Earlier this month, I described how the features as plugins first model is a mess. Drew Jaynes, who is leading the development cycle for WordPress 4.2, is already making headway into improving the model. Unlike previous release cycles, feature plugins that are likely to be merged into WordPress have been assigned a core mentor at…
Online community building is like gardening. Whether you’re running an active blog, moderating forums, or managing a social network, you will encounter challenges in maintaining growth. Experienced community builders have a wealth of knowledge to share with those who are new to it, especially when it comes to recognizing and mitigating toxic elements, fertilizing to…
Restaurant themes don’t often land in the WordPress Themes Directory. In fact, there are barely a dozen listed among the 3,000+ themes on WordPress.org. One problem with many commercial restaurant themes is that they are usually marketed as a complete package with everything built into the theme, including menu management. The lack of separation of…
WordPress plugin authors have a great deal of liberty when it comes to structuring and organizing their code. There’s no prescribed file structure, so when you look under the hood of a plugin, you often need to poke around a bit to find out how the author is organizing things. Jason Agnew found this to…
One of my favorite sessions at PressNomics 3 is now available to watch for free on YouTube. Although sessions weren’t recorded or live streamed, Chris Lema used his own gear to record his presentation. He shares the lessons he’s learned throughout his career on managing time and energy. One of my favorite tips is writing…
The WordCamp Europe organization team announced today that the 2015 event will be held in Seville, Spain from June 26 – 28 at the Barceló Gran Hotel Renacimiento. Last year’s WordCamp in Sofia, Bulgaria was a tremendous success with nearly 800 attendees, a world-class speaker lineup, and a strong local community of volunteers. Ordinarily, the…
Jetpack ships with more than 30 different modules including, Jetpack Comments. One of its primary features is allowing people to login using credentials from their WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ accounts. This module has replaced the WordPress native comment form for nearly two years on WP Tavern. It makes it easier for people on social…
Last week, Pressable was engaged in a 24/7 struggle to keep its customers’ sites operational. The recent outages caused some customers 24+ hours of downtime and many closed their accounts in favor of finding an alternative host. Today the company announced that the root cause of the outage customers experienced the week of January 19,…
GenerateWP, the popular WordPress code generator site, is celebrating two years in operation this week. The site, founded by Rami Yushuvaev, launched with five code generators and now has more than 20. Yushuvaev sees the site as an educational tool that helps WordPress developers learn more about coding best practices. Before launching GenerateWP, Yushuvaev created…
Created by Matt Mullenweg in 2009, when the plugin directory hosted only 4K plugins, Thank a Plugin Author Day (January 28th) motivates users to thank plugin authors. There are several ways to celebrate the event, such as visiting the plugin author’s website. The link is usually available via the plugin’s page on WordPress.org. You can also…
Last week, I attended the third annual PressNomics conference in Phoenix, AZ. The event focuses on the business side of the WordPress ecosystem and provides opportunities for business owners to learn from those who are blazing a path towards success. On the evening before PressNomics, I joined several business owners for dinner. A half hour into…
This past weekend, 250 professionals gathered in Phoenix, Arizona for Pressnomics, a three-day event focused on entrepreneurship in the WordPress economy. During the last day, attendees had the opportunity to watch Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel interview Matt Mullenweg. Although the session wasn’t recorded, the audience tweeted out the highlights of the interview, and discussion continued…
Life on the internet is full of controversial debates, people with strong opinions, and trolls, occasionally mixed in with intelligent, engaging conversation. You never know what you will encounter when you venture into the comments section on blogs with open discussion enabled, but that’s the beauty of free expression. The Tavern has always been a…
WP Chat is currently hosting an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session with Justin Tadlock, founder of Theme Hybrid and co-author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Tadlock recently joined forces with fellow WordPress.org Theme Review team member Emil Uzelac to provide theme review as a service. Leland Fiegel, founder of WP Chat, invited Tadlock as the…
Open source projects often struggle with finding practical ways to recognize contributors. Although most contributors aren’t in it for the recognition, it’s nice for project leaders to have a way to showcase who is behind the work. The relative number of contributors on a project is often a good indicator of how many people are…
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