From Jeff Chandler’s “Calais Offers WordPress Plugin Bounty“:
Calais which is a metadata generation web service that is powered by Reuters is offering up a $5,000.00 bounty to anyone who can develop a plugin that meets the following criteria: tag auto suggestion, semantic cloud, GUID incorporation.
I can’t go for this one, having other immediate priorities and commitments, but it sounds like a neat and challenging project to tackle.
From Matt Tucker’s “XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services“:
There’s a new firestorm brewing in web services architectures. Cloud services are being talked up as a fundamental shift in web architecture that promises to move us from interconnected silos to a collaborative network of services whose sum is greater than its parts. The problem is that the protocols powering current cloud services; SOAP and a few other assorted HTTP-based protocols are all one way information exchanges. Therefore cloud services aren’t real-time, won’t scale, and often can’t clear the firewall. So, it’s time we blow up those barriers and come to Jesus about the protocol that will fuel the SaaS models of tomorrow–that solution is XMPP (also called Jabber) . Never heard of it? In just a couple of years Google, Apple, AOL, IBM, Livejournal and Jive have all jumped on board.
An interesting read on an increasingly attractive architecture.
From the Craigslist ad:
Google is seeking excellent software engineers with a passion for building real-time 3D graphical applications. Here at Google we are always on the forefront of creating revolutionary products. If you have experience with distributed interactive user applications or real-time 3D graphics, we invite you to join our world-class engineering team!
Ready? Polish your résumé… Go!
Zend Developer Zone has a nice tutorial on how to extend Zend_Controller_Action with function parameters.
Additionally, the presented code features a nice example of the utility of PHP5′s Reflection API.
The main “Extend” page on WordPress.org states:
One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.
That’s a statement I’ve heard about countless platforms before, but have often been disappointed to find it to be more of a marketing catch-phrase than anything concrete. Not so with WordPress!
I’ve been doing research on how to achieve specific goals with yet another plugin project, and the more I look, the easier it gets. Every time I catch myself thinking “hmm, this one’s gonna be tough”, a quick trip to the WP Codex changes my attitude within just a few minutes. Everything is possible.
Don’t get me wrong, WP is far from the only extensible platform out there and everybody has their personal pet peeves with the code base, but when coupled with amenities such as the wp-hackers mailing list and the wp-plugins dev repo, Matt and Automattic sure made it easy to adopt WordPress as a full featured scaffolding. And that’s coming from a guy who’s usually happy to start his projects from scratch.
