A child theme is defined in the WordPress codex as a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme. Child themes allow you to modify, or add to the functionality of that parent theme. A child theme is the safest and easiest way to modify an existing theme, whether you want…
WP Editor is a free WordPress plugin developed by Benjamin Projas. It replaces the default plugin, theme, post, and page editors and is integrated with CodeMirror and Fancybox. By integrating these two technologies, the editor resembles an environment coders will be familiar with. The first thing I noticed when writing my first post with the…
BuddyPress 2.0, due sometime in mid-April, officially kicked off development a couple weeks ago. This release will include some exciting, visible new features, including the ability to edit BuddyPress profiles in the WordPress admin. But there are also some major improvements happening under the hood that will help BuddyPress to scale better in the near…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I sat down with Chris Wallace, co-founder of UpThemes and discussed in detail the reasons behind the open letter published by the company. We learned how Chris got involved with WordPress theme development and the circumstances leading to the creation of UpThemes. Chris explained how hard it was to…
WordPress doesn’t send out too many emails. They’re usually only generated for an important notice, or when an action is required on your part. However, there are a few different circumstances under which you may not want WordPress to send any emails. For example, when working on a development site, or even a production site,…
Recently we explored the question of whether or not a clear path for WordPress.org plugin adoption could help to lower the rate of abandonment. Some have suggested that having a standard (unofficial) adoption tag might help to bring more exposure to plugins that need a new owner. “Adopt-Me” was suggested as one possible tag for…
Bob Dunn, who’s been teaching WordPress for years, has launched an all new website dedicated to helping people learn WordPress. The new site is filled with tutorials, up to date information about WordPress, and in the near future, complimentary eBooks. I got in touch with Bob and asked him a few questions about the new…
The Titan Framework is a new WordPress options framework that was released on WordPress.org this week. This set of tools was created to make it easy for WordPress theme and plugin developers to add options to their projects. This first release contains more than 20 options, including meta boxes, Google font selector, a media uploader,…
In the old days, WordPress theme developers used to build loads of specific functionality into their themes, i.e. recipes, portfolios, testimonials, analytics, fundraising capabilities, custom post types etc. Commercial theme providers competed fiercely with one another to see who could pack the most functionality into their offerings. Many companies sought to become a one-stop-shop for…
So you just created and released a cool WordPress plugin that solves a problem. It’s now among 29,000 other plugins on the plugin directory. How do you tell the world your plugin exists? WordPress.org doesn’t have an area to publish press releases or announcements of new plugins. However, all plugins published to the repository show…
Postcard is a new free social sharing app for iOS that landed in the app store today. The app makes it easy for you to share content from your phone to multiple social networks at once. The golden feature of this app is its “Custom Network” capability, which allows you to share to your own…
While there is not an official way to create child plugins, the topic has been discussed in the WordPress community over the past few years. I caught up with Ian Dunn who submitted the idea three years ago to see if it still has merit. From an architectural standpoint, creating a child plugin isn’t really…
John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor has quickly become a favorite debugging plugin for WordPress developers ever since it was released last November. The plugin has 227 stars on github and has been downloaded more than 5,000 times from WordPress.org. One of the unique features of Query Monitor is the ability to narrow things down by plugin…
As more WordPress themes require the use of featured images to look their best, managing those images on a per-post basis can be a time consuming task. Luckily, there is a plugin available that makes things easier. It’s called Quick Featured Images developed by Martin Stehle. Although it’s hard to make out due to the…
On this weeks edition of WordPress Weekly, Chris Wallace founder of UpThemes.com will be our guest. We’re going to dive deeper into the reasons why their open letter was written and published to the WordPress theme community. We’ll talk about what the state of WordPress themes are in 2014 and what UpThemes plans are for…