WordPress Founder: Mobile Blog Platform Growing Fast

Mobile blogging is growing quickly with over four million active users of the mobile WordPress platform, says WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in this inteview with Beet.TV

We spoke with him after his presentation at the paidContent conference in Manhattan in May 2012.

He also speaks about progress with Jetpack, video blogging and the growth at San Francisco-based Automattic which has over 100 employees.

From the AnandTech review of the Microsoft Surface:

“After using Microsoft’s Surface for the past week I can say that I honestly get it. This isn’t an iPad competitor, nor is it an Android tablet competitor. It truly is something different. A unique perspective, not necessarily the right one, but a different one that will definitely resonate well with some (not all) users.”

I think that’s a smart move by Microsoft – they can’t compete with the iPad and they are finally embracing doing something new – even if some people won’t get it. Apple has been doing this forever and it MIGHT help Microsoft stay relevant in the future. A rare kudos to Redmond.

There are several plugins that accomplish what I wanted done, but I thought a better way would be to use a simple shortcode. What is a shortcode? A shortcode is similar to the bbcode used on popular message board software: lightweight markup used to format content, insert files, and other helpful things. Besides, I had never written a shortcode and thought this would be a good way to learn.

I also wanted my client to be able to use the shortcode without typing the shortcode “tags” around the content they wanted to mark – so I would also need to create a quicktag that would live in the post editor toolbar, and allow my client to use the shortcode with a single click of a button.

Shortcodes are written by providing a handler function. Shortcode handlers are similar to WordPress filters: they accept parameters and return a result : the shortcode output.

The `add_shortcode()` function is used to register a shortcode handler. It takes two parameters: the shortcode name (the string used in a post body), and the callback function name.

The callback function for my ‘free_shortcode’ looks like this:

The function shows the content between ‘free’ tags is the user is not logged in, the content of the post is not empty, and it is not being displayed on a feed.

If any of those conditions are true (most important to us is that the user is logged in) then the content between the ‘free’ tags is not displayed.

Getting the shortcode added into a quicktag is simple. WordPress provides an API for adding quicktags (buttons in the HTML side of the editor) – the code for my quicktag is below:

So Simple! Now my client can mark free content by highlighting it in the editor, and clicking the ‘Free Content’ button in the post editor toolbar.

I am not sure if my code is the most efficient way to carry out what I wanted, but it was a great learning experience. If you have any helpful hints or tips for me to improve my code PLEASE drop a comment a below.