The Dream Internship: Work at Automattic (Summer 2013)

Update: The application period is now closed. Thank you to all who have submitted an application! We’ll get in touch with potential candidates via email. 

Our company Automattic — which runs WordPress.com, Akismet, VaultPress, and many other services — is looking for a few stellar summer student development interns, specifically to work with us on the WordPress.com VIP team.

As a paid intern, you’ll be working on a range of projects depending on your skills & passions — everything from doing development work on plugins that improve WordPress functionality for large media companies to working on core WordPress.com features and development. Last year, our interns had a great time developing code for WordPress.com that launched and is still in use! One of our intern developers worked on an early version of WordPress.com Enterprise, and another worked on Push Syndication, which is live on the WordPress.com VIP platform now.

Where will you be working you may ask? Anywhere! We are a distributed company and are happy if you work from wherever you are — including your parent’s summer beach house — as long as you have a good broadband connection. The internship runs 8-10 weeks between June 1st and August 1st, 2013, but we are flexible on the dates.

Interested? Write up a post on your WordPress blog and leave a comment on this post with a link to it telling us what you’d work on — for example, a killer plugin or integration, a feature improvement, etc. Your comment and link will remain private to the VIP team.

Send in your internship application by May 1st, but the earlier, the better!

Looking forward to hearing from all of you.

Neil Leifer on WordPress.com VIP

You may not recognize the name, but you’ve seen his photos.

Neil Leifer, iconic staff photographer for Sports Illustrated, Time, and LIFE magazines (and one of Matt’s favourite photographers), now has a beautiful new home on WordPress.com VIP.

Here’s a snippet from Neil’s bio:

Leifer eventually became a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated before leaving in 1978 to become a staffer for Time magazine. In 1988 he was made a contributing photographer at LIFE magazine and spent the next two years dividing his time between Time and LIFE. When Leifer left Time Inc. in 1990, his photographs had appeared on over 200 Sports Illustrated, Time, and People covers—at that point, the most ever published of one photographer’s work in Time Inc. history.

Want to see his most memorable photos? Head on over to http://neilleifer.com.

Developer Plugin v1.0: Helping WordPress developers develop

One of the great things about developing for WordPress is the number of tools available for developers. WordPress core ships with a bunch of useful features (e.g. WP_DEBUG) with many more built by the community (like our own Rewrite Rules Inspector and VIP Scanner) that make development and debugging a breeze. The hardest part is getting your environment set up just right: knowing what constants to set, what plugins to install, and so on.

That’s why we built-in the Developer plugin. It’s your one-stop resource to optimally configure your development environment by making sure you have all the essential settings and plugins installed and available.

If you’re a WordPress developer, we highly recommend installing this plugin in your development environment. You can download the plugin from the WordPress.org Plugins Directory or directly from your WordPress Dashboard (Plugins > Add New).

Here’s a quick walk-through:

On activation, the plugin prompts you to check what type of developer you are. This is used to configure the plugins checks.

The plugin does a quick check to see if you have the necessary plugins installed.

With two clicks, you can install and activate plugins.

The settings page (Settings > Developer) will check to make sure your environment is correctly configured including plugins, constants, and other useful settings.

If you’d like to check out the code and contribute, join us on Github; pull requests are more than welcome.

Are there any tools, tips, and tricks that you’re using that we’ve missed? We’d love to add them to the plugin. Let us know in the comments.

Welcome to the brand spanking new Fabulous website!

Reblogged from Fabulous Magazine - The Sun - news, horoscopes, recipes beauty, fashion, competitions, homes, videos, photos:

You might notice we've been busy making a few changes to the Fabulousmag.co.uk website - to make it even easier for you to read up on all things Fabulous, every day of the week.

We'll be bringing you MORE celeb news and photos, MORE beauty trends, MORE fashion as well as daily competitions, videos and an insight into the weird and wonderful world of…

Read more… 39 more words

Fabulous Magazine launched a new design of their site today and is now part of the WordPress.com VIP Hosting family! We're #TotallyFabObsessed :)

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

Co-Authors Plus v2.6.2: Enhancements and bug fixes

Reblogged from danielbachhuber:

Co-Authors Plus makes it easy to add multiple bylines to a given post, and has full support for custom post types. Out just a moment ago, v2.6.2 has the following improvements:

• AJAX user search matches against first name, last name, and nickname fields too, in addition to display name, user login, and email address.
• Comment moderation and approved notifications are properly sent to all co-authors with the correct capabilities.

Read more… 194 more words

VIP Code Wrangler, Daniel Bachhuber breaks down some of the enhancements and bug fixes available in the most recent update to Co-Authors Plus.