For the last 4 years or so, I’ve been working at MySQL (which was swallowed by Sun, which in turn was consumed by Oracle), based 100% out of my home office. The thread of working as part a distributed company is something I’m very happy to be continuing at Automattic.

What else is cool?

Impact is cool. Automattic is around 100 people, but WordPress.com is one of the top 20 websites in the world, getting millions of visitors a day. Look at that employee:visitor ratio in the table over there. Isn’t that a beautiful thing?

Getting things done is cool. The smart people at Automattic² have done a great job of making continuous deployment scale as they’ve grown, so engineers can rapidly develop, launch and iterate features. There’s nothing quite like launching a new feature, seeing it run millions of times an hour, then tweaking it based on how people are using it.

Working with awesome people is cool. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the folks at Automattic recently, and even meeting a few of them. When work turns from the usual day-to-day, into hanging out with friends and doing interesting things, you know you’re onto something.

The Automattic Creed

I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company that has a creed, but I like this one.

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

What will happen to my other projects?

PonyEdit development is continuing strongly. We’re working on a bunch of serious performance improvements, expect to see it out soon.

Job Manager is slowly waking up from the long winter of bug-fix releases only. With a little luck, I’ll be able to start making some serious inroads on the next feature release.

I also have some ideas I want to play around with, and now sounds like a good time to see what works. Stayed tuned.

One more thing…

If you want to join in the fun, go and check out our Work With Us page, and apply! You may end up becoming my TransCoding sidekick (we’ll get superhero costumes, and our own theme music).

To block non-admin users from getting into wp-admin, you just need to add the following code to your functions.php, or somewhere similar:

add_action( 'init', 'blockusers_init' );
 
function blockusers_init() {
	if ( is_admin() && ! current_user_can( 'administrator' ) ) {
		wp_redirect( home_url() );
		exit;
	}
}

Ta-da! Now, only administrator users can access wp-admin, everyone else will be re-directed to the homepage.

In order to keep your site running in top condition, you don’t want to be running queries against tables with lots of rarely accessed rows, which is what happens with most comments – after the post drops off the front page, readership drops, so the comments are viewed much less frequently. So, what we want to do is remove these old comments from the primary comment table, but keep them handy, for when people read the archives.

Enter partitioning.

The idea of MySQL partitioning is that it splits tables up into multiple logical tablespaces, based on your criteria. Running a query on a single partition of a large table is much faster than running it across the entire table, even with appropriate indexes.

In the case of the WordPress comments table, splitting it up by the `comment_post_ID` seems to be the most appropriate . This should keep the partitions to a reasonable size, and ensure that there’s minimal cross-over between partitions.

First off, we need to add the `comment_post_ID` column to the Primary Key. This can be a slow process if you already have a massive `wp_comments` table, so you may need to schedule some downtime to handle this. Alternatively, there many methods for making schema changes with no downtime, such as judicious use of Replication, Facebook’s Online Schema Change Tool, or the currently-in-development mk-online-schema-change, for Maatkit.

ALTER TABLE wp_comments DROP PRIMARY KEY, ADD PRIMARY KEY (comment_ID, comment_post_ID);

Now that we’ve altered this index, we can define the partitions. For this example, we’ll say we want the comments for 1000 posts per partition. This query can take a long time to run, if you already have many comments in your system.

ALTER TABLE wp_comments PARTITION BY RANGE(comment_post_ID) (
    PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (1000),
    PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (2000),
    PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN (3000),
    PARTITION p3 VALUES LESS THAN (4000),
    PARTITION p4 VALUES LESS THAN (5000),
    PARTITION p5 VALUES LESS THAN (6000),
    PARTITION p6 VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE
);

When you’re approaching the next partition divider value, adding a new partition is simple. For example, you’d run this query around post 6000.

ALTER TABLE wp_comments REORGANIZE PARTITION p6 INTO (
    PARTITION p6 VALUES LESS THAN (7000),
    PARTITION p7 VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE
);

Naturally, this process is most useful for very large WordPress sites. If you’re starting a new site with big plans, however, you may just want to factor this into your architecture.

UPDATE: Changed the partition definition to better reflect how WordPress uses the wp_comments table, per Giuseppe’s comments.

I found Job Manager easy to work with from day one, I appreciated the way it works straight out-of-the-box and I knew my client would understand it straight away upon handover. This allowed me to set up my fields and pages as required with full knowledge that everything was working and all I had to do was apply my design.

Customizing the form layout to the final design was easy. Using CSS, I was able to style and add classes to my liking by adding code into the page templates as I required them. From a developers view point I was able to customise the layout and fields according to my heart’s content (or my clients’ I should say).

— David Gross, Zojo

They were also after particular information from applicants, so the ability to customise the application form as invaluable. And just because I like to let the users speak for themselves, here’s a little more of what David had to say:

While evaluating other options, nothing came close in terms of freedom of options, customisation and support.

So there you have it – download Job Manager, you can easily create a job board for your company!

Are you doing creative things with Job Manager? Have some time to tell me how and why you’re using it? Drop me a line, you could be the next Job Manager Highlight!

Along those lines, there are a bunch of varied new features!

• Interview Scheduling – Easily keep track of who you’re interviewing and when, with interview ratings and internal comments
• Comments – Keep internal comments on interviews and applications, so you’re easily able to aggregate and recall thoughts on each applicant
• WordPress.com Support – If you’re a WordPress.com VIP customer, and you want to bring your hiring process back in house, drop me a line, I’d be happy to discuss any features you need, or assist you setting it up.
• Application Form Templating – If you’d like to customise the look of your application form, you can. Build a mad-libs style form! (The potential benefits of which are briefly discussed here.)
• Jobs Per Page – If you’re showing lots of jobs, you might want to split them up into multiple pages.

As always, the Changelog has all the juicy details!

The big feature in the next version will be the ability to create a public job site for (optionally) charging people to post jobs on your site. If you have ideas or suggestions for how you’d like to see this work, check out the Roadmap and leave comments on the appropriate issue.

Version 0.8 will have a slightly longer development cycle than previous versions – I expect the stable release to be out in early July. I’m travelling for much of the next 6 weeks, so rather than making promises I can’t keep, I’ll push feature development for 0.8 until June. I’ll still be fixing any bugs that crop up in 0.7, of course.

There are several more translations in progress, I’ll be releasing them as they’re completed, throughout the 0.7 lifecycle. On a related note, the German translation needs someone to keep it up to date – if you speak German and have some time to translate strings, please contact me!

For now, go and upgrade to version 0.7, and let me know what you think!

BlueTree Search recently re-launched their site with the help of Stripe Creative, switching from plain HTML to WordPress as a CMS. Along the way, they decided to bring their job listing in-house.

Initially, this client asked us to add a job posting section to the web site we developed for them a few years ago. Our awesome programmer dude (Scotty at randomproductions.net) suggested that for the same cost of adding a custom-written application, we could re-create the site in WordPress and find a customizable job posting plug-in. This allowed us to offer the client some serious added value (easier updates and adding new functionality through plug-ins) at no additional cost. The transfer to WordPress was transparent to the end users — we kept the site’s original design — and adding/customizing Job Manager was a breeze.

— Brian Robboy, Stripe Creative

With a little bit of editing of the Individual Job Template, they were able to easily highlight pertinent information, without distracting from the content of the listed job.

And a final bonus comment from Brian:

I love working with people like you who actually CARE about the applications they’re writing…we’d never get this level of dedication, customer service and communication with a commercial product.

Are you doing creative things with Job Manager? Have some time to tell me how and why you’re using it? Drop me a line, you could be the next Job Manager Highlight!

Unfortunately, there’s one site missing from the chain: wordpress.org. Job Manager is hosted there, but I cannot see the visitor statistics. Google Code allows you to track statistics for your project hosted there, so I think wordpress.org hosting should be able to do the same, for plugins and themes hosted there.

To that end, I have submitted a shiny new feature request. If you like this idea, go, comment, and vote for it!

Here are some of the major features that have been added:

• Custom Job Fields. Like the Application Form, you can now add custom fields to Jobs, so you can display the information that is pertinent to your organisation.
• Job and Job List Templates. You can now completely customise the HTML that is produced for lists of jobs, and individual jobs. (If you build a cool template that you’d like to share, feel free to send it through – I’d like to build a database where people can easily browse through and choose the look-and-feel that they’re after for their job listing.)
• Widgets. No more maintaining text widgets with links to your job categories, or lists of latest jobs.
• Highlighted Jobs. You can now highlight important jobs, and stick them to the top of any job list they appear in.
• CAPTCHA support, thanks to the excellent SI CAPTCHA plugin.

There are many more, check the Changelog for the complete list!

The development cycle for this version has been a little bumpy. Mid-way through, I decided to add Job Fields and Templates, the lack of which had been bugging me, but in order to meet the arbitrary deadline of “mid-February” for the 0.6 release (which I ended up only meeting with the first beta), I had to cut a few of the other features I had planned. That said, I think the process is getting smoother, and I’m certainly getting a lot of support from the WordPress community: we now have two complete translations (Dutch and French), more on the way, and a comprehensive user manual in the works!

So, where to next?

First up, I like having a “small features” release. It gives me a chance to attend to the tweaking that can be overlooked when implementing major features, so I’ve schedule version 0.8 as being the next small features release. I’ve already have a few listed on the Roadmap, but I’m always interested in adding more!

Speaking of the Roadmap, I’m going to have to revise the Due dates that I have listed. These dates were set in November/December last year, and it seems I made them a bit too aggressive – not allowing for beta releases, longer-than-expected development time, et cetera. I’ll be looking at them over the next couple of weeks, if you have any thoughts on it, please leave a comment below.

The next major feature I’m going to be working on is allowing anyone to post jobs. If you have any comments on how you’d like this to work, please post them in this issue.

Finally, do you have any ideas for where you’d like to see Job Manager go? Some of my best feature suggestions have come from the community – you’re the people who are using it in every day life, so I want to know how I can make your life easier. Send me your suggestions through the issue tracker.

This has been the first time I’ve made beta releases on the wp.org system, and I think it’s been quite successful. I’ve had some good feedback over the past few days, and fixed several bugs, without affecting user’s production systems. Naturally, I welcome any comments on how you felt it went.

The big changes are:

• You can now allow or require users to register before they can submit an application. This will be the basis for a pile of new features coming up over the next few months.
• You could always send email to applicants – now these emails are stored, and along with records of who they were sent to.
• Application ratings – it’s now easy to keep track of who your star applicants are. You can also filter your list of applications based on their rating, for an easy list of who you need to call back.
• A lot of people were asking how to find the links to the categories, so I’ve added links to each category on the Settings page. I’ll be adding more methods to find your way to the categories in later versions.

I’ve set up GlotPress to handle my translations, if you’d like to have Job Manager in your language, please contact me, so I can create an account for you. If you’re interested, I only change or add strings in feature releases (0.3, 0.4, 0.5, etc). I don’t make any changes or additions in bug fix releases (0.4.1, 0.4.2, 0.4.3, etc).

The next feature release, version 0.6, will include lots of small features that people have requested. If there’s a small change you’d like to see in Job Manager, check out the Roadmap and see if it’s there. If not, submit a feature request!

This release involves a pile of under-the-hood changes:

• Re-write of the entire data storage routines to use default WordPress tables – no more creation of custom tables!
• Because of the above, Job Manager now requires WordPress 2.9. That’s cool, because you’ve all upgraded already. Right?
• Sanity checking, security hardening and bug fixes!

As usual, the Changelog has the juicy gossip.

Go and download it now! What are you waiting for?