Last weekend more than 200 developers gathered in London for a niche conference devoted to the WordPress REST API. A Day of REST featured speakers from around the world who are building applications with the REST API at companies like WIRED, The New York Times, Fusion, Automattic, and Bocoup. “The conference was a fantastic proof…
The WordPress community in Karachi, Pakistan held its first meetup last weekend led by Waseem Abbas. The gathering drew 125 attendees and organizers have been receiving positive reviews and feedback. The meetup featured two sessions, one on “WordPress Security” by Ahsan Parwez and the second on “WordPress Possibilities” by Usman Khalid. I spoke with Abbas…
Jack Slingerland started hacking on WordPress in 2008, but recently his career has taken him a bit further afield from it than he would like. By day he is a Senior Software Engineer at CA Technologies in Raleigh, working in React/Redux, Node, ElasticSearch, Grails, and Groovy. But at night he is busy building Kernl, a…
WooCommerce, which currently powers roughly 30% of online stores, has a growing catalogue of 355 extensions ranging from free to $249. Most of the major payment gateways are offered at $79 per single site license. There are also hundreds of additional extensions hosted on WordPress.org, including several payment gateway plugins that, if listed on the…
Arūnas Liuiza, like many other WordPress developers, prefers to develop his plugins on GitHub, thanks to the collaborative tools for issue tracking, merging, and pull requests. Hosting and developing open source projects on GitHub is much easier than trying to get any participation from the community via a plugin’s Subversion repo on WordPress.org. For these…
WordPress.org is getting some love in 2016. In addition to a beautifully redesigned login page, the testimonials page is in the process of being completely revamped. The update comes not a moment too soon, as the old testimonials page included entries dating back to 2003 with what are now rather humorous references to b2 and…
WooConf 2016, a conference devoted entirely to WooCoomerce, will be held in Austin, Texas on April 6-8th. Recaps from those who attended in 2014 are all agreed that this is one conference you don’t want to miss if you work with WooCommerce. The event attracts a healthy mix of entrepreneurs, developers, designers and consultants. The…
Jetpack 3.9 has just been released with a new module that makes it easy for users to add sitemaps to their websites. Since sitemaps are important for SEO, many WordPress sites already have a plugin installed to create them. The new module in Jetpack will detect if you’re already using one of the popular sitemap…
After nearly eight years in business, Theme Hybrid has released its first commercial plugin. Up until now, all of the club’s themes and plugins have been free, but Justin Tadlock decided to try something new with the release of Theme Designer, priced at $125 (with support). The price tag reflects the fact that Theme Designer…
When Mason James hired his first contractor and launched WP Valet in 2012, scaling up wasn’t part of his master plan. He knew he couldn’t do it alone but couldn’t imagine having more than a small team. His first contractor, Kim Lipari, became a partner and helped to bring in more customer requests than they…
Last year Jenny Wong and Aaron Jorbin challenged the WordPress community to venture outside the WordPress bubble after speaking at PHP UK 2015. Both were enriched by the experience of connecting across technology communities and challenging others’ expectations of WordPress. If you’re in the Tampa area and looking to branch out to some non-WordCamp conferences,…
GlotPress 1.0 “Bunsen Honeydew” was released yesterday. In June 2015, Andrew Nacin began the work of transforming GlotPress into a plugin with a first pass that switched it from using the BackPress external to a WordPress install. Dominik Schilling led the development on GitHub, which included 352 commits and fixes for 70 issues. “For the…
The makers of GitLab are attempting to capitalize on the current situation at GitHub where open source project maintainers have publicized their frustrations with issue management. Last week, project maintainers published a letter called “Dear GitHub” that outlines their concerns and the solutions they hope to see implemented. GitHub has not officially responded to these…
Nearly two years ago, GitHub open sourced Atom, its new JavaScript-powered text editor. GitHub designed Atom to be extensible, which has helped to quickly grow its adoption around the web. Developers at Facebook used it to make Nuclide, an entire suite of Atom packages that create the first IDE with support for Hack development. The…
A zealous cadre of open source project maintainers is hoping to inspire change at GitHub by publicizing their complaints regarding issue management. After pursuing official channels without receiving a response, the group’s members say that they are frustrated by a lack of communication: Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on…