Adding staff, board members, or another collection of individuals is a common requirement when building an online presence for an organization. The best way to make sure that your staff member data is portable when you change themes, is to add it via a plugin. Staffer is a newly approved plugin on WordPress.org that stores…
BuddyPress 2.1 “Patsy” is fresh out of the oven, named for a coal-oven pizzeria in East Harlem, NYC. Patsy’s is famous for its traditional New York style thin crust pizza and claims to have originated the practice of selling pizza by the slice. New @mentions Interface The name is fitting, because 2.1 is another slice…
A steady stream of minimalist themes for writers has been flowing into the official WordPress Themes Directory this year. As people grow disenchanted with interaction on social networks, the personal blog is on course for a renaissance. The beauty of WordPress is that anyone with something to say can be a writer. Crawford joins their…
Netropolitan, colloquially dubbed the “Facebook for rich people,” is a new private social network available to those who are willing to shell out $9,000 to join and $3,000/year to continue membership. The site advertises itself as “The online country club for people with more money than time,” and has been featured on CNN and other…
WordPress users were thrilled when widgets were added to the customizer in the 3.9 release. A better UI and real-time previews revived widgets and once again made them a joy to use. The experience was so beneficial to users that the project continues to plough ahead with customizer enhancements. WordPress 4.0 introduced contextual controls and…
PhpStorm from JetBrains is far and away the most favored IDE for PHP developers. In March, PhpStorm announced that the upcoming version 8 would add official support for WordPress. The official release is finally here and delivers on that promise, adding a deeper level of support for developers who work with the WordPress code base.…
When we last interviewed Anders Norén, he was the new kid on the block with a handful of successful WordPress themes. Norén, a communications student from Umeå, Sweden, had just started tossing around the idea of pursuing WordPress theme development as a serious hobby. In the span of about one year, he has released eight…
BuddyPress 2.1 is right around the corner. After a fairly quiet beta period, 2.1 RC1 is now in the hands of testers and is your last chance to test before the official release. BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges also posted an important update to let those who maintain BP language packs know that the latest…
The folks at ThematoSoup are in the habit of naming their theme releases for delicious soup dishes. The team, comprised of WordPress plugin and theme developers Slobodan Manic and Dragan Nikolic, is dedicated to creating minimalist-inspired WordPress products. “We eat, sleep and breathe WordPress and digital clutter gives us nightmares,” the duo expressed on their…
Creating a custom banner for your plugin on WordPress.org will help your extension to stand out among the 33,000+ others in the plugin directory. A little bit of branding also gives the impression that the plugin isn’t just a one night stand but rather a work that you’re committed to continually update. If your plugin…
When you create profile fields in BuddyPress, they apply to every user in the same way. Each user responds to the same set of questions, but this could stand to be a little more flexible to account for differences in users. What if you could conditionally show profile fields, based on a user’s answers to…
The folks behind Graph Paper Press launched a new custom WordPress theme builder this week. Theme.Works was created to be a new brand, featuring a theme building platform that allows users to build a WordPress theme in under 60 seconds. “We wanted something crazy easy for users to understand and use,” founder Thad Allender said.…
Aesop Story Engine 1.1. beta is now in the hands of eager testers, as project leader Nick Haskins prepares to launch the first major update to the plugin since its release. Haskin’s open source storytelling plugin was fully funded via a Crowdhoster campaign earlier this year. Shortly thereafter he released it on WordPress.org and launched…
The open source NetBeans IDE has support for several different languages and frameworks and a worldwide community of developers who depend on it to code more efficiently. A recent survey conducted by SitePoint placed NetBeans as the third most favored IDE among PHP developers, capturing 15.6% of the votes, trailing not far behind Sublime Text…
When creating a portfolio with WordPress, the most ideal way to store your work is in a separate plugin. Later down the road when you want to change your theme, you’ll be able to do so without losing your portfolio content. Many theme authors are now starting to build support for existing portfolio plugins into…