Jetpack 2.9 was released today with the long-awaited Related Posts module, which was introduced on WordPress.com in early November 2013. Server resource-intensive features such as stats tracking and related posts are very difficult to accomplish in an efficient way. Jetpack’s new Related Posts module uses WordPress.com resources to do this instead, which is undoubtedly a…
WP Hotkeys is a plugin developed by McGuive7 and MIGHTYminnow that adds the ability to navigate the backend of WordPress with just a keyboard using shortcuts. The plugin works out of the box with a predefined set of hotkeys for each standard dashboard menu item. If you don’t want to see the shortcut helpers in…
WP Editor is a free WordPress plugin developed by Benjamin Projas. It replaces the default plugin, theme, post, and page editors and is integrated with CodeMirror and Fancybox. By integrating these two technologies, the editor resembles an environment coders will be familiar with. The first thing I noticed when writing my first post with the…
WordPress doesn’t send out too many emails. They’re usually only generated for an important notice, or when an action is required on your part. However, there are a few different circumstances under which you may not want WordPress to send any emails. For example, when working on a development site, or even a production site,…
Recently we explored the question of whether or not a clear path for WordPress.org plugin adoption could help to lower the rate of abandonment. Some have suggested that having a standard (unofficial) adoption tag might help to bring more exposure to plugins that need a new owner. “Adopt-Me” was suggested as one possible tag for…
The Titan Framework is a new WordPress options framework that was released on WordPress.org this week. This set of tools was created to make it easy for WordPress theme and plugin developers to add options to their projects. This first release contains more than 20 options, including meta boxes, Google font selector, a media uploader,…
So you just created and released a cool WordPress plugin that solves a problem. It’s now among 29,000 other plugins on the plugin directory. How do you tell the world your plugin exists? WordPress.org doesn’t have an area to publish press releases or announcements of new plugins. However, all plugins published to the repository show…
Postcard is a new free social sharing app for iOS that landed in the app store today. The app makes it easy for you to share content from your phone to multiple social networks at once. The golden feature of this app is its “Custom Network” capability, which allows you to share to your own…
While there is not an official way to create child plugins, the topic has been discussed in the WordPress community over the past few years. I caught up with Ian Dunn who submitted the idea three years ago to see if it still has merit. From an architectural standpoint, creating a child plugin isn’t really…
John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor has quickly become a favorite debugging plugin for WordPress developers ever since it was released last November. The plugin has 227 stars on github and has been downloaded more than 5,000 times from WordPress.org. One of the unique features of Query Monitor is the ability to narrow things down by plugin…
As more WordPress themes require the use of featured images to look their best, managing those images on a per-post basis can be a time consuming task. Luckily, there is a plugin available that makes things easier. It’s called Quick Featured Images developed by Martin Stehle. Although it’s hard to make out due to the…
It’s frustrating for plugin authors when users mark their plugin as broken when in fact, it’s an incompatibility with the user’s hosting environment. Too many broken plugin reports could damage the reputation of the author even if it’s not his/her fault. Pressing Matters proposed a solution to the problem that while good for developers, is…
The Aesop Storytelling Engine was created to empower the art of digital storytelling by making it easy for WordPress publishers to create interactive, feature-rich posts. Before Aesop came on the scene, these types of long-form storytelling posts often required quite a bit of code and were not easy for your average user to create. The…
Duo Security is a business that provides two-factor authentication services across multiple platforms. Late last week, the company announced on their blog they discovered a security vulnerability in their WordPress plugin. According to Duo, the vulnerability only affects WordPress Multisite installations where the plugin is enabled on an individual per-site basis. The vulnerability may allow…
Power Menus is a new WordPress plugin designed to make it simple to control menu items. The plugin handles both access and visibility on individual menu items and includes the following options: Control visibility of menu items for logged-in or non-logged-in users Show or hide items per user role Limit access to posts and pages…