WordPress Top Demanded Skill on Elance

Since last year when we wrote about “WordPress in Demand on Elance“, WordPress has surged into the top ten, and now is the sixth most in demand skill on Elance!

Online publishing dominates this list. It’s exciting that the ever evolving WordPress, built on it’s PHP, MySQL, and CSS stack, continues to be the web development platform in demand.

Elance’s 2010 Q2 Online Employment Report also includes a single profile, that of Ron Z Zvagelsky, highlighting his success as a WordPress Expert on Elance.  Represent!

WordPress Resources for Publishers

One of the biggest strengths of WordPress as a publishing platform is the depth of our community of consultants, developers, designers, and hosting providers. It can be tricky to figure out where to find pointers to awesome WordPress partners, so we’ve pulled together this mini-guide for publishers looking for help.

VIP Services: Hosting and Support
From the team that runs WordPress.com, at Automattic, we also offer VIP Services in the form of Hosting and Support. We’ve worked with more hosts than you can imagine, and in our opinion, the companies in our hosting directory represent some of the best and the brightest of the hosting world. If you’re a publisher with significant amounts of monthly traffic, VIP Hosting by WordPress.com is another option for your hosting needs. If you’d prefer to run WordPress on your own servers, but want some extra optimization, streamlining, or security help to future-proof your site for the traffic to come, you’ll want VIP Support.

CodePoet
CodePoet is a shortlist of WordPress consultants brought to you by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. As the world’s largest operator of WordPress blogs (over 16 million and counting), we receive a steady stream of requests from people looking for WordPress savvy web design and software development firms. In response we’ve started CodePoet, a directory of consultants who specialize in building beautiful and efficient WordPress sites.

How-to: Nginx as a front-end proxy cache for WordPress

From Harvard Law’s Dan Collis-Puro, a how-to on optimizing your WordPress MU install, using Nginx as a front-end proxy cache for WordPress:

We put an nginx caching proxy server in front of our wordpress mu install and sped it up dramatically – in some cases a thousandfold. I’ve packaged up a plugin, along with installation instructions here – WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator.

You can read the full details on Dan’s blog and grab the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory.

[ Visit http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/djcp ]

WordPress and Windows Azure

This week I had a unique opportunity to appear at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, to demo four open source technologies — WordPress, Apache, MySQL, PHP — running on Microsoft’s new EC2 competitor called Azure.

WordPress and Windows Azure probably aren’t the first two things you’d think of together. WordPress has been free and open source software from the very beginning, Windows not so much, but we’ve always supported as many platforms as possible and for at least 4 years now you could run WP on Windows and IIS (Internet Information Services).

Choice and competition are great for spurring innovation and better for users and I believe open source software is a good thing even if it’s on a proprietary platform. (Just like we have an open source iPhone application, or encourage people to use Firefox on Windows.)

If you’re interested, check out the full transcript of the keynote from PDC or watch the video of the keynote.

We also created this FAQ in case you had more questions about what was announced.

What did you announce about WordPress at Microsoft PDC 09?
As part of the introduction of the Windows Azure platform, we announced that self-hosted WordPress can be run in an Azure environment on an open source stack of Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Showing MySQL in particular at a Microsoft conference was unusual.

Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.

Do you use Azure at all?
Yes, we’ve been testing out their blob storage as an alternative to Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles. We don’t currently use it in production.

Doesn’t this conflict with your open source orientation?
No. We actually think it’s going to help the spread of open source to have the Free and open Web stack get more support and deployment through Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, which they’re investing quite a bit in. Besides, as I like to say, once you get a taste of Freedom it’s hard to go back.

WordPress in Demand on Elance

Elance, a marketplace “where businesses connect with independent professionals to get work done”, has published their latest Elance Online Work Index. In this index they rate which skills are most in demand in their marketplace based on 100,000 new jobs posted on Elance over recent months:

The #1 in demand skill is PHP, followed in the #2 slot by MySQL. The top publishing platform, with an overall ranking of #13, is WordPress, up 2 spots from #15 since the last index. Joomla comes in at #29, previously 18th overall, and the next publishing platform listed is Drupal at #75, previously 46th in the last index.

Since WordPress is PHP/MySQL, WordPress professionals out there are in a great position with the most in demand skills.

You may recall back in January oDesk posted about similar trends in their marketplace as well.

[ Read more on the Elance blog ]

oDesk Reports “WordPress” Fastest Growing In-Demand Skill in 2008

Thanks to Becca for sending in word that oDesk, “an online staffing marketplace and management platform”, reported the other day on the fastest growing set of skills that are in demand on the oDesk platform.  Based on job/project listings WordPress came out on top with a 427% increase since last year :

The numbers in the table below show the number of job postings on oDesk in which the skills were listed as “required,” and their relative increase from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008. You will notice some variance in the numbers between the table and the charts below as the numbers on the charts show keyword mentions in the job post titles, not required skills.

Skill/Experience	Openings Last 60 Days 2007	Openings Last 60 Days 2008	Change
WordPress	37	195	427.0%
Writing*	32	138	331.3%
Excel*	30	118	293.3%
SEO	73	250	242.5%
XHTML	24	61	154.2%
Linux	23	58	152.2%
Drupal	70	169	141.4%
Joomla	157	352	124.2%
CSS	119	250	110.1%
Graphic Design*	20	42	110.0%

*Because writing, graphic design, and excel have small starting points, we believe their change reflects oDesk growth, not a general trend.

The growth in WordPress demand on oDesk has been steady throughout 2008:

If you are looking for WordPress help on projects, in addition to the resources we’ve listed here, oDesk is a great place to check-out as it currently has over 2700 WordPress developers listed in their system.

[ Visit oDesk blog ]

Post Pagination

I received a few inquires this week about how to go about paginating a post in WordPress.  Turns out it’s super simple and built-in to WordPress core, as detailed below in the Codex article:

Did you know you could split a single post up into different web pages? Using the Next-Page Quicktag from the Write Post Panel, you can break a single post up into different web pages.

Called the Page-link tag, place your cursor in the spot where you want a page break to appear in your post and click the Next-Page Quicktag. You can use it throughout a long post to make two, three, four, or more pages out of the single post.

For more information vist http://codex.wordpress.org/Styling_Page-Links

Arbu: “WordPress Doesn’t Just Blog”

Arbu, a new media agency based in the UK, just published a post titled “WordPress Doesn’t Just Blog …”:

… it rocks, rolls, cleans our teeth and rummages around in our psyche. Well, perhaps not, but while editing the Colintraive & Glendaruel Community Website (which is run using WordPress and a basic hack of Kubrick) it occurred to me that Arbu has implemented websites using WP for all sorts of purposes and rarely for straight blogging. In fact when I thought about it properly, very few of the sites we produce are actually blogs.

In the post they highlight community, commerce, social networking, and other types of sites being built with WordPress.

[Visit arbu.co.uk ]

Alex King Interviewed by Download Squad

Alex King of Crowd Favorite, chats with Download Squad about WordPress and his favorite plugins on the latest Download Squad Podcast:

The team at Crowd Favorite has worked on many WordPress projects, and offers the following WordPress services:

Custom plugin development services, WordPress as a CMS development, WordPress theme design and development, WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) development, integrations, and general “how can I do this?” services for WordPress.

If you need to do something with, to, or in concert with WordPress – we can make it happen.

Tips on Optimizing Performance for Self-Installed WordPress

Michael Biven, CTO of Laughing Squid, wrote a great post highlighting how to optimize your self-installed WordPress setup:

Taking responsibility of your WordPress site by keeping it up to date to the latest version and managing it’s load on the server hosting it is just as important as the content you’re writing for it. Security updates, performance improvements and other bug fixes will help keep your site running smoothly, but there are a few other steps you can take to improve it’s performance.

Scott Beale confirms that these optimizations have had a big impact on the Laughing Squid Blog:

We use almost all of these recommendations on Laughing Squid , which has helped to keep server loads low and things running smoothly when it comes to front page Diggs and ongoing high traffic from sources like Google search and StumbleUpon.

Read the full post on Michael’s blog: Optimizing performance for WordPress