Last week WordPress plugin developer Rachel Carden released wA11y, a new plugin that offers comprehensive feedback on web accessibility issues. wA11y was created to provide a toolbox of resources for site owners and currently includes support for two well known web accessibility evaluation tools: Tota11y and WAVE. “You know that saying ‘Information wants to be…
Earlier this year we tested the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, which allows users to draft and preview customizer states. For the past several months Weston Ruter and his team at XWP have been working on adding the ability to schedule Customizer changes. This would allow users to stage content as a set of customizer changes,…
WordPress.com launched browser notifications this week, a feature that delivers instant notifications of site activity to Chrome and Firefox users. Notifications are opt-in, so users will need to enable them before they will be active. Fortunately, they are also configurable on a per-site and per-activity basis, otherwise users with a larger volume of notifications might…
Layers, the WordPress page builder that installs as a theme, has ended the exclusive arrangement it had with Envato for more than a year. David Perel, co-founder of Obox and Layers, announced that any new Layers themes and plugins will be sold within their own marketplace, instead of through Envato. “Our exclusivity agreement meant we…
PHP 7 Release Manager and Core Developer Kalle Sommer Nielsen has been watching the usage statistics of the latest version rise on W3Techs’ market share assessment. PHP is currently used by 82.1% of all the websites for which W3Techs can detect a server-side programming language. The site also collects data on the breakdown of major…
Nearly every WordPress user has experienced the frustration of dismissing an admin notice and having it pop up again on page refresh or upon navigating to a new page. WordPress 4.2 made it possible for plugin and theme developers to create dismissible admin notices using the classes .notice and .is-dismissible, but left it up to…
Headway Themes, founded in 2009 by father-son duo Grant Griffiths and Clay Griffiths, is one of a handful of companies that helped pioneer the WordPress commercial theme market. Headway is not a page builder but rather a visual drag-and-drop layout builder for WordPress. In the past few weeks, several readers have contacted us wanting to…
Listings is a new plugin that is aiming to be the “One Listings Plugin to Rule Them All.” The Look and Feel, a team led by Scott Basgaard and Coen Jacobs, created Listings to provide a generic platform that will support niche extensions for things like a job board, real estate, cars, and kittens. “We…
In 2008, while working for an Irish company under contract with the Irish Parliament, Bogdan Fireteanu was called into a meeting and told that he needed to build 50 blogs as soon as possible. That was the day he discovered WordPress. Over the next eight years, Fireteanu would become more deeply involved with the WordPress…
In a post titled, “The People’s Code,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott announced the release of the new Federal Source Code policy. The period for public comment ended in April after which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) analyzed the feedback on GitHub. The new policy primarily concerns custom-developed source code…
Based in Leipzig, Germany, The Soulmen is a company made up of a small team of people who develop exclusively for Apple devices. One of the products the company develops is called Ulysses. Ulysses is a text editor that’s available on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The company has released version 2.6 which adds the…
A couple years ago, we published a tutorial for setting up a quick WordPress development environment using Koding’s free cloud-based IDE. The platform allows users to use popular applications or build their own using languages like Python, Java, Perl, PHP, Node.js, Go, and Ruby. Users have access to an Ace code editor and Linux terminal…
When Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in February 2016, the open source initiative was targeted at improving the experience of the mobile web for publishers. Up until recently, AMP pages were only featured in the “Top Stories” carousel, but adoption of the technology has now spread to other industries such as e-commerce, entertainment, travel,…
Contact Form 7, one of the oldest and most popular WordPress plugins, passed 40 million downloads this week. Takayuki Miyoshi uploaded the plugin on WordPress.org 10 years ago and it’s now active on more than a million sites. Over the years, other developers have created hundreds of add-ons to extend Contact Form 7 beyond its…
The first WordCamp in Oklahoma took place this past weekend in Oklahoma City at the Francis Tuttle Technology Center. Although organizers had originally planned for 50 attendees, demand was higher than expected and the event sold more than 100 tickets. Lynn Dye, lead organizer for WordCamp OKC, has been attending the city’s local meetup group…