Arūnas Liuiza, like many other WordPress developers, prefers to develop his plugins on GitHub, thanks to the collaborative tools for issue tracking, merging, and pull requests. Hosting and developing open source projects on GitHub is much easier than trying to get any participation from the community via a plugin’s Subversion repo on WordPress.org. For these…
Jetpack 3.9 has just been released with a new module that makes it easy for users to add sitemaps to their websites. Since sitemaps are important for SEO, many WordPress sites already have a plugin installed to create them. The new module in Jetpack will detect if you’re already using one of the popular sitemap…
After nearly eight years in business, Theme Hybrid has released its first commercial plugin. Up until now, all of the club’s themes and plugins have been free, but Justin Tadlock decided to try something new with the release of Theme Designer, priced at $125 (with support). The price tag reflects the fact that Theme Designer…
GlotPress 1.0 “Bunsen Honeydew” was released yesterday. In June 2015, Andrew Nacin began the work of transforming GlotPress into a plugin with a first pass that switched it from using the BackPress external to a WordPress install. Dominik Schilling led the development on GitHub, which included 352 commits and fixes for 70 issues. “For the…
If you’re looking for an easy way to display highlights of a story inside of posts, check out a new plugin called Story Lines, developed by Jacob Martella. Story Lines adds a meta box to the Posts screen where users can name the highlights box, configure its width, how it’s displayed, and fields for three…
In 2010 Google patented its methods for using resource load times in ranking search results. The published patent describes how Google factors in page speed when presenting results: A search result for a resource having a short load time relative to resources having longer load times can be promoted in a presentation order, and search…
When WordPress 4.4 was released in late 2015, some users questioned how to add colors and icons to categories as illustrated at the 1:17 mark in the release video. The colors and icons are not something users can define by default. Instead, they’re exposed by plugins using the Taxonomy Term Meta feature in 4.4. To…
The WordPress admin menu is fairly easy to navigate out-of-the-box but can become unruly over time. It can get out of control depending on the number of custom post types registered and plugins that add a top-level menu. If you want to hide rarely used menus from the admin menu, check out the Clean WP…
The whole collection of plugins from John James Jacoby’s Stuttter project is now available on WordPress.org. Jacoby created Stuttter as “a conduit for rethinking WordPress from the outside in,” and started pushing the plugins to the official plugin directory a couple months ago. During the first half of 2015, he worked full-time on WordPress’ sister…
This post was contributed by guest author Jenny Beaumont. Jenny Beaumont is co-organizer of WordCamp Paris & WordCamp Europe, a frequent speaker at WordCamps in France and abroad, and a contributor to a number of blogs. After 17 years building things in and around the web, she is taking a year-long sabbatical to get a…
Custom Contact Forms has just passed one million downloads after nearly six years in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Last year Taylor Lovett, Director of Web Engineering at 10up, released version 6.0, a completely rewritten version that made it one of the first plugins to incorporate the new WP REST API. It is now one of…
If you need to edit a lot of content and want to save time doing so, check out a new plugin called Destination After Save created by, Robert Whitis. Destination after save overrides WordPress’ default save behavior and creates a new meta box on the post and page creation screens. Users can choose what to…
On December 17, telecommunications companies cut off access to WhatsApp in Brazil after the company did not comply with police wiretapping requests. Many of the app’s estimated 100 million users went in search of an alternative, landing on Telegram, WhatsApp’s rival messaging app. Telegram gained 5.7 million new users in one day as a result…
On the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, a member recently raised the issue of display banner advertising in plugins. After installing Ultimate WooCommerce Brands developed by MagniumThemes, a large admin notice appears with an affiliate linked display banner for Bluehost. Ultimate WooCommerce Brands is a freemium plugin and while I’m not against plugin authors making a…
Mailbag is not a new plugin but it’s one of those convenient tools you’ll want to bookmark if you build WordPress sites that require email subscription forms. The plugin makes it easy to add a MailChimp or Campaign Monitor email form to posts or pages using a shortcode. I only recently came across it while…