Towards the end of 2013, WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin outlined a potential roadmap for multisite that would address a number of long-standing questions regarding network setup and organization. When multisite, formerly known as WPMU, was first introduced, building large blogging networks was the primary use case. Over the years, the uses for multisite have…
WordCamp Prague is gearing up for its second edition on February 28, 2015. The event will be held at the University of Economics. Organizers are planning two tracks of presentations: one for end users and bloggers and the other for WordPress developers and programmers. Co-organizer Vladislav MusÃlek said that the team is expecting 300-350 attendees.…
Emoji characters were born in Japan in the late 90’s but took nearly a decade to break into global usage. They entered popular culture full force when select emoji character sets were incorporated into Unicode in 2010. Since that time, emoji popularity has grown, and there’s no denying that they are mainstream and here to…
This isn’t just a plugin, man. It’s The Dude, so that’s what you call it. That, or His Dudeness… Duder… or El Duderino, if, you know, you’re not into the whole brevity thing. It symbolizes the realization of an entire modern lazy hippie bowling amateur private investigator generation summed up in two words spoken most…
A change log is the quickest, most convenient way for users and contributors to identify significant changes in a project as it moves from one version to the next. The log exists to keep users informed. Unfortunately, many open source project leaders have little motivation to provide a meaningful CHANGELOG file and are purely focused…
Tom McFarlin released his Mayer WordPress theme on GitHub today. The theme was designed with writers, bloggers, and authors in mind and was previously only available to WordPress.com users for $79. Mayer is unique in that it was created to get users writing immediately, without having a bunch settings pages or additional widgets to configure.…
Topher DeRosia, creator of HeroPress, announced today that he is canceling the project’s Kickstarter campaign. During the past few weeks, the project attracted 33 backers who pledged $21,855 of the $60,000 AUD goal. When it became clear that the fundraiser was hopelessly behind on reaching its goal, DeRosia canceled the funding three days ahead of…
This week, Nick Halsey officially proposed the Customizer Theme Switcher feature plugin for merge into WordPress 4.2. Halsey summarizes the goal of bringing theme switching into the customizer: “By integrating themes directly into the Customizer, live-previewing workflows are greatly simplified, and the relationship between themes and theme/site options is clarified for the user,” he said.…
Iseulde Van Dorpe is joining SiteGround to work full-time as a contributor to WordPress core. She expects to work on a variety of different tasks, particularly those that relate to media and the editing experience. Van Dorpe’s recent core contributions helped to improve the editor for users in the 4.0 release. https://twitter.com/markjaquith/status/507580649536880640 SiteGround identified and…
Custom CSS boxes in themes are a common feature that allow users to easily add their own styles without having to edit any theme files. The inclusion of this feature in themes, as opposed to plugins, has long been a hotly contested issue among theme developers. WordPress.org Theme Review team admin Justin Tadlock announced today…
iThemes will be conducting a free online training event next week for those who are interested in getting started with WordPress. The Intro to WordPress Web Design course will run from February 18 – 20 and will cover everything from learning how to set up a site to working with plugins and management tools: Understand…
GitHub Updater is a plugin that developers often use to enable automatic updates to GitHub or Bitbucket-hosted WordPress plugins and themes. The project was started in July 2013 by Andy Fragen, a trauma surgeon and plugin developer. Over the past two years GitHub Updater has received improvements from 14 contributors. Fragen’s work on GitHub Updater…
Connecting a WordPress.com account in order to use Jetpack can be a hassle, especially when developing for clients or working on your local machine. If you like Jetpack but don’t want to connect to WordPress.com, there’s a new plugin that makes it easy to use the features that don’t require a connection. Unplug Jetpack was…
As a result of the improvements to the Customizer API in WordPress 4.0 and 4.1, developers now have access to a wider array of controls and parameters that allow them to extend the feature for more varied uses beyond themes. The new Custom Login Customizer plugin is a prime example of making the customizer available…
The Custom Metaboxes and Fields for WordPress (CMB2) plugin is now officially out of beta and ready for public use. The tool was created to make it easy for developers to create metaboxes and forms with custom fields. Developers at WebDevStudios took over the original CMB GitHub repository from Jared Atchison, its original creator, in…