Like Thomas Kinkade and Pablo Picasso before him, success in art is defined by crafting an approach that best connects with your patrons. The most beautiful thing about art, though? When you start with a blank slate, you can take it in any direction you want. And the same goes for support.

He managed to reference Thomas Kinkade. How can you not love that?

Check it out: Customer Service as Art

We’ll be testing both the frontend and backend experience, asking participants to focus on some of the newer changes & features we’ve implemented with this release. We’ll also have our filters plugin, which is being built as a standalone add-on to TEC, active for experimentation and will be asking users to engage with that as well. We’re stoked to have some eyes other than our own checking this work out and providing useful feedback along the way.

WHEN: Thursday, January 17 2013. There will be three sessions throughout the morning:

• 9 am – 10 am PT
• 10 am – 11 am PT
• 11 am – 12 pm PT

Note these are in Pacific time!

WHERE: Usability test will take place on Skype, possibly using Join.me if the situation dictates.

REQUIREMENTS: We’re seeking 3 unique participants here:

• Participant 1 will be a fresh user who has never used The Events Calendar, but has some (not tons) experience using WordPress and basic familiarity with the WordPress backend.
• Participant 2 will be a fairly sophisticated user, who ideally has experience using a 2.x version of The Events Calendar/Events Calendar PRO.
• Participant 3 will be an international user, located outside the United States and ideally working on sites who’s target audience is outside the U.S. as well. This person must speak fluent (and easily understandable) English.

All participants must have a strong/reliable Internet connection; speak English fluently; be an adult at least 18 years of age; and be situated in a quiet place free of distractions. As always, participants in this usability test will be given a coupon for a free developer license to the Modern Tribe plugin of their choosing upon completion of their session.

If you’re interested, send us an email specifying which participant role you’d feel interested in taking on, which time slot is preferred and any other reasons you think you’d be a good fit. Please also confirm that you meet all the baseline requirements noted above in your email.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you, and to showing off the fruits of our recent labors.

Note that this means if you’ve got an issue you’re thinking you may need help with, you’ll want to get it posted to the forums sometime this week or wait until early January to see it addressed.

We hope everyone has a fantastic holiday season, and that you end 2012 in as meaningful a way as possible. Thanks for your support these past 12 months…we’ll see you in the new year.

As of a few minutes ago, hotfixes have been released for Community Events 1.0.4 and Events Calendar PRO 2.0.10 (the core The Events Calendar was not impacted). To get the latest code:

1. Log into the tri.be website with the credentials you used to purchase Events Calendar PRO and/or Community Events.
2. Navigate to Account Central -> Downloads.
3. Re-download Events Calendar PRO 2.0.10 and/or Community Events 1.0.4.
4. Overwrite the old version(s) of Events Calendar PRO and/or Community Events 1.0.4 with the newly-downloaded files.

Keep in mind that the version numbers will not change with the new code — this was a hotfix, rather than a fresh release. It also means that users will not be provided with an update prompt, as this technically is not a new build. Anyone who experienced problems with the 3.5 update on PRO/Community will need to take the steps outlined above to fix the issue.

Thanks to everyone for being diligent in reporting the bugs quickly. If anything else emerges as you continue to use your freshly-updated WordPress 3.5 site, let us know over at the forums and we’ll do our best to get them sorted.

So just why am I writing this blog post? To extend our gratitude more tangibly, in the form of a discount coupon you all can make use of over the coming week. Now that we’re at 1000 fans we want to celebrate, and the coupon code They Like Us does just that by taking a 25% discount off your cart total. Use it once, or use it as many times as you want…it’s up to you. So long as you’ve made your purchases by the end of the day next Monday  – 10/22, when this coupon expires — you’ll get the discount, whether you’re a Facebook fan or not.

Note that if you apply the coupon and find it doesn’t work, please try logging out of the tri.be site (if you’re logged in already); clearing your browser cache entirely; and restarting the browser. If you continue to encounter problems at that point let us know.

And if you haven’t yet liked us on Facebook…well, now’s as good a time as any. We promise it’ll be worth your while.

Thanks again, everybody, and have a great week.

• Import events from either a Facebook organization or a Facebook page (importing from personal pages is not possible at this time).
• Sync with multiple organizations/pages and import the specific events you want, when you want them.
• Import individual events manually or auto-import all events from a organization/page at set intervals.
• Set imports to publish automatically or wait in draft/pending review format.

As some of you may be aware there is a fan-made plugin on the .org repo (done by Mark Nelson) that was around for some time. Using Mark’s awesome idea as an inspiration, we rewrote the plugin from scratch and cleaned it up to better integrate with our platform, be future proof using proper Facebook APIs and ensured it worked smoothly with The Events Calendar/PRO and our other add-ons.

The result is what we’ve launched today. As with both Community Events and Eventbrite Tickets, this add-on will work with either The Events Calendar or Events Calendar PRO PRO (so don’t feel like you need to buy PRO just to use this feature). However, note that you will need either The Events Calendar or PRO 2.0.7 or higher for this plugin to operate properly.

While the plugin is fairly self-explanatory, and the readme.txt & “Facebook” settings tab should point you in the right direction, you may want to start by checking out our Facebook Events new user primer to make sure you’re familiar with what the plugin can and cannot do. If you encounter a bug, which is always possible during the 1.0 lifecycle of a plugin, we’d appreciate you bringing it to our attention in the Facebook Events forum here on the tri.be site. We’ll hit that forum daily as we do all the others and will work to get any bugs resolved in as timely a fashion as possible.

We look forward to hearing all of your feedback once you jump into the plugin.

In the hullaballo of product launches, new project betas, and babies everywhere, we forgot to mention that one of our favorite projects from 2011 was honored with a webby award win this past month.

Indiewire is the finest source for independent film news on the web. We helped them through a complete rebrand and redesign of their blog network. We worked on the project with our good friends at Independent Content Co. I had an amazing design team with Brad Fitzgerald of Apt Design, Amy Stein, and Amy Richard of Be Better Studios.

We are lucky to have clients that are leaders in their field and trust us to do our thing.

Community Events will work with The Events Calendar or Events Calendar PRO, which means you can use it regardless of whether you’re an open source or paying user. It will not, however, work with any builds prior to 2.0.6 (which was also just released yesterday, 5/1/12). If you’re running The Events Calendar or PRO 2.0.5, make sure you’ve updated before installing Community or you may run into issues.

Don’t forget to check out our Community Events new user primer before you jump into it. And if you’ve got questions that the primer doesn’t address…then head over to the Community forum here on the tri.be site and we can try to help you out.  

As was the case with Eventbrite…this is a 1.0 release, and while we’ve spent a lot of time QAing it, there will inevitably be issues we missed. We’d appreciate you bringing any bugs or quirkiness to our attention so we can get them patched up with haste. We’ve already got 1.0.1 in the works to include a couple features that couldn’t make it by launch time. 

To all the beta testers who participated in helping us reach this 1.0 release…thank you! With this launch we’ve finally taken the first step on what we’re hoping to be a long path down the road of frontend submission awesomeness, and we hope you all enjoy the fruits of our labors.

You’re going to need an Eventbrite account to use this plugin…so while your purchase is downloading, why not head over to their website and set that up now? Also keep in mind that while the plugin may technically operate on 2.0 – 2.0.4, you should be running Events 2.0.5 if you’re using this add-on. We unfortunately will not be able to provide Eventbrite-specific support for users running the add-on alongside a pre-2.0.5 code base.

Ready to go? Awesome! It might be wise to check out our Eventbrite Tickets new user primer, complete with both screencasts and written walkthroughs, before you get started. There is more in-depth documentation for developers/themers at our Documentation page. And if you have any other questions that aren’t addressed in either of the locations above, there’s a brand new Eventbrite Tickets forum here on the site where our support team will do their best to help you succeed. 

It’s also worth noting that we’ve spent a lot of time QAing/testing this plugin…but as this is a 1.0 release, there are inevitably going to be minor bugs/quirks still in the system that no amount of internal QA would catch. We appreciate you being understanding of this and reporting anything you catch to us — so we can patch it and release an update with haste. We’ve already got a 1.0.1 release in the works with plans to release over the next couple weeks. 

Thanks to everyone who has been patient in waiting for the release of this add-on. We’re proud of the finished product and have real solid ideas for how to extend the functionality down the road. As a team, we are all looking forward to hearing your reactions once you jump into Eventbrite Tickets.

Photo courtesy of Adam Tow

I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to join some of the most advanced and influential WordPress community this week. The 2012 WordPress VIP workshop in Napa was a really interesting and inspiring event. I think it was well worth the money.

I had been really wondering what to expect. I had thought that we might guide the agenda through some sort of collaborative process. Maybe even setting it when we arrived. I was surprised to learn upon my arrival that the schedule was in fact a fixed agenda.

The Scene

The receptionist asked us if we’d like some wine while we signed in before shuttling us to our room in one of the shinny new cars provided by their sponsor, Audi. I think Andy Skelton said it best when he pointed out that The Carneros Inn, where we were staying, felt like the set for The Prisoner. Eerily perfect and enclosed.

The Carneros Inn is a base camp for wine lovers. It is a village of high-end cabins and villas with several on site restaurants, a cafe, a 24 hour heated luxury pool and hot tub, a spa, and a deluxe gym. You can literally walk from there to at least a dozen wineries.

I was giddy when I entered my villa to find that it came equipped with a bright orange Francis Francis! X1 espresso machine. Though, somewhere between the heated tile bathroom floors, the indoor / outdoor shower system, my luxurious fenced in back patio with space for 20 people to lounge, and the enormous and supremely comfortable bed, I couldn’t help but wonder if this room wasn’t a bit overkill. What a shame that I never really had time to do more than sleep in it. I would have loved to have spent a day lounging.

The People

Sara Rosso threw this shindig together. Hmm… actually, that doesn’t really do it justice… This must have been at least as complicated as a wedding. Sara Rosso would make a heck of a wedding planner!

All in all, there were about 50 attendees including the 17 “Automatticians”. Sadly, only 4 of the attendees were female. And in terms of ethnicity, while there was some variety, about 70% of the group was comprised of white guys. I’m not sure why, but there definitely seem to be a lot of white guys (about my age too) in the WordPress community.

Aside from the Automattic team, the people attending the workshop were pretty high caliber in terms of knowledge and business size. I was honored to count myself, and the folks from my team (Jonathan Brinley and Joey Kudish) among a group of people representing the likes of Time, CBS, MAKE Magazine, and All Things Digital. The most amazing thing on top of that was the fact that we all were so open and giving with each other. I’m not sure if that’s a WordPress thing or if that was because of the environment, but we all were completely excited to share our hard earned innovations.

The Automattic team in particular made themselves very approachable. I never got the sense that I was on the outside of a clique. Instead, I felt that I had been given a free pass to hangout and be a part of the internal workings of this stunning company (as though I had a golden ticket to Mr. Wonka’s Website Factory). The team did an excellent job of setting a tone of mutual respect and exchange. The result was an easy environment where everyone was eager to learn.

The State of the Word

It was really exciting to see Matt Mullenweg open the sessions with a summary of his view on the state of WordPress and with an intro to VIP in particular. One thing that he talked about that I am particularly interested in is the evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform, to a CMS, to an application engine. I’m especially interested in this because our own Events Calendar Pro is a step in that direction. In fact I later talked with Raanan about the prospect of putting our Events Calendar plugin on wordpress.com so that the greater WordPress user community could easily access it. I got the sense that it’s not totally out of the question.

Shortly after Matt wrapped up we had the pleasure of hearing from the Automattic CEO / “Band Manager”, Toni Schneider. Toni kicked it off with some mind blowing numbers to give us some context. WordPress powers at least 16% of the entire web! What’s more, WordPress is credited with running 53% of all CMS powered sites. It is leagues ahead of every other platform. Given that context, I suddenly felt like I was at a summit of world leaders. Actually, more than anything, I felt empowered. That reaffirms my sense that I’m in the right industry and that we have the power to make an impact in the world (or at least the western part of the world)

Matt and Toni are both wonderful speakers. If you haven’t had an opportunity to attend one of their talks, I highly recommend it!

The Sessions

All the sessions were great. They all had useful information. Some were not quite advanced enough for me but I am pretty sure that there were other folks who got a lot out of those sessions too.

Some of my favorite sessions included Mo Jangda’s debugging session, both of Mike Adam’s performance sessions, and Nikolay Bachiyski’s code standards session.

Mo’s debugging session was a real eye opener. He started with a pretty straight forward agenda, walking us though various basic approaches to WordPress debugging. About half way through the session, he presented us with a nasty image uploader bug and then simply told us to solve it. Many of us were completely unprepared to put our coder hats on and dig into it. I personally was having trouble mounting the drive for the Virtual Machine they gave us and didn’t bother for at least 15 minutes before I realized that people were seriously struggling with this bug. Joey and Jonathan (both representing our team) were the only people in the entire room of WordPress experts to solve the challenge! Go team! In terms of a lecture to learning ratio, that was probably the most efficient and impactful session I’ve ever attended.

Mike Adams wins the prize for preparedness. His sessions were 150% thought through. He gave us powerful examples of caching both in WordPress AND in Javascript. Did you know that rendering elements to the DOM has significant overhead? His solution: render the nodes to a variable and then when you’re done, render the variable to the DOM. He did this in a demo, that we all could try, where we could see a consistent and dramatic result.

The big take away from Mikes sessions… the best way to get a feature to perform is to not have the feature at all. But if you have to include it, then use the green waste mantra:

• Reduce
• Reuse
• Recycle

Nikolay presented a number of workshops. In general, that guy is pretty damn funny. In particular, he presented on WordPress coding standards. Fortunately, we had also just started a significant company effort to standardize our code for WordPress so we were primed for this talk. In fact his talk answered many of our questions. I learned that the spacing habits that we inherited from Nick Ohrn are being applied in all new Automattic code.

It’s lovely because it makes things so much more readable. The only gripe I have with it is in the case of actions and filters. If you add a space arbitrarily between the parentheses and the quotes, then it makes it harder to text search the WordPress code base. In other words, if I search the code for
do_action('wp_head", do_action( 'hp_head' ); will not be returned. Instead, I now have to regex search for do_action\(\s*'wp_head.

The other thing that was pretty exciting was being present for JJJ and Beau’s announcement that WordPress.com is going to be launching a JSON api. I just really like being present for big announcements. It makes me feel special.

The Night Life

Of course every night was spent swapping tales at the open tab bar (Is it wrong that I fell in love with a beer in wine country?). To some degree, this was more important to me than the day sessions. I found that at night, while we were all loose and receptive, we could have the most interesting and unconstrained conversations that varied from Crosspost Architecture and Coding Standards to Krav Maga and the pursuit of a satisfying life.

And of course, the last night was my birthday. After the bar closed, Raanan and Sara busted out the store bought vodka tonics in plastic cups. #feelingthelove.

The Learnings

After an intensive week of submerging myself in the WordPress discourse, my biggest take away is actually that our team is pretty awesome. We know this stuff. I personally realized that I am more savvy than I thought. I didn’t really learn anything new. In fact, I felt like I could have taught many of the sessions myself.

This is not the first time that I have done something like this only to realize that I know more than I thought I did. And it is by no means a waste of time or money. On the contrary, it is very empowering. It inspires me to work harder and apply my knowledge and share the fruits of my efforts. And that… is priceless.