by appending “p=[post ID number]” to the URL. You can get your post ID number by looking at the preview link URL on the edit post page in WordPress. This will only preview that post’s “single” page though. You can’t preview your latest post at the top of your index page until it’s published. There’s also the downsides of having to do things manually. In addition to finding your post id number, when you want to update your production site with your staging files, you have to copy the files from your staging theme folder to your standard theme folder. This is still no harder than copying updated files strait to your production theme though and at least you’re not affecting your live site. Be careful not to overwrite files you didn’t want to and always keep a backup!

The dirtiest part is this – version control. It has none. Lets say you want to see how a new logo image looks. You have to upload that new logo image and change the URL in the <img> tag in the header file of your theme. If you just upload and overwrite the existing logo file, that will affect your “production” site. This is why a true staging environment requires an entirely separate install of WordPress. Like I mentioned – it’s not simple. The setup is no doubt an improvement over having to hit preview and seeing it in a frame or worse – experimenting with your live site.

Flash vs HTML5

While part I focused on the quarrel between Adobe and Apple, the future of Flash is much larger than the ramblings of an over-dramatic control freak. Flash has been a definitive tool for web interaction. It’s lived through the indirect blow of AJAX by being more animation-centric and object oriented. It’s lived through the increasing functionality of Java by, again, being more animation centric and having a very hands-on design view in the Flash development environment. HTML5 however, is taking direct aim at animation, graphics, video and even 3D applications. Beyond the momentum of the current Flash-comfortable army of web developers, where will Flash sit in the future of the web?

Adobe has proven to be adaptive and intelligent. There is no doubt in my mind that right now, in various offices, at various desks, there are well paid people looking for ways to have Flash outlive this next battle. According to the W3C, HTML5 will reach recommendation by late 2010. That’s not a lot of time to come out with dramatic advances in Flash’s functionality. Lets take a look at where the battle fronts lay.

Video

Right now, there are a number of barriers to entry for placing videos on the web. If you don’t have your own Flash video player, getting one is confusing enough to give up on. Using YouTube or Vimeo has you sign up for an account and be subjected to their quality limit, censoring, upload times, user interface, ads, and terms of service. Windows Media Player embeds are dead due to their poor handling of codecs and even Apple’s .mov “embedding” technique is terrible. YouTube, Vimeo or one of the many other video uploading communities are almost always your best bet.

The W3C thankfully recognizes the web video problem and has brought us the salvation that is the “<video>” tag. Browsers will be able to see video files much like the way they see image files. Video files are however very, very different. The video playback controls for HTML5 are built in (and customizable) but the video file codec is a beggar. While H.264 is a real winner in terms of compression, quality and streaming abilities, it’s a huge mess in terms of legal use. If you want to use the codec for commercial purposes (which so many people would), you have to pay royalties. OGG is the other codec available for HTML5 and is completely free, but not as impressive in quality and compression.

Right now, Flash accounts for around 70% of the web’s video. The biggest player here is YouTube which accounts for around 40% of all web video. While YouTube is the child of Google, who has shown extensive co-operation with Adobe to bring Flash to their mobile platform Android, YouTube has also co-operated with Apple to stream videos in the Apple-friendly H.264 format. It seems YouTube will (rightfully) innovate to keep their grip on internet video, firm. YouTube has already dabbled with HTML5 and was in fact one of the first to offer a demo. You can opt-in to their HTML5 beta here. So far though, HTML5 videos don’t have the in-video ad-showing abilities of their Flash counterparts. Until HTML5 offers a way to do this, Flash will be a part of the YouTube and the overall web video mix.

Verdict: Let’s not lose perspective. HTML5 allows you to embed videos with the H.264 and OGG codecs and has built in controls. Flash is a platform capable of streaming video in a variety of codecs, any video control scheme imaginable, overlays, in-video links, advertisements, subtitles, keyboard interaction.. and… well the list is ever-expanding. Flash’s interactivity both server-side and user-side will earn its place in the future of web video. Both HTML5 video and Flash embedding (via swfObject) offer alternative content. If a browser doesn’t support Flash, it can seemlessly display an HTML5 video in its place.

Read on:

• See the HTML5 video tag in action – w3schools.com
• H.264 is a codec, Flash is a platform. One can not kill the other. – streamingmedia.com
• A developers perspective on HTML5 vs Flash. A little homegrown but good points are raised. – YouTube.com

Animation & Graphics

Unless you seek out things like Flash games, most of a web users experience with Flash animation is (unfortunately) ads. Flash’s ability to distract you is worth billions (I’m definitely not kidding). HTML5 currently lacks the timeline animation environment of Flash, but coded animations could be on par with Flash via a canvas tween library. The idea behind browser add-ons like Flash Block is to protect your web experiance from animated and invasive advertisements. Ironically, it’s because of such programs that there will undoubtedly be HTML5 animated ads. Flash has been in this game a long time though and I have no doubt their verteran status will trump HTML5 for the next few years.

Graphics are a different story. With HTML5, the web will support vector graphics directly. This doesn’t really conflict with Flash however since embedding static non-interactive vector images, with Flash, doesn’t make much sense. The benefit lies mostly on the side of developers that will be able to scale images without making/saving multiple copies of an image or scale a logo with a liquid layout. The benefit on the user side lies with reduced loading times.

Verdict: Put simply, Flash will win. HTML5 through the canvas API has the potential for animation engines like the popular GreenSock suite. The performance thus far has been lacking though and unless Adobe themselves come up with an HTML5 compiling animation environment (which they might), developers will be sticking with Flash. Web vector graphics on the other hand are filling a need that Flash never filled anyways. Apples and oranges.

Connectivity

This is a much more convoluted battle ground. Through Java, browsers have plenty of live peer connection abilities. Flash has fought back with a number of connection services. Firstly, there’s AMFPHP. Not made by Adobe but still very powerful; if PHP can do it, so can Flash. There’s the barrier to entry with interface setup and complications around dealing with that interface, but the capability is there. Plenty of todays Flash applications connect with databases and display PHP-retrieved data. Then there’s RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol). This is what ChatRoulette uses for it’s awkward magic. RTMP enables a Flash player to stream a file (such as a .flv Flash video) from a Flash Server. Another punch came with the Adobe Labs release of the “Stratus” service.

Adobe Stratus

Stratus 1.0 (which I wrote about here), released in 2008, offered an exciting new way to connect Flash instances. When 2 Flash instances can connect directly to each other, this removes all server responsibility except the initial connection. The implications for chat and gaming were (and are) exciting. Then came Stratus 2.0, seen in the right panel above. Very exciting. Imagine the performance increase in gaming, conferencing and video streaming when you can receive information from your neighbors instead of a server half-way around the world. The only people more excited than Flash media users would be Flash media suppliers. The performance increase and server load decrease on something like YouTube would be phenomenal.

Verdict: This is the area in which Adobe has been advancing in leaps and bounds. Peer-to-peer connections are beyond the responsibility of the HTML5 specifications (or HTML6 for that matter). I don’t see HTML ever advancing to duplicate Adobe Stratus 2.0 functions. Flash wins this one in a big way.

3D

Let’s get something strait. This is not HTML5. It’s a Google Code project call O3D. In their own words – “Originally built as a browser plug-in, this new implementation of O3D is a JavaScript library implemented on top of WebGL”. While it’s not native HTML5, it makes use of HTML5, and it renders much more complex 3D environments, much better than Flash. 3D in Flash is sort of a hack – Adobe never intended for it to be a 3D engine. Papervision blazed the 3D Flash path and has since made a couple impressive advances. Away3D, Sandy 3D and Sophie 3D are other Flash 3D engines. With the release of Flash Player 10, Adobe recognized the 3D applications of Flash and made it much easier to render with it’s native 3D transformations. While it only allows 3D transformations of completely flat objects, this takes the calculation burden off of the imported library and dramatically improved performance. You can see what Papervision is capable of at papervisionshowcase.com (not currently working, but I assume it will be back soon).

Verdict: So far it’s a toss up which only time can settle. Even with Adobe offering performance enhancements and the dedication of the Papervision team, 3D in Flash is an exercise in how far you can push a hack. O3D is very young, but being a 3D-from-the-start development, it has a more solid foundation. It’s hard to say what will be developers’ mainstream choice. Sites that use 3D Flash, usually use to it to immerse a user in a product-centric environment. Flash’s animation abilities have proved much more immersive than any O3D (or Java based) implementation I’ve ever seen. I see that trend continuing for the next little while.

Games

Flash is without doubt the undisputed internet gaming king. Flash wins. By a lot. That was until my world was shaken… with this.

Quake II. In a browser. Don’t let the April 1st post date fool you – that’s Quake II running as well as it ever could. In a browser. This changes everything.

Verdict: Flash has an army of game developers behind it and a world of libraries such as Flixel. Developers are fickle and curious creatures though. I can see browser gaming exploding into 3D in the coming years and it will play out like the release of a new console. There will be communities and advocates for “retro” flash games, but the focus of internet gaming could entirely become HTML5 based Java ports like the one above. It’s a movement I would whole heartedly support.

In Conclusion…

The W3C aren’t bent on replacing Flash and it’s not what they’ve aimed for; Steve Jobs is responsible for any notion otherwise. HTML5 will change the role of Flash, but it is far from ever replacing it. I’d go as far to say that the role change would be minor – mainly simple video embeds and image rotators. The possibilities of Java and WebGL are very exciting and may largely replace Flash extensions such as Papervision, but not completely.

Read more on HTML5 vs Flash:

“We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page” Jared Friedman, CTO, Scribd

Scribd ditches 3 years of Flash development for HTML5 – slashgear.com

• W3School’s HTML5 Tag Reference – w3schools.com
• HTML5 experiance on the iPad – YouTube.com
• Introduction to HTML5 by Google developer Brad Neuberg (a must-see!) – YouTube.com

Apple VS Adobe

Adobe and Apple have recently been making rather public fisticuffs (love that word). Adobe has been slightly quieter, letting their fans speak for them, while on Apple’s end, Steve himself has blogged on the matter. The whole affair has been splattered far and wide on the web, but above the opinions and battles defending such opinions, 1 question remains.

What is the future of Flash?

Flash has come a long way since it’s inception with Macromedia and it wasn’t an easy start. If you’ve been crawling the web for 8 years or so, then you remember how poor it’s integration was. Tricks and hackery was used to force cross-browser compatibility, it was very resource heavy and it didn’t play well with web standards. Yet, the mark had been made. Rich web media was born. It wasn’t long before a more or less standard embed technique was publicized and standards such as the clickTag emerged. Flash’s abilities in interactivity, smooth animations, sound and video playback as well as keyboard control were undeniably cool. Then came the jaw droppers. Site’s that used Flash in ways people couldn’t have seen coming. The future was bright.

A few years later while game changers like YouTube we’re emerging, a fateful patent violation brought Macromedia and Adobe to the table. Adobe’s very successful line of design software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc) had a lovely patent for dock-able toolbars. Macromedia published Flash with a dock-able toolbar and a legal battle ensued. The result was a $3.4 billion buyout; well received by the Flash community since their much loved workspace had returned. While the Flash experience on the developer side had improved, the experience on the web side had not. Being a browser plug-in, Flash can not properly access computer resources. Java had it’s virtual machine, but Flash required something else.

As Apple’s client base rapidly expanded, Microsoft worked directly with Adobe to ensure Flash had the resources it required to function acceptably. Apple and Linux were kept in the dark while the Flash experience flourished on Windows. Another, more ambiguous player was in the arena however. Java coupled with web native XML (AJAX) was producing some very unexpected results. Fetching data without reloading the page was giving the web new application-like abilities. What’s more – it wasn’t a resource heavy proprietary plug-in, and it worked across all operating systems and browsers. Google Maps was and still is undeniably the best application of AJAX. While AJAX and Flash shine in their own ways, web interactivity now had competition.

The Apple vs Adobe battle came center-ring with the release of what is now one of the world’s most successful mobile devices – the iPhone. Multi-touch blew the mobile web-experience wide open. People couldn’t wait for power of the whole internet in their pocket. Then came the announcement of no Flash support for the iPhone browser. With so much of the web experience involving Flash, the iPhone’s superior web abilities suddenly had a watered down image. The built-in YouTube application alleviated much pressure but the lack of support wasn’t let down. As the pressure for Flash support was seemingly ignored by Apple, something grew inside of Steve Jobs. His very public iPhone leak and very public reaction probably haven’t helped, but regardless, a usually cool and professional Steve has been a very unprofessional and childish Steve.

Adobe hasn’t been taking it all sitting down however. In what’s clearly a much more adult reaction, here’s what Adobe thinks:

Moving Forward
This morning Apple posted some thoughts about Flash on their web site.
The primary issue at hand is that Apple is choosing to block Adobe’s
widely used runtimes as well as a variety of technologies from other
providers.
Clearly, a lot of people are passionate about both Apple and Adobe and
our technologies. We feel confident that were Apple and Adobe to work
together as we are with a number of other partners, we could provide a
terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

However, as we posted last week, given the legal terms Apple has
imposed on developers, we have already decided to shift our focus away
from Apple devices for both Flash Player and AIR. We are working to
bring Flash Player and AIR to all the other major participants in the
mobile ecosystem, including Google, RIM, Palm (soon to be HP),
Microsoft, Nokia and others.

We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android
smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a
general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number
and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which
we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.

Like a cliché bar fight each side has friends and it is not just Adobe and Apple in the ring. Far from it. Google has sided with Adobe and made a subtle blow with the announcement of Flash being built into the next release of their Chrome browser. Such a move could have Flash preform similarly to HTML5, which has been the source of much Apple ammunition (Appleunition?). Microsoft, Google, Palm (soon to be HP), RIM and others have also teamed with Adobe for Flash support on mobile devices in an effort to give consumers a reason to jump off the Apple train. The list of stabs and swings is much too long to chronicle.

Various players can spout their pro-open-standards and throw around the p-word (proprietary) as much as they like, but where does this leave us? By July, a serious mobile Flash experience will be available on Android. This will be dangerously close to Apple’s release of the next iPhone. That light at the end of the tunnel it seems, was just a lamp. We’re going to be here for a while…

FITC Toronto 2010

FITC 2010 is well underway, here at the Hilton Hotel in Toronto. Saturday’s free “Get a Job!” event managed to be considerably larger than last year and while success is in the eye of the resume-holder, I’d call it a big success. The same goes for the presentations. We’ve seen great talks from Lee Brimelow about multi-touch, great (and hilarious) advice derived from an important mantra from Hoss Gifford and a wonderful look into inspirational works of the past from James White. In just a few moments Adobe presenters Richard Galvan and Mark Anders will wrap up their keynote where Flash and Adobe patriots were enticed with CS5 and wooed with Adobes future plans. The full three day schedule is here. I suspect my favorite event will be the last one.

It’s too bad a fair number of people couldn’t make it. Ash clouds. Think they own the place. No matter where you are, don’t forget to tune in online!

BuySellAds.com

Selling out is a harsh term in many’s books, but putting ads on a website previously void of ads is, quite accurately, “selling out”. This is something I wanted to avoid for purposes of brand image but have recently realized it’s genuine benefit.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time designing, building, testing, and improving Archonic.com and I will continue to update and improve it as long as the brand is alive. This is work that does not yeild income. You could argue that the time spent on Archonic.com indirectly yields income by landing clients through having a solid brand image. I would agree, however, no one could argue that such work directly benefits paying clients. This means I’m either working for free or taking income from other projects. I don’t like doing either.

The solution is simple – have Archonic.com pay for itself! BuySellAds.com is a young ad manager (their 2nd birthday is today – happy birthday!) which focuses exclusively on niche sites. The ad manager has taken off particularly in design and web technology related communities. Current clients of BuySellAds.com include FreshBooks, MailChimp, Abduzeedo, Tuts+ Network, Yoast and a good number more. I can’t think of a more applicable ad manager for Archonic.

In the coming days, expect to see some non-invasive ads along the right side of the page. I will certainly keep it non-invasive unlike others who’ve “sold out” (*cough* IGN), but let me know what you think.

Search Engine Optimzation

SEO (search engine optimization) is often regarded as a mythical un-masterable collection of cheats to have Google place your page higher than others. The reality is far from mythical, though there are plenty of myths about SEO itself. There’s little tips and tricks (which I’ll cover here) but a recent presentation I attended by SEO experts SearchingWorks Inc. revealed both a surprising and obvious secret. Search engines are an ever-evolving organisms which become more powerful (and useful) everyday. A few years ago SEO was more akin to black market trickery with tactics such as

<META name=”keywords” content=”digital camera, digital camera, digital camera, digital camera, digital camera, digital camera”>

Gone are those days and good riddance! Modern SEO can be boiled down to this 1 mantric question: “Are my pages logical?”

Google and similar search engines are governed by 2 simple elements. The “bot” and people who use the net. A bot is a confusing algorithm of mathy sciencey pixie dust worth untold millions of dollars. Put plainly though a bot will “crawl” your pages to determine what content it contains. That’s it. The search engine then uses human factors such as visits, time spent on pages, number of “organic” links from other pages and a few other factors to determine how desirable your page’s content is versus content of a similar nature, on other pages. Simple right? Don’t worry if you said no, it’ll make sense in a moment!

To understand SEO, you first have to understand what a bot “sees”. The meta tags are almost completely irrelevant (*gasp*!). The number of times a word is repeated on a page is also irrelevant (*double gasp*!). What matters a great deal though, is your headlining text. The page title is a good indicator of page content, no? Well it should be, and this is possibly the greatest weight in determining relevance to searched-for content. A header such as the title of this post is also a good indicator of the content that follows it and subsequent headers are good indicators of the content that follows them. So use your headers well! Stay away from font tags and make good use of CSS.

Make good use of the <TITLE> tag:

• Well-written, unique title paired with strong content helps position in search index
• 50-75 characters in length (66 are displayed)
• Lead with the important word (not always the company name)
• Compelling titles invite clicks by search engine users
• By comparison, keyword meta tags are all but useless

Another powerful indicator of page content is the pictures it contains. This also keeps visitors engaged. Have you ever been searching for something, land on a plain text page and just leave cause there’s no pictures? We all have. Search bots can’t determine the content of pictures (with the exception of the presence of a face) but the “alt” or “alternate” text is used as an indicator to the pictures content. When an image doesn’t load for any reason, the alternate text shows. Making the “alt” text relevant to the image’s content is smart for both SEO purposes and if your image doesn’t show. Makes sense right?

Contrary to popular belief, the number of times a term is mentioned in an article (“keyword density”) will not make that article rank higher for relevance to that term. It’s a myth! It screams unprofessional (or perhaps just incompetent) to have content that appears to be written for search engines.

Keyword density doesn’t allow for:

• Location of terms on a page
• Usage or terms in context
• Proximity of terms in context
• Contextual use of terms in comparison to other documents
• Synonymy, plurality, other contextual variations

Lesson: don’t write like you’re trying for hits. Write like you want the reader to be engaged with your content. Search engines have gotten smart about keyword determination, but if you really want worth-while visitors, you need to make it human friendly too.

Guidelines for keyword placement:

• Once in the title, possible twice as a variation
• Once in an H1 tage on the page
• 3x or more in the body
• Once in bold (at least)
• Once in the meta-tag description
• In the anchor text pointing to the page (links from other pages!)

Doing all of the above will make for pages that index the best they can. That is something entirely different however from pages that pull a lot of visitors! To get many loyal visitors, you must produce content those reads will read and you must keep them engaged with frequent, high quality updates. One of the greatest ranking factors is how many other high ranking sites link to your own. A second mantric question you should ask yourself is “Is my content desirable?”. It’s hard work, I know, but make it on to the google-podium for hard-to-rank terms organically, and you’re getting the SEO holy grail – free advertising.

If you’d like to read more on the matter, LifeHacker has a short and to the point SEO article here or head over to SEOmoz which has an excellent, free and quite complete guide to search engine optimization here. Getting quality visitors is about producing quality content too however – for guidance there I’d recommend Gerry McGovern and his book “Killer Web Content”.

Each one of these logos does a great job of matching imagery with meaning in a creative and beautiful way. After almost resorting to Logo Tournament for my own logo (an embarrassing defeat for any designer), I’ve come up with a concept which will work for Archonic. Expect to see it March 1st.

If you see a logo above you think is better than the rest, then go vote!

People on the project were myself – Joshua Mark, Chris Atallah, Chris Burt, Kevin Paquette and Matt McLean. If you’d like to learn more or build a touch table yourself visit the project “learning center” at BitBox.Archonic.com. The touch input to Flash is driven by open source software called CCV (Community Core Vision) developed by the good people at the NUI Group. If you want to make one yourself, NUI Group is an invaluable resource. Let me (and the NUI forums) know of your multi-touch creations!