In March, the Shortcake project officially began its journey as a feature plugin with regular meetings for contributors working to make it ready to propose for inclusion in WordPress core. The plugin provides a friendly UI for adding shortcodes and transforms them to render a nice preview in the visual editor. Last week, Daniel Bachhuber…
WP Rocket is celebrating its second year in business. The commercial caching plugin for WordPress launched two years ago in the French market and opened its doors to international customers last May. At that time, WP Rocket was entering unproven territory as the first major caching plugin to launch with a 100% commercial model. Could…
WordPress has a whitelist of 31 trusted sites from which users can oEmbed content, but one source is noticeably missing – WordPress itself. During this week’s feature plugin chat, Pascal Birchler and a group of contributors proposed the idea of oEmbed for WordPress Posts: Basically, we want to make WordPress an oEmbed provider. Users should…
Ben Word and the team behind Roots are launching a new WordPress-related podcast called Roots Radio. Earlier this year, Word rebranded the Roots starter theme as “Sage” under the Roots organization as part of a long-term plan to make it framework-agnostic. Opening up the starter theme to be available for use with a variety of…
WordPress 4.3 beta 3 was released this week right on schedule, and beta 4 is expected to arrive next Wednesday. This release includes more than 140 fixes and improvements since last week’s beta. One of the most important changes you’ll notice is that the Site Icon feature is now available in the customizer in addition…
Consumer disappointment ran high yesterday when Amazon Prime Day failed to deliver on its ambitious claim to have “more deals than Black Friday.” Prime customers were surprised to find modest deals on knee braces, shoe horns, and pet grooming kits instead of steep discounts on shiny electronics. https://twitter.com/shave_my_lemon/status/621462914533232640 The world was optimistic that if any…
WordPress REST API project lead Ryan McCue, in cooperation with Automattic’s Engineering team, released a REST API Console plugin on WordPress.org today. It’s a basic console that fits right into the WordPress admin and allows you to explore the API, make small changes, and find out what your site is exposing. “This is a forked…
Last November, ModernThemes officially launched its free WordPress themes site and has been gradually adding to its collection hosted on WordPress.org. Founders Robbie Grabowski and Mike Driscoll launched the site with a commitment to produce themes that support the native customizer and keep plugin functionality separate while still being “plugin-friendly.” Proper Lite is ModernThemes’ latest…
In May, BuddyBoss founder Michael Eisenwasser shared with Tavern readers the challenges of creating a profitable business in what is still a relatively small marketplace for BuddyPress themes and plugins. Developers are building niche social networks every day, but BuddyPress’ appeal as a platform hinges on the availability of compelling and reliable third-party add-ons. Over…
WordPress.org will soon support translations and language packs for themes hosted in the official directory. In Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A at WordCamp Europe 2015, he emphasized the importance of having better language support for themes and plugins and identified this as a high priority for continued improvements to WordPress.org. Today the WordPress meta team announced that…
Just one day after Meerkat, the popular video streaming service, launched its embedded player, a WordPress plugin was in the works to make it easy for publishers to take advantage of it. David Artiss, an English developer and author of several popular embedding plugins, is the first to bring Meerkat embedding to WordPress. The Meerkat…
If you’ve attempted to access Themeforest or any other site on the Envato network lately, you may have encountered some down time. The company updated customers and community members today, attributing the technical difficulties to a DDoS attack: Since July 1, Envato has been the target of a sustained DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.…
With all of the content an average user generates across social media sites, it can be challenging to get a full view of all that activity. Let’s face it, your social media posts are scattered all over the web. SocialCrumbs is a non-traditional, niche WordPress theme that aggregates all of your social media activity into…
PhpStorm 9 was released this week with a slew of improvements and new features for PHP and web developers. The popular IDE is used by more than 300,000 developers and its development team usually puts out one major release per year. Version 8 was released last September with official support for WordPress. Highlights of version…
Argentinian WordPress developer Damian Logghe had never touched the Customizer API, but with all the controversy swirling around it, he decided to jump in to see what all the fuss was about. “The customizer has been making a lot of noise lately, as we all know, bringing politics to WordPress, and by politics I mean…