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…
The FCC isn’t making a lot of friends these days in large part due to its position with Net Neutrality. If you want to get back at the FCC, consider using the FCC Slow Lane plugin. The plugin allows users to protest the FCC by slowing down their websites to a crawl when an IP…
After attending a WordCamp, you’ll sometimes receive an email with a survey asking for your thoughts on how it went. The survey gives you an opportunity to rate and provide feedback on individual speakers as well as other aspects of the event. However, not all WordCamps send out surveys. Andrea Middleton has proposed that there…
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…
Today marks the one year anniversary of the devastating EF5 tornado that ripped through Moore, OK. The twister killed 24 people, seven of which were students when they took cover in The Plaza Towers elementary school. The Norman Transcript, a news publication that serves the Moore, OK, area has published a special website to remember…
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…
In a crucial courtroom decision involving Google v.s Oracle, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Oracle. The main part of the appeal is whether Oracle can claim copyright on Java APIs and if Google infringed that copyright. If the ruling stands, it would create a major setback to…
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a plugin author requests administrator access to your site for troubleshooting purposes? That’s the question posed by WPBeginner along with a couple of tips to help you decide whether you answer yes or no. Over the years, I’ve given access to a couple of plugin authors…
The Frontend Developer plugin is a handy little tool for WordPress theme developers who are working with media queries. The plugin hooks into the admin bar to display the current viewport resolution so that developers know what they’re working with. The indicator automatically updates as you resize your browser window. In addition to displaying common…
In this week’s edition of WordPress Weekly, we were joined by David Bisset, one of the many organizers and volunteers that helped put together WordCamp Miami 2014. Bisset explained the challenges the team faced, the logistics of organizing a 770 attendee event, and he shared advice to WordCamp organizers looking to grow their events. Stories…
When we wrote how to create a platform agnostic favicon with RealFaviconGenerator, one of the common complaints in the comments was that you needed to add the generated HTML into the HEAD section of the theme in use. This was not ideal since switching themes would cause the favicon images to be lost. Another suggestion…