In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I wrap up our year in review. We look back at the biggest stories from July-December of this year. Thank you to everyone who listened to the show throughout 2015. Marcus and I plan to expand beyond WordPress in 2016 to discuss mental health, distributed worker…
Budding Windows App Studio developers who want an easy way to create a Windows application of their WordPress sites are in luck. In the December update, the Windows App Team announced a couple of new features including, a WordPress data source and template. Windows App Studio is a template-driven, drag-and-drop software development tool that enables…
Earlier this year, WordPress 4.2 added the ability to install and update plugins in-place. This feature is known as “Shiny Updates”. I’m a big fan of this feature because it’s substantially quicker than updating plugins via the updates page. Here’s what it looks like in action. Due to complications near the end of the 4.2…
On December 17, telecommunications companies cut off access to WhatsApp in Brazil after the company did not comply with police wiretapping requests. Many of the app’s estimated 100 million users went in search of an alternative, landing on Telegram, WhatsApp’s rival messaging app. Telegram gained 5.7 million new users in one day as a result…
Automattic announced today that its WordAds advertising network is now available to self-hosted WordPress sites via Jetpack and the new AdControl plugin. WordAds, which bears a name confusingly similar to Google’s AdWords, delivers all the advertising seen on WordPress.com’s free sites. (Ad display on VIP or upgraded sites is opt-in.) Self-hosted WordPress site owners who…
Most of the themes created by the professional design team at WordPress.com are geared towards bloggers. Business themes make up a much smaller segment of those designed in-house. That’s why the latest Pique theme is an unusual and exciting release. Although the theme was originally designed for coffee shops, it also works well for other…
On the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, a member recently raised the issue of display banner advertising in plugins. After installing Ultimate WooCommerce Brands developed by MagniumThemes, a large admin notice appears with an affiliate linked display banner for Bluehost. Ultimate WooCommerce Brands is a freemium plugin and while I’m not against plugin authors making a…
Frontend developers working with Flexbox no longer have to sacrifice support for older versions of IE. The folks at 10up have open sourced Flexibility, a polyfill that uses JavaScript to allow Flexbox to work with IE versions 8 and 9. “Unfortunately, Flexbox support wasn’t added to Internet Explorer until version 10, leaving older versions –…
There’s a lot that happens in the WordPress ecosystem throughout the course of a year. In this episode, Marcus Couch and I run down our selection of big news stories from January to June. One trend we noticed is that there were quite a few unsuccessful crowdfunding campaigns. Listen in to find out if any…
When I founded WP Tavern in 2009, comments were an important part of the site’s initial success. After six years, the site has published its 30,000th comment. At a time where large websites such as Copyblogger and the Toronto Star are closing down comments in favor of social media, the Tavern continues to be a…
Earlier this week we interviewed Muhammad Kashif about the phenomenal growth of the WordPress community in Pakistan. Kashif organizes the local Lahore meetup, which started with a few dozen attendees three months ago and grew to more than 500 this past weekend. His team has been working hard to bring WordCamp to Pakistan, and today…
Mailbag is not a new plugin but it’s one of those convenient tools you’ll want to bookmark if you build WordPress sites that require email subscription forms. The plugin makes it easy to add a MailChimp or Campaign Monitor email form to posts or pages using a shortcode. I only recently came across it while…
Contributors to the WordPress core Customize component are targeting the upcoming 4.5 release for inclusion of a new feature plugin. Customize Pane Resizer allows users to drag the edge of the pane to make the customizer wider than the default 300px. According to Customize component maintainer Weston Ruter, the idea for the plugin came out…
Earlier this year Steven Gliebe, founder of Churchthemes.com, launched Pro Plugin Directory, a site that lists commercial WordPress plugins for a variety of categories including, forms, performance, and security. After accumulating more than 170 plugins in five months, Gliebe decided to sell the site in November citing a lack of time to devote to the project.…
If you’re looking for a blog design that emphasizes the words of your content without a requirement for big, flashy featured images, Reyl Lite is a super minimalist option. It is one of the most bare bones blogging themes to hit WordPress.org in recent weeks. Throughout 2015, the single-column, centered layout has been a mainstay…
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