When WordPress is used as a CMS, pages are one of the most common ways for structuring content that doesn’t require the use of taxonomies. Unlike posts, pages are not arranged chronologically, but are instead interrelated with other pages by hierarchy. Some sites have hundreds or even thousands of parent and child pages. WordPress includes…
Many WordPress users elect to automatically close comments on older posts in order to keep the constant deluge of spam at bay. This method works, but it comes with a couple of drawbacks. The option, found under the Settings → Discussion screen, is essentially an an all-or-nothing choice on older posts. The comment deadline setting…
WordPress 3.0 introduced the ability for developers to register their own custom post types, enabling the software to be used more easily as a CMS. Custom post types ushered in a new era that allowed plugin developers to create and organize content in a more modular way. If you’ve ever tried to explain the concept…
With the release of WordPress 4.0.1 less than 24 hours old, we’ve received reports of plugins breaking due to the update. For example, Cool Video Gallery is broken because of the way it handles custom shortcode attribute parsing instead of using the Shortcode API built into WordPress. Mika Epstein, who is a support forum volunteer,…
When version 3.0 of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was released, it came with a brand new community website. After three years of continual improvement, creator Tom McFarlin felt that the project had finally matured enough to warrant its own branding and website. As the boilerplate gained traction, McFarlin started receiving numerous requests for a generator…
In what has been a long time coming, WP eCommerce has changed the URL of its website from GetShopped.org to WPEcommerce.org. Between the Shopp e-commerce plugin and Getshopped.org, it was confusing as to which product the site represented. The move to a more recognizable URL is the pinnacle of a series of improvements the project…
Postmatic is hoping to revolutionize WordPress comments by giving readers a way to subscribe to new posts/comments via email and leave a comment by simply hitting reply. Since email is usually the way most people find out about comments, having the ability to reply without leaving your inbox in convenient, especially when you’re on the…
Gigaom has been pumping out a steady stream of news and analysis on technology since 2006. The WordPress-powered site attracts 6.5 million monthly unique visitors with topics ranging from science and energy to cloud businesses, media and mobile. With years of articles buried in its archives, it’s important for Gigaom to have a solid search…
In a matter of months, Slack has managed to become the favorite communication tool for thousands of businesses, boasting more than 250,000 daily active users, with roughly 30% of them paying for the service. The company recently acquired $120 million to fund further growth and is now valued at $1.1 billion dollars. While Slack helps…
Anas H. Sulaiman is a WordPress plugin developer who has created several extensions that extract modules from Jetpack so that they can be used independently. He recently renamed his WordPress.org profile to “JP Bot” and is gradually adding to his collection of Jetpack-extractions: One of his most popular plugins is JP Markdown, which essentially duplicates…
When WordPress is used heavily as a content management system, taxonomies play a very important role for grouping information. While your standard blog might only have a handful of categories, more content-heavy sites can include hundreds of terms within custom taxonomies. Scrolling through an impossibly long list of categories or terms can be a clunky…
WordPress recently adopted Slack as its primary communication tool for contributor teams, largely replacing IRC. When trac tickets are mentioned in Slack, they are automatically linked up, which helps contributors reference and connect discussions. So far, the app has been enthusiastically received, especially since it offers a far more mobile-friendly option for asynchronous communication. WordPress-related…
Note is a simple and easy to use widget for editing bits of text, within the widget via the customizer developed by Slocum Studio. Although you can edit text widgets in the customizer, it’s a boring experience and requires HTML knowledge to format text. Note enables you to add and edit content live from within…
The Shortcode API was introduced in 2008 when WordPress 2.5 was released. Over the past six years, the UI for adding shortcodes has changed very little, despite the fact that they remain a big part of how many WordPress users structure complex content. Shortcake is a new project created by the folks at Fusion with…
Beautiful Taxonomy Filters is a new plugin that adds filtering to your custom post type archives, based on taxonomy (terms/categories/tags). It allows visitors to filter CPTs by multiple terms on the frontend. The plugin automatically adds rewrite rules to create pretty filter URLs, without the use of JavaScript. Beautiful Taxonomy Filters was created by Swedish…