One important trend surfacing this year is WordPress developers’ growing desire to add git-based version control to their sites. It adds an extra layer of safety in case you need to revert changes. Version control also helps multi-person teams work together more efficiently on the same website. Several plugin options are in the works in…
Last month, Sprout Apps announced that it would soon be launching a suite of business apps targeted at WordPress freelancers and small businesses. While the company is still in pre-launch operations, Sprout Invoices was just released on WordPress.org as part of the launch plan. Dan Cameron, the founder of Sprout Apps, believes there are some…
When Theme Hybrid launched its Stargazer theme, the idea of a design-specific parent theme that would provide limitations landed in stark contrast to the super generic, all-encompassing themes that permeate the market. You’ve probably seen themes marketed as “the last WordPress theme you’ll ever need.” They kinds of themes purport to have so much flexibility…
Version 3.0 of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was released today. The open source project was started in 2011 by Tom McFarlin as a GitHub repository for storing code while he learned plugin development. Over the past three years, the boilerplate has matured beyond his expectations with the help of 39 contributors. It now has more…
The business of building WordPress websites is exploding, and most agencies and freelancers have more work than they can handle. Clients are attracted to WordPress because of how easy it is to manage content. In the old days, if you had a website built, you would still need to hire a developer to make updates…
Denis Bosire has been working with WordPress for more than five years. As client work became more frustrating, he decided to focus his attention on WordPress themes. After an unsuccessful attempt to monetize themes at Creative Market, Bosire decided to try his hand at developing themes for WordPress.org. Nouveau Riche was approved this week and…
John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, announced today that Google will be discontinuing its support for authorship in search results. We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as…
Earlier this year we featured the /r/ProWordPress subreddit on a post exploring various WordPress watering holes. If you’re not familiar with subreddits, they are essentially focused topics where where registered users can vote article submissions “up” or “down.” Subscribing to a subreddit allows you to hone in on specific topics where you have an interest.…
Yesterday we featured a plugin, created by application developer Jeroen Sormani, that clones Google Keep functionality in the WordPress dashboard. Sormani has produced a number of other interesting experiment with WordPress, including a little known tool for generating WordPress settings. The WP Settings Generator is a tool for plugin and theme developers. It generates a…
Dashboard notes can come in handy when working with multiple people on a WordPress site. Even when working alone, you can use notes to collect ideas for posts or to remind yourself of important publishing-related tasks and ways to promote your posts. While there are many varying plugins devoted to creating sticky notes in the…
WP Tech is “breaking up with WordCamp,” according to co-organizer Willy Bahuaud. The developer-centric event, previously called WordCamp Nantes WP Tech, is set to be held at the end of November and was welcomed as France’s second official WordCamp. During the course of working with WordCamp Central, the organizers decided to opt out of keeping…
WordPress 4.0 RC 1 is now available for download. Helen Hou-Sandí announced the release candidate today with an update to the project schedule. The official release was targeted for the week of August 25th but will likely be arriving the following week. “We hope to ship WordPress 4.0 next week, but we need your help…
Giving a plugin a top level admin menu between Dashboard and Posts is somewhat frowned upon among WordPress plugin developers. Although the Administration Menus section of the WordPress codex doesn’t outright forbid top level menus above Posts, plugin authors are strongly encouraged to consider placing their plugin’s menu underneath an existing WordPress top-level menu. Nevertheless,…
bbPress 2.5 introduced a host of new importers for AEF, Drupal, FluxBB, Kunena Forums (Joomla), MyBB, Phorum, PHPFox, PHPWind, PunBB, SMF, Xenforo and XMB, making it easier than ever to bring forums into WordPress. bbPress 2.5 also improved existing importers to include better support for importing stickies, topic tags, and forum categories. If you’re thinking…
Editorial access is a capability granted only to Administrator and Editor user roles in WordPress. This access is not easily shared to other roles without changing a user’s role or adding extra capabilities. There are several complex plugins out there that will allow you to create custom roles and manage capabilities. But what if you…