If the WordPress community is your only barometer of knowing how an open source community works together, then you might want to explore outside a bit further to gain a broader outlook on other cultures. Some of the differences are worth examining. A few days ago I noticed an interesting observation regarding the relationship between…
iThemes published details on a security breach that took place earlier today. According to the announcement, after noticing suspicious activity, they noticed a signification attack on their membership database. iThemes urges all customers to reset their passwords immediately. To protect accounts from any unauthorized access, iThemes has temporarily reset all user passwords. To regain access…
Envato has a nice article covering the current state of WordPress blogging themes. The article does a nice job highlighting not only the styles over the years but the inspiration behind them as well. The design traits profiled include: Modern Single-Column Layout Traditional Two-Column Layout The Journal Layout The Masonry/Grid Layout My favorite style is…
Earlier this year, BuddyPress contributors announced that the project would be adopting the features-as-plugins model to help speed up future development. This is the same development model that has been working well for WordPress core, helping four major features land in the 3.8 release. The BuddyPress Media Component and Attachment API was the first feature…
If you’ve ever wondered how well an open source project is maintained, you now have a quick way to get an overview, without scouring the project’s issues queue or trying to infer something based on its release history. Is It Maintained? is a new web app that allows you to check the activity of open…
WordPress theme designer Anders Norén is an unstoppable force, rolling out his ninth free theme to WordPress.org in just over a year. Fukasawa is a masonry theme designed to showcase the work of photographers, collectors, and visual artists. The theme is named for Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, who is both well-known and highly decorated…
WordPress offers excellent oEmbed support for embedding content from more than two dozen major services. Pasting a link into the editor on its own line will have it magically appear as embedded media on the frontend. However, the task of finding that media in another browser window is still required, and this takes you outside…
BuddyPress 2.1 was released yesterday with a handy new mentions interface that pops up a suggestions panel as you are typing. In the past, you would need to know a member’s username in order to write a mention in the activity stream, which many times meant looking it up. The new mentions interface makes it…
Contributors on the WordPress Meta team are responsible for WordPress.org and its associated sites, i.e. wordcamp.org, apps.wordpress.org, etc. The team works on supporting and improving these sites along with the build tools that are used by the other contributor groups. Folks often complain about how the sites work, but did you know that much of…
Adding staff, board members, or another collection of individuals is a common requirement when building an online presence for an organization. The best way to make sure that your staff member data is portable when you change themes, is to add it via a plugin. Staffer is a newly approved plugin on WordPress.org that stores…
BuddyPress 2.1 “Patsy” is fresh out of the oven, named for a coal-oven pizzeria in East Harlem, NYC. Patsy’s is famous for its traditional New York style thin crust pizza and claims to have originated the practice of selling pizza by the slice. New @mentions Interface The name is fitting, because 2.1 is another slice…
A steady stream of minimalist themes for writers has been flowing into the official WordPress Themes Directory this year. As people grow disenchanted with interaction on social networks, the personal blog is on course for a renaissance. The beauty of WordPress is that anyone with something to say can be a writer. Crawford joins their…
Netropolitan, colloquially dubbed the “Facebook for rich people,” is a new private social network available to those who are willing to shell out $9,000 to join and $3,000/year to continue membership. The site advertises itself as “The online country club for people with more money than time,” and has been featured on CNN and other…
WordPress users were thrilled when widgets were added to the customizer in the 3.9 release. A better UI and real-time previews revived widgets and once again made them a joy to use. The experience was so beneficial to users that the project continues to plough ahead with customizer enhancements. WordPress 4.0 introduced contextual controls and…
PhpStorm from JetBrains is far and away the most favored IDE for PHP developers. In March, PhpStorm announced that the upcoming version 8 would add official support for WordPress. The official release is finally here and delivers on that promise, adding a deeper level of support for developers who work with the WordPress code base.…
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