WP Engine Labs, in collaboration with the VVV creators at 10up, released Mercury Vagrant (HGV) today. The new open source Vagrant configuration uses HHVM to serve PHP code. It also includes the ability to run your development site using standard PHP to test against for comparison. Mercury Vagrant is useful for any WordPress developer who…
This post was contributed by David Hayes. David loves solving difficult problems at Press Up, publishing new WordPress tutorials at WPShout, and eating cold cereal with milk. The developer tool Composer has been sneaking in around the fringes of the WordPress community. Rarst is a fan. The Roots theme framework folks like it. There’s support…
Last week, Emil Uzelac launched a new theme review service targeted at WordPress developers and companies that want their products to adhere to best practices. Just one week after launch, Justin Tadlock, a fellow member of the WordPress.org theme review team and author of the Hybrid Core framework, is joining forces with Uzelac to provide…
The beta version of the Better Notifications for WordPress plugin was released last year, and it lay dormant for many months while its original collaborators searched for a new developer. The plugin was created to allow you to send customizable HTML emails to users based on different actions in WordPress. Jack McConnell, founder of development…
The developers behind the BuddyBoss theme shop released a plugin today that has the potential to benefit nearly every BuddyPress social network. BuddyPress Global Search adds a unified search bar, allowing users to search through every BuddyPress component, along with pages, posts, and select custom post types. Once activated, the plugin turns the site’s WordPress…
A long-awaited update to the official WordPress Themes Directory is in progress. Contributors on the Meta team for WordPress.org are picking up speed on the effort to move the theme repository away from bbPress and into a new plugin, comprised of a custom post type for the repository package and a theme uploader. Konstantin Obenland…
Over the weekend, BuddyPress project lead John James Jacoby announced that 2.2 beta 1 is ready for testing. The upcoming release has been in development since last September. Jacoby’s campaign for six months of BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress development was fully funded in mid-December, allowing him to spend more time on the project in 2015.…
WordPress sites with multiple users often run into challenges when attempting to work on the same content. Larger publications require more robust editorial tools for efficient collaboration between administrators, editors, contributors, and authors, who often need to jump in on the same post. Duplicate and Merge Posts is a plugin that offers a new take…
WordPress 1.0 introduced search engine friendly permalinks using mod_rewrite. Setting your site to use pretty permalinks is usually one of the first things that administrators do after installation. WordPress 4.2 will add a new function that will automatically enable pretty permalinks, if the server supports it, at the time of installation. This means that in…
Web accessibility guidelines are constantly in flux, making it difficult for site administrators to keep pace. Even if you have a decent grasp on the basics, changes to your theme, plugins, and content can introduce new accessibility issues that you didn’t anticipate. Legal requirements may soon put publishers under the gun for accessibility compliance. Plugin…
This week the world mourns with Parisians following yesterday’s terrorist attack at the headquarters of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Masked gunmen, claiming to be Yemeni al-Qaida, killed 12 people, including eight journalists and two police officers. The attackers targeted Charlie Hebdo’s daily editorial meeting, in protest of the publication’s controversial satirical depictions of religious figures.…
WordPress for Android is starting 2015 with a big update. Version 3.5 was released today, introducing major changes to the app’s overall design. This release follows Google’s new Material design principles, which was created to unify the experience of apps across platforms and devices. The design spec includes basic tenets for the various aspects of…
When migrating a WordPress site to a new domain, you’ll have to update every instance of the site’s URL in the database. Some developers prefer to use tools like WP-CLI or WP Migrate DB to handle this, while others opt for a general database search and replace plugin with a UI in the WordPress admin.…
Happy Joe is launching its first planned WP Boot Camp in San Antonio, TX on January 23, 2015. The non-profit organization helps US military veterans re-enter the workforce through training in WordPress and the web technology industry in general. Happy Joe was started by former service member James Dalman, who will be presenting at the…
Last week, moderators from the WordPress Development StackExchange (WPSE) posted a short summary of stats from 2014, which demonstrate the remarkable growth and success of the community surrounding the site. This past year WPSE pulled in approximately 15,000 new users, bringing the total to 45,000. The site received a total of 17 million page views…