At the contributor day event for WordCamp San Francisco 2013, breakout sessions were created to explore ideas on the best ways to teach people how to work with WordPress themes. One of the ideas being pursued are lesson modules. The modules explain all the aspects of developing, editing, and learning about themes. Despite a lot…
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a plugin author requests administrator access to your site for troubleshooting purposes? That’s the question posed by WPBeginner along with a couple of tips to help you decide whether you answer yes or no. Over the years, I’ve given access to a couple of plugin authors…
WordPress 3.9.1 was released late last week, resolving 34 bugs. This maintenance release includes several important fixes for multisite, TinyMCE, the customizer, widgets, and the new audio/video playlists. Site administrators who are still doing manual updates are encouraged to bring their sites up to the latest. WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin reported that in the…
Accessibility is one of those areas of WordPress contribution that hardly ever ends up in the spotlight. Much of the work that goes on in this area is invisible to the vast majority of users. Accessibility experts are generally in shorter supply than other types of contributors as well. Why aren’t more people involved in…
If you find yourself constantly referring to the Codex or searching for a commonly used template function, consider bookmarking this WordPress Cheat Sheet created by Trevor Niemi. Launched in February of this year, Niemi created the site after seeing a pixelated image of the same information published to Reddit. When asked how often the site…
Andrew Nacin announced today that Helen Hou-Sandí will be the release lead for WordPress 4.0, which kicks off development today during the regularly scheduled meeting in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel. Two guest committers, Dominik Schilling (@ocean90) and Sergey Biryukov (@SergeyBiryukov) have both been granted permanent commit access. An important development meeting was held yesterday, where…
Last week we featured a collection of Vagrant resources for WordPress development. Eric Clemmons, one of our readers, commented to let us know about Genesis Skeleton for WordPress, an awesome project that uses Vagrant for creating, developing and deploying WordPress across multiple environments. When Clemmons created Genesis, he wasn’t aware of how easily the name…
Siobhan McKeown announced that the first version of the WordPress Code Reference is now live. It’s still in the very early stages of development but is now out in the wild so that people can help contribute. Go try it out to see how easy it is to search the WordPress code base. The reference…
If you’ve ever contributed to the WordPress project, whether through code, documentation, plugins and themes, speaking at a WordCamp, etc., your feedback is requested on the WordPress Contributor Experience Survey. Jen Mylo announced the survey today, noting that none of the questions are mandatory. One of the questions in the survey asks: “What can the…
Dashicons are what’s known as an icon font and were added to the core of WordPress with the release of 3.8. The icons are vector based so they can be as large or small as you want without losing quality. Plugin authors can use CSS, HTML, or a Glyph for use within Photoshop to display…
Vagrant is an open source tool that makes it easy to configure and distribute virtual development environments. The project was started in 2010 by Mitchell Hashimoto and John Bender who wanted to create a way to standardize development environments for teams. Vagrant was designed to put an end to the “works on my machine” frustration…
A common support question that’s been popping up on the web after WordPress users update to 3.9: What happened to the “Paste from Word” button in the visual editor? If you find that the button is missing, don’t worry – it’s not a bug. Prior to this update, the button was located in the kitchen…
After the release of WordPress 3.9, I decided to help out in the support forums since they usually become busy soon after a release. Providing support in the WordPress.org forums gives you a clear indication on how well a release is being received and whether or not anything major broke. After spending five hours in…
WordPress 3.9 “Smith” is now available, just four months after the release of 3.8. This release continues the strategy of developing features as plugins first. Widgets Customizer by Westonruter is the only plugin that was developed and merged into WordPress this time around. Much of the work in WordPress 3.9 is an improvement of features added…
WordPress 3.8.3 was released today and fixes a pesky bug introduced in WordPress 3.8.2. As we reported a few days ago, one of the security fixes in 3.8.2 caused the Quick Draft dashboard widget to break. Auto-drafts created through the widget were not being promoted to draft status. When a title and content were added…