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Community events have become very common these days. Ever since the days of the first BarCamp – an unconference event that caters mainly to developers and techheads and is organized around attendees picking time slots to speak in on the day of the event – and transitioning to other similar style events, like PodCamp, WordCamp, and now Gov 2.0 Camp, these events have become a catalyst for grassroots movement in the areas they focus in.

As a WordPress guy, my roots are with the WordCamp events that are held around the country. I just got back from WordCamp NYC 2 and we’ll be announcing details on WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2010 around the new year. I’ve been to a ton of these kinds of events. I flew to Boston for PodCamp Boston 2, attended the inaugural PodCamp Philly a few years ago (still the best of its kind, in my opinion) and been involved with a variety of other events like it. More after the jump.

The other day, I wrote the popular 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9. As usual, most people are very excited about the new release which is now in beta and available for testing. In the article, I made a few fundamental errors which I have since corrected.

Notably, I mentioned that WordPress 3.0 would be going to PHP 5. This was based on conversations I had with a core developer which I now realized I misunderstood. Kinda. WordPress will probably not be dropping PHP 4 support in WordPress 3.0 but as core developer Mark Jaquith suggests:

Some things already require PHP 5, like time zone support or oEmbed. There are no plans that I know of to remove PHP 4 support in 3.0 — last I checked we still had 12% of WP installs using PHP 4.

I see more of a natural and gradual deprecation of PHP 4. We’re very much open to making new features require PHP 5 if it would be a pain to make them PHP 4 compatible.

As a PHP developer, I am on board with calls for PHP 5 support. PHP 4 has been end of life (EOL) since August 8, 2008. That basically means that there will be no more releases, no more security patches, no more nothing. It’s done. Stick a fork in it. However, as Matt mentioned on stage at WordCamp NYC this weekend, there are still 12% of WordPress installations using PHP 4 hosting. He breaks that down as approximately 2M installs, the size of a major American city. More precisely, that’s approximately the size of Philadelphia.

Back in July, I noted that I had accepted and was beginning the process of writing The WordPress Bible for Wiley Publishing. You can read that post here.

It’s now November and almost everything is in the bag for me. I’ve written the book with an average of 20-30 pages per chapter. I’ve gone through Author Review (AR), more commonly referred to as “editing”. I’ve taken screenshots. Wrote code. Sifted through pages and pages that have so many changes, from three different editors, that the page appears to bleed. I’ve survived. Sometimes barely. I want to talk about the process of writing that book. More after the jump.

Gentlemen, start your engines! WordPress 2.9 is just around the corner. Unlike WordPress 2.8, which Mark Jaquith describes as the Snow Leopard of WordPress since most of the basis of the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was complete rewrites and optimization of the infrastructure that ran WordPress instead of providing lots of new features in the same way Apple’s new OS X release is a focus on improved performance instead of features, WordPress 2.9 brings major new “bling” to the table. As a reminder of WordPress 2.8, you can see the writeup that Jonathan Dingman brought us last time around.

By and large, this release is a plugin developers release with lots of new APIs and abstraction. However, there are significant additions for theme designers and users as well. As a result, unlike previous iterations of this article (I do one for every major WordPress release), I’m going to break this down into sections for each kind of feature.

Themes: the_post_image()

Theme developers have a new piece of functionality that have become extremely popular in themes these days. As blogs have evolved from journal form into entities that can be very magazine-like, the use of thumbnail images has also grown. Typically, this layout is achieved through the use of custom fields that must be manually created and populated. No more!

Our world today is diluted. The lines have blurred. Everyone has bought into this concept of community – that everyone has something for everyone and we’re one big happy family. Specifically, the concept of the “technology community” which is a term that has come to mean anyone who has a blog, uses social media or Twitter and engages online in some way or another.

Though this has been a trend that is akin to the frog happily boiling in an ever increasing pot of hot water, the reality struck me today as I saw this Wall Street Journal article about how Facebook and Zappos approach hiring. Facebook, of course, is the social networking platform that has become the largest social network on the planet and Zappos, the sexy company that was just acquired by Amazon and has made its name, not on selling shoes – its core business – but in its company culture and parties.

In the WSJ article, the writer begins with the statement, “For fast-growing technology start-ups, there are many approaches to employee hiring and retention.” More after the jump.

or the last two weeks, I’ve been mulling this concept of market correction as it pertains to the web. There are a variety of stories that have been related, in addition to signatory bubble characteristics that I have observed for some time, but it’s all coming into a lot more focus as time has gone on.

A market correction is an economic term describes a natural occurrence when a certain market sector becomes “over sold” or hyperinflated, or when a sector becomes irrelevant to the market and is put out of its misery, or re-capitalized. It is a “coming to center” that occurs naturally when there is an imbalance in the system.

We’ve seen macro-economic market corrections in the form of the housing and financial market implosion last year or the dot-com bust of the late 90s. Last year, around this time, the stock market gave up half of its value in a correction that wreaked havoc in every market sector. Even the startup market based largely in Silicon Valley felt the effects as leading venture capital firms started informing portfolio companies of looming doomsday scenarios. More after the jump.