Emoji One is a new open source emoji set that is the first of its kind, designed specifically for the web. The set boasts more than 840 emoji. It was created to solve the perennial problem of translating emoji code from mobile devices while legally displaying the corresponding emoji icon on the web. The idea…
Matt Mullenweg made waves this past weekend during his Q&A session at WordCamp Europe when he strongly advocated the importance of companies contributing back to WordPress. He offered a rule of thumb for companies that benefit from the software and want to invest in the future of WordPress: I think a good rule of thumb…
The contributor day following WordCamp Europe was a tremendous success, bringing approximately 180 people to the SiteGround offices in Sofia. A healthy mixture of veteran contributors were in attendance, as well as many folks who were brand new to contributing. At the beginning of the day, contributors split off into smaller groups to focus on…
This weekend, 794 WordPress professionals and enthusiasts from all over the world descended upon Sofia, Bulgaria to participate in Europe’s largest WordCamp to date. WordCampers arrived excited to soak up new information and connect with others in the European community. Sofia’s graffiti-lined streets are peppered with leftovers of communist architecture, contrasting the Neo-Bohemian culture that…
Nine years ago, John Blackbourn was stocking shelves at a supermarket 40 hours per week and returning home to do another 20 hours of freelance work on the side. His journey with WordPress started much like many others, when his first patch was accepted seven years ago. This past weekend at WordCamp Europe, Blackbourn was…
WordPress developer Ryan Hellyer had always wanted to open source his website. As a strong supporter of open source software and an avid plugin developer, he enjoys sharing his code and learning from others. This desire led him to put his site up on GitHub one evening, not knowing that he would wake to find…
A few months ago, the folks at GavickPro abandoned their GavernWP Framework in favor of using the WordPress customizer for theme options. The shop’s customers found the original framework to be too cumbersome and confusing, so the GavickPro team decided to move away from frameworks altogether. With the customizer in place as the baseline for…
Every day, millions of people mindlessly pump content into social networks that are owned by someone else. These massive data silos plaster your feed with advertising and blatantly disregard user privacy. It’s a symbiotic relationship wherein you are the product being sold, but you have no control. Even Twitter, which many saw as the last…
If the WordPress community is your only barometer of knowing how an open source community works together, then you might want to explore outside a bit further to gain a broader outlook on other cultures. Some of the differences are worth examining. A few days ago I noticed an interesting observation regarding the relationship between…
Earlier this year, BuddyPress contributors announced that the project would be adopting the features-as-plugins model to help speed up future development. This is the same development model that has been working well for WordPress core, helping four major features land in the 3.8 release. The BuddyPress Media Component and Attachment API was the first feature…
If you’ve ever wondered how well an open source project is maintained, you now have a quick way to get an overview, without scouring the project’s issues queue or trying to infer something based on its release history. Is It Maintained? is a new web app that allows you to check the activity of open…
WordPress theme designer Anders Norén is an unstoppable force, rolling out his ninth free theme to WordPress.org in just over a year. Fukasawa is a masonry theme designed to showcase the work of photographers, collectors, and visual artists. The theme is named for Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, who is both well-known and highly decorated…
WordPress offers excellent oEmbed support for embedding content from more than two dozen major services. Pasting a link into the editor on its own line will have it magically appear as embedded media on the frontend. However, the task of finding that media in another browser window is still required, and this takes you outside…
BuddyPress 2.1 was released yesterday with a handy new mentions interface that pops up a suggestions panel as you are typing. In the past, you would need to know a member’s username in order to write a mention in the activity stream, which many times meant looking it up. The new mentions interface makes it…
Contributors on the WordPress Meta team are responsible for WordPress.org and its associated sites, i.e. wordcamp.org, apps.wordpress.org, etc. The team works on supporting and improving these sites along with the build tools that are used by the other contributor groups. Folks often complain about how the sites work, but did you know that much of…