The developers behind the BuddyBoss theme shop released a plugin today that has the potential to benefit nearly every BuddyPress social network. BuddyPress Global Search adds a unified search bar, allowing users to search through every BuddyPress component, along with pages, posts, and select custom post types. Once activated, the plugin turns the site’s WordPress…
WordPress sites with multiple users often run into challenges when attempting to work on the same content. Larger publications require more robust editorial tools for efficient collaboration between administrators, editors, contributors, and authors, who often need to jump in on the same post. Duplicate and Merge Posts is a plugin that offers a new take…
If you’ve ever clicked on a screenshot in the WordPress plugin directory and received a download prompt, you’re not the only one. In fact, it’s a widespread issue that affects a number of plugins. Screenshots are important as they help with troubleshooting, previewing features, and give users a sense of what to expect when it’s…
Web accessibility guidelines are constantly in flux, making it difficult for site administrators to keep pace. Even if you have a decent grasp on the basics, changes to your theme, plugins, and content can introduce new accessibility issues that you didn’t anticipate. Legal requirements may soon put publishers under the gun for accessibility compliance. Plugin…
This week the world mourns with Parisians following yesterday’s terrorist attack at the headquarters of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Masked gunmen, claiming to be Yemeni al-Qaida, killed 12 people, including eight journalists and two police officers. The attackers targeted Charlie Hebdo’s daily editorial meeting, in protest of the publication’s controversial satirical depictions of religious figures.…
When migrating a WordPress site to a new domain, you’ll have to update every instance of the site’s URL in the database. Some developers prefer to use tools like WP-CLI or WP Migrate DB to handle this, while others opt for a general database search and replace plugin with a UI in the WordPress admin.…
The traditional use of widgets in WordPress is to set it and forget it. After placing and configuring a widget, it stays in the widgetized area until manually removed. Many plugins have extended widgets to add visibility settings that are based on the page or post where the widget appears. But what if you could…
In order to see the post meta boxes using Distraction-free Writing Mode in WordPress 4.1, you have to move the cursor away from the post editor. During the editing process, you may need to preview a post several times. Since the preview button is only available when the publish meta box is shown, you have…
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin maintained by Automattic and has more than 30 different modules. The modules provide a variety of features including, contact forms, stats, and related posts. Part of Jetpack’s reputation in the WordPress community is that it’s bloated and slows down websites. Sam Hotchkiss, who is part of the Jetpack team, has…
This year the WordPress plugin directory crossed 35,000 plugin listings and is rapidly approaching one billion total downloads. WordPress 4.0 added custom icons to the plugin installer in the admin, which helps developers to differentiate their plugins in this massive sea of extensions. Plugin branding is useful for standing out in the initial results of…
WordPress’ sticky posts feature was introduced six years ago in the 2.7 release. It was added to enable users to stick important posts to the front page so that they won’t disappear in a blog’s steady stream of chronologically ordered content. By default, a sticky post is sticky indefinitely and requires you to manually uncheck…
Maintaining a library of code snippets can save you time when coding similar tasks in the future. Although there are countless sites online where you can host code snippets, it’s more convenient to have them at your fingertips when writing a blog that includes code. Plugin developer Justin Sternberg recently released Code Snippets CPT, a…
The WordPress project is charging full steam ahead with improvements to the customizer. The most recent release featured the addition of dynamic and contextual controls, sections, and panels. As WordPress 4.2 is kicking off development, core contributors are looking to add menus to the customizer for easy management from the frontend. More WordPress theme developers…
Jekyll fans are fond of the Ruby-powered static blogging software due to its ease of use and support for Markdown and the Liquid templating engine. With no database to maintain and no comments to moderate, Jekyll radically simplifies blogging. It’s also the software that powers blogging on Github Pages. Moving content from WordPress to Jekyll…
The WordPress Heartbeat API, introduced in WordPress 3.6, simulates a pulse and is responsible for revision tracking, session management, and more. The pulse is around 98 Bytes in size, but it can cause performance issues in certain situations. If you’ve been notified by your webhost that your account is using too many resources and cite…