You might have heard about WordPress turning 10 years old on May 27th. To celebrate local WordPress communities around the world are having anniversary parties on May 27th, 2013. This includes the greater Salt Lake City, Utah area. The details are at http://www.meetup.com/WordPress/Salt-Lake-City-UT/930892/:

When: Monday, May 27, 2013, 7:00 PM
Where: Sonny Brian’s; 33 East 11400 South in Sandy

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If you are coming be sure to RSVP so that we have an idea of how many people to expect. Bluehost is also giving away the 10th Anniversary WordPress t-shirts to the first 30 people who fill out this form on wpslc.com.

It will be a fun time to hang out and chat with other local WordPress fans/users/designers/developers.

Today VaultPress announced the Code Garage migration details. We really wanted to make sure that we had the details and options on this right. I know that migrations like this can often be annoying, so we went out of our way to make the process smooth and inviting.

Code Garage users that migrate to VaultPress will get their first two months on VaultPress free. For those who don’t want to migrate, we’ll refund your last payment.

Even if you aren’t a Code Garage customer, you should go read Peter’s CodeGarage Locker is Migrating to VaultPress post. He gives a personal history of how Code Garage came to be, how it grew, and how it ultimately was sold to Automattic.

The next meeting is tomorrow night ( April 24th ), where Matt Jones will be talking about e-commerce with WordPress.

The OpenWest Conference is happening May 2-4, 2013 (formerly the Utah Open Source Conference) at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

This year the keynote speakers are Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, and Mark Callaghan, lead of the MySQL engineering team at Facebook.

For my part I’ll be giving three different presentations this time around. First up is “Simple Filesystems with Python and FUSE”, where I’ll cover the basics of getting a simple filesystem up and running written in Python using the FUSE library. Next up is “Site Testing with CasperJS”, which is an intro to using CasperJS to run user tests against your site. Last, but not least, is “Scaling WordPress”, where I’ll talk about some of the methods that WordPress.com (the largest WordPress install in the world) uses to host tens of millions of sites that add up to billions of page views per month.

I tried to keep my session titles direct and to the point. At times there will up to ten sessions running at once ( OpenWest session schedule ), so I wanted people to be able to tell at a glance what my sessions are about.

Tickets for OpenWest are available at $80. Every open source group in the area has been given a discount code though, so you can bring that down significantly.

If you’ll be at the OpenWest conference be sure to say hi.

In the world of HTML filtering in PHP HTML Purifier appears to be the current top dog. WordPress long ago forked kses for HTML filtering, which is fine, but as John Godley ( a co-worker at Automattic ) put it:

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the way WordPress and bbPress filters comments, and in fact there has been no security alert related to this. However, this doesn’t detract from the desire to make things better, and the fact that HTML Purifier is much more thorough and exhaustive.

He wrote the HTML Purified WordPress plugin, which “replaces the default WordPress comments filters with HTML Purifier”.

For new PHP projects, or ones that allow you to easily swap in/out libraries, it looks like HTML Purifier is the current best option for HTML filtering.

Some of my great co-workers recently released a new icon font – Genericons

The details are in The Genericons Icon Font Story announcement post. In additional to being a nice general use icon font, it is licensed under GPLv2 (or later), so no more trying to sort out licensing terms to see if the icon font will jive with your existing open source projects. They are also free, as in no cost. The font is already in use in the new WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme ( demo site is at http://twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com/ ).

For more examples check out the bottom of the announcement post and genericons.com site.

Post By Email is something that WordPress has had for some time, but most self hosted WordPress sites don’t bother with it.  Why?  Because it is a pain to setup and manage.  Jetpack 2.0 brings the features and simplicity of post by email powered by WordPress.com to self hosted WordPress sites.

Jetpack has gradually been building up awesome abilities, it isn’t all about this 2.0 release.  One of the things I’m most impressed with came in the 1.9 release: support for the WordPress.com REST API.  What this means is that you can now use the WordPress.com REST API to communicate with all WordPress.com hosted sites AND Jetpack connected sites.  Let that sink in for a minute.

What does that look like?  You can try it out with this URL: https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites/josephscott.org

You’ll get back something like:

{
  "ID": 5190300,
  "name": "Joseph Scott",
  "description": "",
  "URL": "http:\/\/josephscott.org",
  "meta": {
    "links": {
      "self": "https:\/\/public-api.wordpress.com\/rest\/v1\/sites\/5190300",
      "help": "https:\/\/public-api.wordpress.com\/rest\/v1\/sites\/5190300\/help",
      "posts": "https:\/\/public-api.wordpress.com\/rest\/v1\/sites\/5190300\/posts\/",
      "comments": "https:\/\/public-api.wordpress.com\/rest\/v1\/sites\/5190300\/comments\/"
    }
  }
}

Remember that josephscott.org is not hosted on WordPress.com.

Developers now have the potential of being able to use a single API end point for every WordPress site out there, it doesn’t matter if they are hosted on WordPress.com or some place else (assuming they connect with Jetpack).  Now that is impressive.

• schedule for the day is now live
• early bird pricing has ended, but we still have general admission tickets, with the still reasonable cost of $20
• t-shirt order is going in tomorrow so if you want to be assured a of shirt in your size you’ll need to register before the end of the day on September 5th.

Look forward to seeing everyone again on the 22nd up at the UoU campus.