PressGram, the WordPress-powered photo sharing app, has significantly evolved since its launch. The app broke onto the scene last year, positioned as a game-changing challenger to the increasingly unpopular policies of Facebook and Instagram. After supporting the native social networking aspect for several months, John Saddington, the app’s creator, found that most users were not…
Over the past two years, Easy Digital Downloads has become a dominant player among WordPress plugins for selling digital products. EDD has been downloaded nearly 300,000 times due to its developer-friendly codebase and comprehensive set of features tailored to digital stores. While there are several dozen EDD-ready themes available, many developers prefer to build their…
BuddyPress 2.0 is due in approximately three weeks. The release roadmap shows it as being 74% complete. In addition to big performance improvements, this release will introduce several new WordPress admin tools to speed up common maintenance tasks for community managers. An update committed today makes it easier for administrators to mark users as ham/spam…
The folks over at Sucuri have reminded us once again why it’s important to only download plugins from trusted sources. In a disturbing post published on the Sucuri blog, Denis Sinegubko highlights the dangers of using plugins from untrusted sources. In this post, we’ll talk about “patched” malicious premium plugins. We’ll talk about what they…
WordCamp Miami is nearly sold out with an estimated 700 WordPress fans to be in attendance. The event is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year and the organization team has announced its first WordPress beginner’s workshop for kids. Tammie Lister and I will be leading the workshop, which will introduce kids and their parents to…
Activating and deactivating widgets can become quite tedious when testing WordPress themes. Monster Widget is a handy plugin, created by the folks at Automattic. It adds all of the default WordPress widgets to a “monster” widget that you can deploy as one collective instance. Once the widget is added to your sidebar, you’ll see all…
Earlier this month, we interviewed Dre Armeda and Tony Perez of Sucuri.net to talk about WordPress security. Both guests shared information from a services perspective. We received a lot of positive feedback on the amount information presented in the episode. We’re going to turn the tables and discuss securing WordPress from the perspective of using…
In the course of blogging about important issues, there are times when you may need to link to dubious or objectionable material in order to provide context for your post. For example, some subject matter may necessitate a reference to racist material or a fraudulent business. Unfortunately, when it comes to SEO, the age old…
When we talk about the basics of WordPress security, we always tell you to use a very strong password. The recently added password strength meter helps to facilitate the process. But what about usernames? WordPress offers a way to change your display name which acts as a username alias. However, it doesn’t hide the username…
Over the past 30 years, emoticons have become a staple of digital communication. People rely on the smiley to add tone and feeling, which are often absent when communicating online. This is especially important in the case of text messaging and micro-blogging applications like Twitter where characters are limited. An emoticon can make all the…
Are you in love with the new WordPress.com smilies? Their modern look is a bit more expressive and endearing than the old emoticons. If you view them side-by-side, there is simply no comparison, especially when you zoom in: Although there is a ticket open for updating WordPress core emoticons for self-hosted sites, there’s no telling…
Founded in 2006, Qik enabled mobile phone users to share live video with their friends, family and followers. In January of 2011, the company was acquired by Skype. Three years after announcing the acquisition, the company has announced they will shutdown the service on April 30, 2014. The shut down means all mobile apps will…
Casper is a new theme for WordPress that is essentially a port of the default blogging theme for Ghost. Lacy Morrow built the theme using Underscores as a base. Morrow said that the goal for his theme was to approximate Ghost’s default theme while incorporating WordPress-specific features: The goal of this project is to emulate…
Announced at WordCamp San Francisco during Matt Mullenweg’s State of The Word 2013 presentation, developer.wordpress.org will host educational tools for developers in the form of handbooks and code referencing material. It will be the go-to place to discover WordPress best practices. Since educational materials surrounding WordPress are spread across the web, it’s hard for developers…
Emoticons are believed to have been invented in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who suggested that they be used on “computer bulletin boards.” Though not widely used at that time, emoticon usage exploded with the popularity of AOL’s Instant Messenger in the 1990’s. Now, more than 30 years later, emoticons…