WordCamp Miami is one of the largest WordPress events in operation, with 770+ attendees and a large group of organizers and volunteers who turned out for its most recent 5th anniversary edition. It ran earlier this month with four days (Thursday – Sunday) packed full of activities. Multiple venues, parking areas, presentation tracks, catering and…
Today marks 11 years since the very first official public release of WordPress. Reading through that changelog will make you smile and realize how far the software has come since the early days when its main competitors were Textpattern and Movable Type. Fast forward 11 years and WordPress now powers 22% of the web with…
Apple has a new advertisement for iPad, featuring Chérie King, whose WordPress-powered Flight of the Travel Bee blog is dedicated to helping deaf people discover the joy of traveling. Her story can be found at apple.com/cherie and is included as part of the “What will your verse be?” campaign. The first video beautifully captures Chérie’s…
Version 1.0 of the JSON REST API plugin was released over the weekend, adding new user, revision and post meta endpoints. This release also introduces the project’s new long-term backwards compatibility policy for its internal PHP API and REST API, which will not be broken from this point forward as new endpoints and data are…
From time to time, a WordPress site has the requirement of keeping users’ media uploads separated. It helps keep things a little more streamlined on multi-author sites where many authors are publishing and regularly adding files to the media library. WP Users Media is a new plugin that disables the ability for all users to…
WordCamp Vancouver is gearing up for its fourth year and will be held on Saturday July 26th, 2014, at the BCIT Downtown Campus, in Vancouver. The event’s organization team announced this week that this year’s camp will be a “developer edition,” catering to the area’s tech community. The day will be focused on topics for…
Last October, Matt Medeiros launched his WordPress Startup Challenge with hopes of validating the WordPress startup scene while building a stronger sense of community among entrepreneurs. At that time he also created a WordPress Entrepreneur group on Google+ to help connect those whose businesses are based on WordPress. Medeiros is the host of the Matt…
If you’re using Varying Vagrant Vagrants for WordPress development, the VVV Site Wizard, created by Alison Barrett, is a must-have tool for setting up new sites and deleting old ones. It’s a bash script that completely automates the otherwise lengthy process of adding a new site to VVV. If you already have VVV up and…
Yesterday former WP Engine customer Matthew Woodward posted a lengthy, illustrated review of his experiences with the company’s managed WordPress hosting and support. Though initially impressed with the host’s support when he signed on 18 months ago, Woodward detailed his assessment of its decline over the past eight months, citing poor performance, slow and uninformed…
For the past few years, the holy grail for many WordPress theme makers is to create a theme that is easy for anyone to customize without touching a line of code. One of the most difficult aspects of site customization is building the layout, especially if you’re shooting for a responsive website. Make is a…
Jetpack 3.0 was released today with a couple of brand new features and an updated interface for managing modules and settings. The new administrative user interface allows for bulk activation and deactivation of modules in the same way you might manage plugins. The redesigned Jetpack admin greeting page now features its 33 modules and allows…
Schema.org provides a standard way of marking up structured data so that it can be easily found by search engines and properly structured for other forms of data communication, i.e. JSON. Search engines such as Bing, Google, Yahoo! and others make use of this “shared markup vocabulary” to correctly identify the content on web pages.…
If you’re new to WordPress, the sudden onslaught of spam that you receive upon opening registration can take you by surprise. Unless you have a solid plugin in place, open registration comes with the wearisome task of wading through new signups to put the axe to spammers who got through. One of the common ways…
Long time Android users will remember how much of leap forward Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 (ICS) was for the platform in 2011. As the vastly improved successor to Android 2.3 Gingerbread, it was one of the largest upgrades to Android OS in history, creating a demarcation line between the much older versions and the newer…
WordCamp Miami celebrated its 5th anniversary this year, drawing 770+ people to the event. The organizers also hosted their first WordPress beginner’s workshop for kids as part of the Sunday activities. Tammie Lister, Kathryn Presner, and I worked together to lead the workshop, along with volunteers Noel Tock, Mika Epstein, and Suzette Franck. The session…