Today CodePen announced oEmbed support and just as quickly a free plugin is already available to add it to WordPress. CodePen oEmbed allows you to drop a Pen URL into your content area on its own line and have the pen automatically embedded. Currently, you cannot customize the output, so the embed will use the…
For the past couple months, BuddyPress core developer Boone Gorges has been hinting at some big performance improvements coming to BuddyPress 2.0. He’s been working tirelessly to make the plugin faster and has published some benchmarks to demonstrate the improvements in 2.0. He posted statistics that compare the number of MySQL queries and the total…
Without much in the way of advertising, Underscores has become a popular choice for WordPress theme developers. To learn more about it, I asked Automattic employee, Konstantin Obenland, @obenland on Twitter, to explain what the theme is, how it got its name, and how people can contribute to the project. Why was Underscores created and…
We’ve written about a number of alternate editors to WordPress for both editing and writing content. Sir Trevor WP, PrettyPress, Splitdown, and Barley to name a few. However, WordPress may soon have its own frontend editor built into core. WordPress Front-end Editor was proposed by Janneke Van Dorpe in late 2013, with the goal of merging…
If you love to blog but don’t want a theme with clunky sliders and overloaded widget areas cluttering up your site, then chances are you’re on the hunt for the perfect minimalist WordPress theme. Finding a theme that provides a beautiful reading experience with an unobtrusive, high quality design is no simple task. You’ll end…
Okay Themes, founded by Mike McAlister, has rebranded and is now known as “Array.” Despite the fact that the shop produced high quality WordPress themes, the previous name seemed to imply a passable, lackluster product. Array is a stronger name for a top-notch theme shop that is successfully pioneering a return to simplicity in both…
Easy access to open source typography services has made the web a more beautiful place. Google’s vast library of fonts is free, fast-loading and hosted on high performing servers, which has resulted in ubiquitous use across the web. But have you ever looked at Google fonts and wondered why they appear to be a bit…
There are many ways to set up a Vagrant-based development environment for WordPress. It’s likely that you’ve come across Varying Vagrant Vagrants in your searches. VVV is probably one of the most popular Vagrant configurations for WordPress, but it may include more than you need. If you’re not contributing to WordPress core, then you may…
Writing documentation for products is oftentimes a thankless task. It’s a challenge to style and organize docs in a clear and approachable way. Unfortunately this tends to be an afterthought for many projects, even though it is the first point of connection for users seeking support. A WordPress theme specifically created for documentation makes this…
If drag and drop is your preferred method to add content to the WordPress media library and you’d like to extend that functionality to the featured images meta box, you’re in luck. Developed by Jonathan Lundström, Drag and Drop Featured Image adds the ability to drag and drop images into the featured image meta box when…
WordPress 3.9 Beta 3 went out the door today. Andrew Nacin announced the beta and set April 16th as the official release day. Beta 3 isn’t just a slightly better version of Beta 2. In fact, this third and possibly final beta includes more than 200 changes. Nacin cites several major changes that will be…
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…
Sarah Gooding and I debated whether or not smilies are content and what the true focus of debate should be concerning the emoticons. I shared my experience upgrading to WordPress For iOS 4.0 and the problems it solved. Last but not least, we discussed the dangers of downloading plugins from untrusted sources. Stories Discussed: WordPress…
It seems like there is a WordCamp or two happening every weekend. With so many, it’s tough to keep track unless you routinely browse the schedule on WordCamp Central. However, I’ve discovered a few other ways to monitor upcoming WordCamps. In late 2013, WordCamp central added RSS feeds that notify subscribers when an event is…
Last week, we reported the Better WordPress Security plugin would be renamed to iThemes Security. We also shared important details to prepare users for the upgrade. Because of the name change, users needed to re-enable the plugin or risk seeing errors. Despite the beta testing period, the upgrade process hasn’t gone smoothly for some users.…