In case you missed it over the holidays, an important notice was issued to WordPress.org plugin developers. The WordPress Plugin Repository will no longer allow developers to commit files with PHP syntax errors in them. Mika Epstein, one of the developers who helps to review incoming plugins, posted an example of what the kick-back error…
This week on the Tavern we’ve been following the trend of new plugins popping up for customizing admin color schemes. Since WordPress 3.8 was released, developers have been having fun creating tools that give WordPress users more options beyond the eight default schemes. Yesterday we featured the HS Custom Admin Theme plugin as one of…
David Bisset has been organizing WordCamp Miami for the past five years. That’s a long time in WordPress years! WordCamp Miami will celebrate its five year anniversary May 23-25, 2014. The first WordCamp Miami was held in 2010, spreading the phenomenon of WordCamps to one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US. Every single…
2013 was an excellent year for finding beautiful themes in the official WordPress Themes Directory. The Theme Review Team has been breaking all kinds of records lately, averaging more than 80 new themes approved per month, according to Chip Bennett. With so many themes available, it can be difficult to sort through them all to…
The new WordPress admin design released in 3.8 was created in such a way that it’s easy for developers to extend the feature and write their own color schemes. But for your average user who doesn’t know how to work with Sass, creating color schemes is probably not going to happen. Fortunately, someone has created…
We’re entering the time of year when everyone opens their calendars and starts planning for the new year. The dates for WordCamp San Francisco 2014 were just announced this week to be set for October 25-26. The dates and times for pre and post-WordCamp events have not yet been decided, so the organizers urge you…
By and large, most WordPress users are in love with the new admin interface. However, there are some who have been resistant to the changes in the design, as evidenced by the creation of the wp-admin classic, a plugin that actually goes so far as to conjure up the old, unresponsive admin from the dead.…
A few days ago, Jeff wrote a post encouraging WordPress plugin developers to be more transparent about trackers they apply to your website via their extensions. He referenced Pooria Asteraky’s discovery that a social sharing plugin had applied 13 trackers on a vanilla installation. This is no surprise, really, as a site owner installs social…
WordPress themes that integrate well-known front-end frameworks, such as Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation, offer a full range of UI tools to help users quickly customize their websites. Not having to style a ton of UI components can be quite liberating when creating a new site, especially when you combine that with the publishing power of…
Piwik is leading the way when it comes to open source web analytics software. More than 1,000,000 websites are using Piwik for analytics, according to the current Builtwith assessment. The team has just launched its 2.0 release with a brand new website and redesigned mobile app. This release is the culmination of seven months of…
Many people around the world are already in the thick of celebrating a host of international holidays, including Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and more. If you’re celebrating a holiday involving gifts and you’re not sure what to buy the beloved WordPress geek in your life, we have a few suggestions. Even if you don’t celebrate any…
The Jetpack plugin code is now available on github and the team welcomes your pull requests. With the addition of Jetpack, Automattic now has 106 public repositories on github. That’s a lot of shared code! Jetpack has been downloaded nearly eight million times since its debut on WordPress.org. If you’ve enjoyed using Jetpack and have…
BuddyPress 1.9 was released to the world today thanks to many volunteer contributors who worked hard to make it happen. This release pays tribute to Sammy’s Pizza in Providence, Rhode Island, where lead developer John James Jacoby has enjoyed many fine pizza pies. Here’s a quick tour of the three main highlights of this release.…
Here’s a quick performance tip for self-hosted WordPress sites. WordPress loads a number of scripts from its /wp-includes/ directory, depending on what you have active on your site. Use WordPress.com Libraries is a new plugin, created by Automattician and plugin developer Ben Lobaugh. Once installed, it automatically switches the URL on built-in WordPress Javascript files…
The WordPress post editing experience is one of the next major features that will be evolving to meet the needs of modern publishers. We don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but there’s a trend emerging where everyone is taking a stab at re-imagining the post editor. Free and commercial plugins are popping…