Akismet is celebrating a huge milestone today. According to its spam counter, it has now blocked over 100,000,000,000 spam messages. Not all of that spam has originated from WordPress powered websites. Thanks to a number of libraries and an API, Akismet can be used on different content management systems as well as services.
About three years ago, WordPress introduced pie charts and a stats API to the plugin repository. These stats gave plugin authors a chance to see which versions of their plugin were activated while also giving a glimpse into how many actual users the plugin had. The API provided a method to getting access to the…
ManageWP.org has been live since October 14th and has already accumulated over 1,000 registered users. The site has also been in the top 5 of traffic referrals to WPTavern.com, thanks in large part to the unsolicited submission of articles and upvotes. We extend a huge thank you to all who have shared and voted on…
WordPress is getting its own style guide. Helen Hou-Sandí is working on a new plugin called WordPress Style Guide to serve as a reference for building WordPress admin UI components. This is very much a work in progress and its purpose will evolve, as Helen notes on the plugin’s github page: “This plugin is not…
When Tom McFarlin released his WordPress Plugin Boilerplate on github last November, he has no idea how many developers would jump on board to contribute to this open source learning resource. The plugin has received a ton of support from the community, including commits from more than 26 contributors. McFarlin will soon be putting out…
It’s amazing how much WordPress code is available on github. Many developers choose not to place their plugins on WordPress.org for one reason or another, but this makes their code less convenient for others to find. Using a plugin from github traditionally requires you to visit github, search for the plugin, download the zip file…
Now that WordPress 3.7 is out in the wild and has already accumulated over 1.5 million downloads, the complaints are starting to roll in concerning the automatic update feature. On the Make.WordPress.core website where Andrew Nacin published a great guide on the different ways of configuring auto updates, users started questioning why there wasn’t an…
One of the security tips you’ll come across often is immediately deleting the admin user after installation and creating a new user, then assigning that user the administrator role. This is something I wish the core team would address so that during the installation of WordPress, users would be able to choose their own username…
WPShout.com has a great article that explains how to easily find websites that are using the theme you’re thinking about buying or using. One of the first things I try to do before downloading or purchasing a theme is to find actual websites that are using the design. While some theme companies have a showcase…
Over the weekend, WordPress developers Andrew Nacin and Dion Hulse released an official WordPress.org plugin that enables users to test their sites’ compatibility with the background updates feature, introduced in WordPress 3.7. Background Update Tester is an official plugin, released under the WordPress.org account. It was created to help users diagnose problems that prevent WordPress…
On this weeks edition of the show, Alex Denning was my special guest along with the new owners of WPShout.com, Fred and David of PressUp Inc. In the show, Alex and I talk about the last four years of publishing content on WPShout.com, what types of opportunities it’s opened up for him, and what it…
It’s easy to get distracted while writing posts. You’re in a browser and you probably have a few other tabs open with notifications beeping at you from every direction. On top of that, the WordPress post editor has a ton of meta boxes competing for your attention. With all of this going on, how can…
Today following the release of WordPress 3.7 many users are wondering where the settings page is to configure these options. The answer is that there is no settings page in the WordPress admin. If you upgrade to WordPress 3.7, the default behavior is that you’ll be automatically upgraded for security and minor releases. The fact…
WordPress 3.7 has been released and the big news is that WordPress now has the ability to update itself. This begins a new era of automatic background updates for security and minor releases. Web hosts around the world have been eagerly awaiting this release and are cheering its arrival. The upgrade process has been greatly…
The questions are simple but the answers are not. Can a theme that is built for developers using best practices be successful in the commercial space? Can a commercial theme add value without adding functionality and bloat? Those are the questions that a trio of WordPress developers are going to try to answer with their…
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