Fire up your test environments; BuddyPress 2.0 Beta 1 was just released. 2.0 is going to be a stellar release and is packed full of exciting updates and performance optimizations. BuddyPress core developer Boone Gorges announced the beta and summarized new features and changes that will be important for you to test. This release will…
PressGram, the WordPress-powered photo sharing app, has significantly evolved since its launch. The app broke onto the scene last year, positioned as a game-changing challenger to the increasingly unpopular policies of Facebook and Instagram. After supporting the native social networking aspect for several months, John Saddington, the app’s creator, found that most users were not…
Over the past two years, Easy Digital Downloads has become a dominant player among WordPress plugins for selling digital products. EDD has been downloaded nearly 300,000 times due to its developer-friendly codebase and comprehensive set of features tailored to digital stores. While there are several dozen EDD-ready themes available, many developers prefer to build their…
BuddyPress 2.0 is due in approximately three weeks. The release roadmap shows it as being 74% complete. In addition to big performance improvements, this release will introduce several new WordPress admin tools to speed up common maintenance tasks for community managers. An update committed today makes it easier for administrators to mark users as ham/spam…
WordCamp Miami is nearly sold out with an estimated 700 WordPress fans to be in attendance. The event is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year and the organization team has announced its first WordPress beginner’s workshop for kids. Tammie Lister and I will be leading the workshop, which will introduce kids and their parents to…
Activating and deactivating widgets can become quite tedious when testing WordPress themes. Monster Widget is a handy plugin, created by the folks at Automattic. It adds all of the default WordPress widgets to a “monster” widget that you can deploy as one collective instance. Once the widget is added to your sidebar, you’ll see all…
In the course of blogging about important issues, there are times when you may need to link to dubious or objectionable material in order to provide context for your post. For example, some subject matter may necessitate a reference to racist material or a fraudulent business. Unfortunately, when it comes to SEO, the age old…
Over the past 30 years, emoticons have become a staple of digital communication. People rely on the smiley to add tone and feeling, which are often absent when communicating online. This is especially important in the case of text messaging and micro-blogging applications like Twitter where characters are limited. An emoticon can make all the…
Are you in love with the new WordPress.com smilies? Their modern look is a bit more expressive and endearing than the old emoticons. If you view them side-by-side, there is simply no comparison, especially when you zoom in: Although there is a ticket open for updating WordPress core emoticons for self-hosted sites, there’s no telling…
Casper is a new theme for WordPress that is essentially a port of the default blogging theme for Ghost. Lacy Morrow built the theme using Underscores as a base. Morrow said that the goal for his theme was to approximate Ghost’s default theme while incorporating WordPress-specific features: The goal of this project is to emulate…
Emoticons are believed to have been invented in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who suggested that they be used on “computer bulletin boards.” Though not widely used at that time, emoticon usage exploded with the popularity of AOL’s Instant Messenger in the 1990’s. Now, more than 30 years later, emoticons…
PhpStorm is a popular IDE that many developers depend on to code more efficiently, debug applications, and run unit tests with integrated version control and command-line tools. The upcoming version 8 will add official support for WordPress. According to a recent survey conducted by SitePoint, PhpStorm is by far the most favored IDE among PHP…
A WordCamp mobile app may soon be a reality. WordPress was accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. As part of that process, the community prepared a list of ideas for GSoC projects that students can work on. The creation of a WordCamp mobile app was among those ideas. The application…
ThemeCheck.org is a new site that provides a free validation service for WordPress and Joomla themes. Visitors can upload themes and templates and the service will analyze the files and run tests to verify security and code quality. The site gives each theme a quality score along with a list of alerts and warnings. For…
Due to its popularity, WordPress is a favorite target of hackers looking to exploit any vulnerability to gain access to your site. Once inside they can do things like compromise your files, deface your website and start gobbling up all your server’s resources until you are shut down. With services like BruteProtect gaining traction and…