WP Contributor Day is a new WordPress event that is coming up this weekend. It will be held Saturday, March 1st, 2014, in Manchester, England from 10:00 – 18:00. The goal is to have eight solid hours of contributors working together to improve WordPress. Jenny Wong, the organizer of the event, regularly attends the WordPress…
InstantWP is a free tool used to quickly and easily create a WordPress testing environment. It ships with everything you need to get a local install of WordPress up and running. Apache, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress 3.6 are prepackaged. You may be wondering why WordPress 3.6 is installed and not the latest version. Seamus Brady,…
Did you know that WordPress has built-in support for subscript and superscript characters? This information is not easy to find, as it’s tucked away under the Editing Help page in the codex. Although the WordPress editor doesn’t show subscript and superscript buttons, you can add these characters anytime using the sub or sup tags. For…
The latest trend in WordPress blogging themes is to put post formats on center stage with a colorful palette selected to highlight the variety of content. Hexa is a beautiful new example of this trend in action. The theme launched last week on WordPress.com and hit WordPress.org over the weekend. Named for the geometric shapes…
A child theme is defined in the WordPress codex as a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme. Child themes allow you to modify, or add to the functionality of that parent theme. A child theme is the safest and easiest way to modify an existing theme, whether you want…
WP Editor is a free WordPress plugin developed by Benjamin Projas. It replaces the default plugin, theme, post, and page editors and is integrated with CodeMirror and Fancybox. By integrating these two technologies, the editor resembles an environment coders will be familiar with. The first thing I noticed when writing my first post with the…
BuddyPress 2.0, due sometime in mid-April, officially kicked off development a couple weeks ago. This release will include some exciting, visible new features, including the ability to edit BuddyPress profiles in the WordPress admin. But there are also some major improvements happening under the hood that will help BuddyPress to scale better in the near…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I sat down with Chris Wallace, co-founder of UpThemes and discussed in detail the reasons behind the open letter published by the company. We learned how Chris got involved with WordPress theme development and the circumstances leading to the creation of UpThemes. Chris explained how hard it was to…
WordPress doesn’t send out too many emails. They’re usually only generated for an important notice, or when an action is required on your part. However, there are a few different circumstances under which you may not want WordPress to send any emails. For example, when working on a development site, or even a production site,…
Recently we explored the question of whether or not a clear path for WordPress.org plugin adoption could help to lower the rate of abandonment. Some have suggested that having a standard (unofficial) adoption tag might help to bring more exposure to plugins that need a new owner. “Adopt-Me” was suggested as one possible tag for…
Bob Dunn, who’s been teaching WordPress for years, has launched an all new website dedicated to helping people learn WordPress. The new site is filled with tutorials, up to date information about WordPress, and in the near future, complimentary eBooks. I got in touch with Bob and asked him a few questions about the new…
The Titan Framework is a new WordPress options framework that was released on WordPress.org this week. This set of tools was created to make it easy for WordPress theme and plugin developers to add options to their projects. This first release contains more than 20 options, including meta boxes, Google font selector, a media uploader,…
In the old days, WordPress theme developers used to build loads of specific functionality into their themes, i.e. recipes, portfolios, testimonials, analytics, fundraising capabilities, custom post types etc. Commercial theme providers competed fiercely with one another to see who could pack the most functionality into their offerings. Many companies sought to become a one-stop-shop for…
So you just created and released a cool WordPress plugin that solves a problem. It’s now among 29,000 other plugins on the plugin directory. How do you tell the world your plugin exists? WordPress.org doesn’t have an area to publish press releases or announcements of new plugins. However, all plugins published to the repository show…
Postcard is a new free social sharing app for iOS that landed in the app store today. The app makes it easy for you to share content from your phone to multiple social networks at once. The golden feature of this app is its “Custom Network” capability, which allows you to share to your own…
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