In the last two years, Automattic has made significant improvements to WordPress.com and Jetpack. From managing plugins, themes, and other updates to New Dash and a revamped post editor. The individual changes represent iteration but when seen as a whole, show off an entirely new WordPress.com. Automattic has announced that the improvements its made in…
If you’re running or opening a new WordPress business, you should read Adam Soucie’s warning on the dangers of accepting credit cards. Soucie, a WordPress Developer based in Orlando, Florida describes what happened after working with a client that claimed to be hearing disabled. Soucie went through the usual process of sending over a contract,…
The WordPress 4.4 field guide is available and covers all of the major features in WordPress 4.4. The guide explains what the features are and more specifically, links to posts that explain how they work. WordPress 4.4: Field Guide While it doesn’t cover every single change, it gives developers and site maintainers an opportunity to…
While developers celebrate the first half of the WordPress REST API being merged into WordPress, there’s also another reason to celebrate. Six years in the making, taxonomy term meta will be available in WordPress 4.4. If you’re like me and don’t have a clue as to what taxonomy term meta is, I highly encourage you…
If you don’t consider yourself a developer and want to contribute to WordPress core, Hugh Lashbrooke’s guide offers a few different techniques. The guide explains how and where to provide feedback and how important it is to beta test new features. Over the years, I’ve used WP Tavern to advocate for and against features in…
93Digital, a London-based WordPress development agency, has published a WordPress time machine. The page features a timeline where visitors can browse every major version of WordPress released since 1.0. Versions are displayed in a horizontal timeline format with fancy animations when hovered over. Unfortunately, the animations are more distracting than they are useful and add…
For the last six years, WordPress has been an oEmbed consumer, adding support for services with nearly every major release since 2.9. In WordPress 4.4, it switches roles and is an oEmbed provider. Proposed by Pascal Birchler earlier this year, oEmbeds for posts streamlines how they’re shared across the web. Here’s an example of what…
One of the key features in WordPress 4.4 is responsive images. Joe McGill, who is helping to merge the feature to core, joined me for a thirty minute interview to explain how it works. When users upload images in WordPress, it automatically crops new images to smaller sizes. For example, if you upload an image…
Over the weekend at WordCamp Portland, Oregon, Drew Jaynes, a WordPress core developer who also led the 4.2 development cycle presented on the topic of beta testing WordPress. In the presentation, Jaynes highlights the pros and cons of using the WordPress Beta Testing plugin on a testing site and a production site. However, he also…
After more than eight weeks in development, WordPress 4.4. beta 1 is available for testing. With over 1,600 commits since WordPress 4.3’s release, it’s important that 4.4 be tested by as many people as possible. Commits are bug fixes, additional functions or filters, new features, corrected typos, and anything inbetween. As a rule of thumb,…
This post was contributed by Jesse Nickles. He is the founder of LittleBizzy, a managed WordPress hosting company, and a part-time blogger at CollegeTimes, where he gets into trouble exploring controversial issues. Two weeks ago, I announced that all current and future domains hosted at LittleBizzy would have XML-RPC permanently blocked due to the non-stop…
A few hours ago, Ryan McCue, one of the lead developers of the WordPress REST API project who recently received guest commit access for WordPress 4.4, committed a patch that adds the REST API infrastructure to WordPress core. In his commit message, McCue referred to the infrastructure as a baby API: REST API: Introduce baby…
In WordPress 4.4, the View Post button in the post editor is disappearing in favor of a clickable permalink. Four years ago, Scribu, who is a former WordPress contributor, created ticket #18306. In the ticket, Scribu explains that the View Post button is redundant functionality and suggests that it be removed in favor of a…
WordPress plugin and theme developers need to take note of an important change in WordPress 4.4 that rearranges the comment form. In WordPress 4.4, the comment form is arranged so that the text area is displayed first followed by the name, email, and website fields. According to Aaron Jorbin, WordPress core developer, the change improves…
After more than three years of development, the WordPress REST API is one major step closer to getting merged into core. Ryan McCue, a lead contributor to the project, published the first official proposal to merge the API into WordPress. The proposal explains what the REST API is, why it’s needed, an integration plan, and…