Anas H. Sulaiman is a WordPress plugin developer who has created several extensions that extract modules from Jetpack so that they can be used independently. He recently renamed his WordPress.org profile to “JP Bot” and is gradually adding to his collection of Jetpack-extractions: One of his most popular plugins is JP Markdown, which essentially duplicates…
When WordPress is used heavily as a content management system, taxonomies play a very important role for grouping information. While your standard blog might only have a handful of categories, more content-heavy sites can include hundreds of terms within custom taxonomies. Scrolling through an impossibly long list of categories or terms can be a clunky…
John Blackbourn announced this afternoon that he will be merging the Focus Project into WordPress core ahead of the upcoming 4.1 release. Last week Jeff Chandler explored how the Focus Project plans to enhance distraction-free writing in WordPress. If you haven’t been following the project, it’s essentially a complete re-think of the way WordPress has…
WordPress recently adopted Slack as its primary communication tool for contributor teams, largely replacing IRC. When trac tickets are mentioned in Slack, they are automatically linked up, which helps contributors reference and connect discussions. So far, the app has been enthusiastically received, especially since it offers a far more mobile-friendly option for asynchronous communication. WordPress-related…
The Shortcode API was introduced in 2008 when WordPress 2.5 was released. Over the past six years, the UI for adding shortcodes has changed very little, despite the fact that they remain a big part of how many WordPress users structure complex content. Shortcake is a new project created by the folks at Fusion with…
John James Jacoby launched an Indiegogo campaign today with the goal of raising $50,000 to fund six months of full-time work on WordPress’ three sister projects: BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress. While WordPress core has many contributors who are sponsored by companies, the sister projects have yet to receive this kind of investment from the community.…
Last week LoopConf announced that early bird tickets will go on sale November 20th. The conference is aimed at developers and organizers are planning for 700 – 1,000 attendees in Las Vegas on the weekend of May 7-8, 2015. A bit of controversy has surfaced regarding the ticket pricing, as LoopConf emerges as one of…
Beautiful Taxonomy Filters is a new plugin that adds filtering to your custom post type archives, based on taxonomy (terms/categories/tags). It allows visitors to filter CPTs by multiple terms on the frontend. The plugin automatically adds rewrite rules to create pretty filter URLs, without the use of JavaScript. Beautiful Taxonomy Filters was created by Swedish…
This post was contributed by Ryan Hellyer. He is from New Zealand, lives in Germany, and works as a full-time WordPress geek for Forsite Media in the Netherlands. He spends his time building WordPress plugins and getting up to mischief in his adopted home of Berlin. I have an issue with WordPress caching plugins. It’s…
Twitter announced today that it has open sourced Twemoji, a set of 872 emoji characters. This means that emoji characters tweeted from phones will now be visible on the web and will look the same across all platforms. Twitter also partnered with Automattic to bring emoji to WordPress.com, and users can start adding emoji to…
Many WordPress developers have adopted Vagrant as part of their toolbox for creating development environments, due to the fact that it’s relatively lightweight and makes collaborative work much easier. Varying Vagrant Vagrants is one of the most popular Vagrant configurations for WordPress, but there are many others out there tailored to different uses, i.e. Chassis,…
Matt Mullenweg announced today at Web Summit in Dublin that Automattic has acquired Code for the People, a UK-based WordPress development agency and longtime WordPress.com VIP partner. The acquisition adds all six members of the company, including co-founders Simon Dickson and Simon Wheatley, to the WordPress.com VIP team. “It’s a fairly natural transition for us,”…
Taylor Lovett, director of Web Engineering at 10up, announced today that the company is open sourcing its engineering best practices. 10up has historically been a leader in contributing to open platforms, most notably being one of the first development agencies to sponsor an employee to work full-time on WordPress core. The company used GitHub pages…
Entry level WordPress debugging often involves the tedious task of turning plugins on and off to track down the culprit that is breaking something on your site. When seeking help in support forums, users are often instructed to deactivate all of their plugins and activate one of the default themes. This process can become especially…
WordPress 4.1 will be adding several major improvements for theme developers. Joost de Valk opened a ticket three years ago, requesting a better option for controlling the output of title tags. He proposed a patch that would output the title tag during the run of wp_head, based on whether the current theme has added theme_support.…