A test environment for your WordPress site is an important part of being able to ensure smooth updates. It also allows you to test new plugins and themes without affecting visitors. However, creating an exact copy of your site in the same environment is no simple task. There are many commercial plugins and WordPress hosts…
Good news for BuddyPress fans: The project now has wallpapers available for desktop and mobile devices. While viewing the official BuddyPress logos and fonts page, I noticed that there were no wallpapers like those that you can find on the WordPress Logos page. I decided to reproduce a few of the wallpapers for BuddyPress, based…
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic, was recently featured on the Hired Podcast, a show that focuses on exciting things in the world of work life and company culture. Cameron Moll, founder of Authentic Jobs, hosts this short 27 minute interview, which many of you may enjoy. As Mullenweg tells the story of…
The Ghost open source blogging project had an interesting path to get to where it is today. John O’Nolan, the project’s creator, originally introduced the idea of his pure blogging platform as a “WordPress-lite fork.” After a great deal of deliberation, O’Nolan decided not to fork WordPress and instead opted to built his application on…
Markdown has finally made its way to Jetpack after it was added to WordPress.com a couple months ago. The new Markdown module in Jetpack 2.8 gives you the option to write and edit rich text without having to write code or reach for your mouse. If you’re not familiar with Markdown, here’s what it looks…
January has been a rocking month in the world of WordPress themes. With everyone kicking off their blogs for 2014, we’ve seen a gaggle of pure blogging themes released this month. If you’ve neglected your blog, it’s not too late to get started. You haven’t missed the boat. Find a new theme that inspires you…
If you’re like me, you can never remember the shortcodes you have active on your WordPress site. This inevitably leads you to stop what you’re doing and hunt down the documentation for the feature you’re attempting to use. This is especially true when it’s a shortcode that can be configured with multiple attributes. What if…
WordPress 3.6 introduced native support for audio and video files which meant that you no longer need to add a plugin in order to play multimedia files hosted in your media library. A new group, led by Scott Taylor under the project code name “Disco Fries,” has set out to continue iterating on this feature.…
BuddyPress 2.0 is underway and an exciting new feature is in the works. This next release will add profile editing to the WordPress admin. Navigating to the admin Users screen and clicking on “profile” will take you to a new “Community Profile” tab for backend profile management. In addition to editing profile fields, this new…
The exciting news today in WordPress core development is a shiny new core/components page that presents an organized overview of open Trac tickets for each component. Nacin announced the new feature today during the #wordpress-dev IRC meeting, which delighted many core contributors in attendance. The page breaks down 34 top-level components with two dozen subcomponents.…
Treehouse offers technology education courses in a virtual environment to help users pick up new skills. Membership to the site offers access to various tracks of study that include topics such as iOS and Android development, web design, PHP, Rails development and more. Treehouse has been gradually adding to its collection of WordPress courses and…
The Widget Customizer plugin is currently being considered for inclusion in WordPress 3.9. Weston Ruter, the project’s lead developer, submitted a proposal for its merge into core. He and a large team of contributors have been working ardently to bring this feature into WordPress so that users no longer have to edit widgets blind. With…
Aesop plugin developer Nick Haskins announced tonight that the project has now been fully funded through its Crowdhoster campaign. He’s raised $6,397 of $6,000, thanks to backing from many major WordPress companies and individuals who are hoping to make the Aesop storytelling engine a reality. Haskin’s open source storytelling plugin allows publishers to create rich…
This week GovFresh, a government and technology blog, launched a new WordPress theme project to help promote the use of open source software among governments. If you’ve ever visited a local government website that looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1999, then you understand the problem that the folks at GovFresh are trying to…
There’s nothing more fun than exploring different interface ideas for the WordPress publishing process. Over the past several months we’ve featured a number of plugins that are vying for the best way to edit content on the front end. Sir Trevor WP is a new plugin that presents an alternative way to edit content within…