Over the past 30 years, emoticons have become a staple of digital communication. People rely on the smiley to add tone and feeling, which are often absent when communicating online. This is especially important in the case of text messaging and micro-blogging applications like Twitter where characters are limited. An emoticon can make all the…
Are you in love with the new WordPress.com smilies? Their modern look is a bit more expressive and endearing than the old emoticons. If you view them side-by-side, there is simply no comparison, especially when you zoom in: Although there is a ticket open for updating WordPress core emoticons for self-hosted sites, there’s no telling…
Emoticons are believed to have been invented in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who suggested that they be used on “computer bulletin boards.” Though not widely used at that time, emoticon usage exploded with the popularity of AOL’s Instant Messenger in the 1990’s. Now, more than 30 years later, emoticons…
PhpStorm is a popular IDE that many developers depend on to code more efficiently, debug applications, and run unit tests with integrated version control and command-line tools. The upcoming version 8 will add official support for WordPress. According to a recent survey conducted by SitePoint, PhpStorm is by far the most favored IDE among PHP…
WordPress for iOS 4.0 has been released. Stats are now a native component, improving their look and feel on devices running iOS. While I didn’t have a problem with the traditional web view, the native view is a considerable improvement. Being a native component has also given the stats a noticeable speed improvement when loading.…
A WordCamp mobile app may soon be a reality. WordPress was accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. As part of that process, the community prepared a list of ideas for GSoC projects that students can work on. The creation of a WordCamp mobile app was among those ideas. The application…
CreativeMarket, one of the first WordPress theme marketplaces to fully support the GPL license has been acquired by Autodesk, for an undisclosed amount. The marketplace sells everything from themes to templates to fonts. The site became one of the first marketplaces to be advertised on WordPress.org after they announced they would only sell WordPress themes…
WordPress.com has relaunched its Developer Site with a new focus on making information easier to find for third-party developers. The site is now sporting a modernized design with a call to action that goes straight to the newly updated documentation, outlining how to get started creating apps for WordPress.com. I spoke with Automattic employee Joey…
Last week, we wrote about a report published by Sucuri that explained how 162,000 clean WordPress sites were used in a DDoS attack through the pingback functionality of XML-RPC. Alex Shiels who works on Akismet mentioned on Twitter the security team was working on a solution. An update to Akismet is now available containing bug…
Just one month after launching its WordPress beginner’s course, Treehouse has added BuddyPress education to its collection of interactive learning resources. The “Learn BuddyPress” course is geared toward BuddyPress beginners and covers all the basics of setup, user management, and core social components. After reviewing the course, I was impressed by how quickly Gordon is…
WordPress development agency 10up has hired John Eckman to take on the role of CEO. Eckman will work closely with Goldman and team leaders on the day-to-day operations of the company. Jake Goldman will remain as president and will focus on the products, strategic investments, and business development side of the company. Eckman has spent…
Sunny Ratilal’s WordPress adventure started when he was 13 years old. While learning how to build a custom content management system, he stumbled upon WordPress and started fiddling around with it to learn more about its features. At the age of 14, he landed his first client. WordPress ticked all the boxes for the client’s…
Shortly after New Year’s, Nick Haskins caught the eye of WordPress publishers with his open source story telling plugin. The prospect of building feature-rich, interactive stories within WordPress, without having to touch any code, was so promising that the project’s Crowdhoster campaign was fully-funded by the end of January. The buzz around the Aesop plugin…
In an era where many website designs are powered by popular themes, it’s become common for folks passing by to want to snoop under the hood to find out which theme a site is using. If the visitor is not capable of inspecting the code with his browser, he might resort to a service built…
Last week, Getty Images announced its new open-embed program, which removes the watermark from many of the images in its library for non-commercial use. In exchange, Getty’s iframed images are plastered with its logo and force a row of large, unattractive social sharing buttons on each embed. Getty reserves the right to remove content from…