My question to everyone out there is this: would you rather power your website by software that doesn’t get updated enough, or by software that gets updated too often?

While yes, the frequent updates may be somewhat annoying, it’s by no means a reason to complain. While people do find any reason to complain, there are better things you could find to complain about.

WordPress is free, so really you shouldn’t ever complain about anything.

I love WordPress, and I know other people love WordPress, so please, eveyrone, stop complaining about all the updates. It’s more annoying hearing you complain than it is for you to just click the update button and let WordPress update on its own.

One other thing to think about is security. A lot, most, if not all, of these frequent updates are security patches. It’s unrealistic to expect that WordPress is the perfect application and that with every release they will catch every single bug. The core WordPress dev team is active though, and responds quickly to security threats. That’s something you should be extremely thankful for, otherwise you would be left helpless and open to attacks.

And as a side note, I remember the days when the upgrade process was much more difficult. In fact, I remember when “Pages” didn’t exist, and they were “folders” instead…back in the 2003-days of WordPress. It’s beautiful to me, to see how far WordPress has come and to see the vision it has for the future.

WordPress.com’s TOS states that you may not have any sort of advertising on your site. But there’s another way around it. There is a support article that states you can enable Ad Control.

There are a couple requirements before you can enable the Ad Control system though. According to the support article about advertising, you need to have at least 25,000 pageviews/mo.

This Ad Control system uses two forms of advertising: AdSense and Skimlinks.

The first, AdSense, is the advertising platform that Google built to enable publishers to make money by placing contextual advertising on their site. This has largely helped build Google to where they are today. The revenue share between the publisher and Google is typically 68/32, respectively.

The second is a platform called Skimlinks. This advertising platform is built on affiliate marketing, which takes existing keywords and turns them into affiliate links.

Darren Rouse has a great article about what affiliate marketing is, in case you’re still wondering.

The alternative to running your own advertising is to be a VIP publisher, such as the NY Times, CNN, or the NFL, to name a few. VIP publishing starts at $2,500/mo for 5 blogs and then goes for $500/mo for every blog after that.

If you wanted to make money using WordPress, whether .org or .com, how would you do it?

Their website doesn’t disclose too much, but you can be assured it’s going to be, well, massive.

One Massive WordPress Collaboration

A coalition of like-minded WordPress entrepreneurs who think we can do more together than apart. Just enter your email address above, click “Submit” and we will keep in touch…

What do you think MassivePress is? A consulting company? Maybe a new event? Let us know in the comments.

Drupal 1.6 was just released and it has some killer Access Control System features, that really just blow WordPress out of the water.

WordPress has good, but very basic, access control. Subscriber, contributor, author, editor, and administrator. But nothing beyond that.

If you are a WordPress developer and looking for a fun project, here’s my idea.

An Access Control System (ACS or ACL), to allow me to do the following:

• Grant access to specific plugins, to specific users
• Grant access for specific pages, and the children of said parent page, to specific users
• Grant access for specific a specific category(s) to specific users
• Give the ability to upgrade WordPress, to specific users
• Give the ability to update the theme, to specific users
• Give the ability to manage Links, to specific users

And the list goes on. But basically looking for a way to let any specific user, or a group of users, access a particular part of WordPress, so I don’t have to figure out a way to code it every time I want to give access to someone.

This has been a major pitfall for WordPress, in my mind.

I would love to see major improvements in this area. Preferably in the core, but if someone creates a plugin – and continues development of it – I would be happy with that too.

Today’s topic is about whether or not you should nofollow links within your posts.

The short answer is, no, you shouldn’t nofollow links within your posts. Here’s why.

The web is built up of links pointing to other sites. That’s how Mashable.com, or CNN.com, or Engagdet.com got to be as powerful as they are, as a domain.

Then with the introduction of a new eco-system, “paid links” were created.

So why “rel=nofollow”? This was created to discredit sites that were paying for links, to help normalize the search rankings. Nofollow has been abused, extremely abused.

The reason I strongly advise not nofollowing links is that it breaks up true authority within the web. Unless it’s a paid link, you really shouldn’t use nofollow. Links should flow freely for sites that you link to, to give them authority and trust, just like your own website is given trust and authority.

Here are what some of the folks on Twitter have to say about the topic:

WP and WPMU are merging.

This announcement took place in May 2009 at WordCamp SF. It was and still is, a huge announcement (and process).

Yesterday while watching #wordpress-dev (where all/most of the core developers meet to talk about WordPress), there was a lot of chatter about WordPress 3.0, which is when WP and WPMU will be merged.

Today, we can see tickets being closed where there is the introduction of WPMU’s slight code changes into the normal WP.

Something to note, it’s not WPMU being merged into WP, but the other way around. WP is being merged into WPMU. The key to the success of this merge is to keep WP as efficient as possible so that it doesn’t get too bloated.

Here is an example of something we’ll see along the way of how WordPress is changing.

[sourcecode lang="php"]if( !is_site_admin() )
unset( $submenu['plugins.php'][10] ); // always remove the plugin installer for regular users
unset( $submenu['plugins.php'][15] ); // always remove the plugin editor
unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] ); // always remove the themes editor[/sourcecode]

The new updated and merged code base is going to have to take into account there will be an overall admin along side of normal blog administrators. Changes along these lines are what we will be seeing throughout the next year for what WordPress is becoming.

I’m really excited to see where WordPress is going. It’s been a wild ride for the past 6 years and I’m ready for another 50 years on WordPress

Update: The WPMU options, such as multiple blogs within a single installation, will be opt-in only. You will have to enable them in the wp-config.php file before they are available. This is good for the average user so there’s no confusion as to how the blog should be administered.