Emoji characters were born in Japan in the late 90’s but took nearly a decade to break into global usage. They entered popular culture full force when select emoji character sets were incorporated into Unicode in 2010. Since that time, emoji popularity has grown, and there’s no denying that they are mainstream and here to…
This Wednesday at 9:30 PM Eastern on WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I will be joined by Wade Foster, Co-founder and CEO of Zapier. Zapier is a service that acts as an integration point for more than 300 applications. GravityForms, WP Remote, and WooCommerce are just a few examples of popular WordPress plugins and services…
This isn’t just a plugin, man. It’s The Dude, so that’s what you call it. That, or His Dudeness… Duder… or El Duderino, if, you know, you’re not into the whole brevity thing. It symbolizes the realization of an entire modern lazy hippie bowling amateur private investigator generation summed up in two words spoken most…
Mario Peshev published a great article that looks at where the WordPress community stands on job titles and skills. Peshev explains why titles are out of control and how they don’t match their expected skill sets. The problem with a number of general titles is that they are overused and it is no longer clear…
A change log is the quickest, most convenient way for users and contributors to identify significant changes in a project as it moves from one version to the next. The log exists to keep users informed. Unfortunately, many open source project leaders have little motivation to provide a meaningful CHANGELOG file and are purely focused…
Tickets are on sale for the 3rd annual, WordCamp North Canton, OH, May 8th-9th. Tickets are available for Friday and Saturday, Friday only, or Saturday only. Friday features a full day of learning split between entrepreneur and WordPress sessions. Saturday is a full day of WordPress sessions with breakfast and lunch included in the…
Tom McFarlin released his Mayer WordPress theme on GitHub today. The theme was designed with writers, bloggers, and authors in mind and was previously only available to WordPress.com users for $79. Mayer is unique in that it was created to get users writing immediately, without having a bunch settings pages or additional widgets to configure.…
In the past two years, there’s been a lot of discussion surrounding the WordPress REST API project. If you’re not familiar with it, Brian Krogsgard published a great article that explains what it is, how to get involved, and the possibilities it opens up to developers. Krogsgard believes the REST API is “the most exciting…
Topher DeRosia, creator of HeroPress, announced today that he is canceling the project’s Kickstarter campaign. During the past few weeks, the project attracted 33 backers who pledged $21,855 of the $60,000 AUD goal. When it became clear that the fundraiser was hopelessly behind on reaching its goal, DeRosia canceled the funding three days ahead of…
Devin Price, who owns and operates the WordPress commercial theme shop DevPress, announced that he is retiring his best selling theme, Zenith. I asked Price why he’s retiring his best product. “Retirement may not be the best term. It’s more like introducing the new year’s model and stopping production on the previous one. The designs…
Since Automattic was founded in 2005, it has acquired several businesses, services, products, and people. In August, the company will be 10 years old and I thought it would be interesting to see if the acquisitions the company has made are still around. The list is organized from earliest to latest. Gravatar Gravatar stands for…
This week, Nick Halsey officially proposed the Customizer Theme Switcher feature plugin for merge into WordPress 4.2. Halsey summarizes the goal of bringing theme switching into the customizer: “By integrating themes directly into the Customizer, live-previewing workflows are greatly simplified, and the relationship between themes and theme/site options is clarified for the user,” he said.…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by the co-founder of WP Ninjas, James Laws. WP Ninjas specializes in WordPress plugins such as Ninjas Forms and Ninja Demo. In the show, Laws explains the origins of the business and why he decided to enter the forms market despite GravityForms being…
Iseulde Van Dorpe is joining SiteGround to work full-time as a contributor to WordPress core. She expects to work on a variety of different tasks, particularly those that relate to media and the editing experience. Van Dorpe’s recent core contributions helped to improve the editor for users in the 4.0 release. https://twitter.com/markjaquith/status/507580649536880640 SiteGround identified and…
In 2009-10, there was an intense debate between the co-creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, and the founder of DIY Themes, Chris Pearson. The debate centered on whether or not Thesis needed to be 100% GPL licensed. Thesis lifted lines of code from the core of WordPress, which some people claimed made Thesis a derivative of…