One of my favorite features in WordPress is the ability to easily embed content from services such as YouTube by copying and pasting the source URL into the post editor. The feature is called oEmbed and was added seven years ago to WordPress 2.9. While content authors enjoy the luxury (more…)
Building on the momentum generated from the WordPress 4.4 development cycle, WordPress 4.5 includes a number of enhancements to comments. In a post on the Make Core blog, Rachel Baker explains the changes and what to expect. “WordPress 4.5 includes several ancient bug fixes and a few enhancements in the (more…)
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is part of a new series where I share an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full (more…)
Between posts and comments, WordPress.com is an enormous hub of activity. The service recently published its 2015 year in review and the numbers are staggering. Last year, users published 660M posts that generated more than 655M comments. The review looks back at posts that went viral, books published by (more…)
When I founded WP Tavern in 2009, comments were an important part of the site’s initial success. After six years, the site has published its 30,000th comment. At a time where large websites such as Copyblogger and the Toronto Star are closing down comments in favor of social media, the (more…)
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Drew Jaynes, WordPress core contributor. We discuss a wide range of topics, from Jaynes’ opinions on Scott Taylor’s work on WordPress 4.4 thus far to his trip to WordCamp Capetown Africa, 2015. We go in-depth on 10up’s (more…)
Last week, I shared the lessons I learned and the drawbacks to moderating comments in WordPress. In this post, I highlight six plugins that solve a problem I encountered or enhance comments for both readers and site administrators. All of the plugins are free of charge and available from the (more…)
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 (more…)
In the past 4-5 weeks, I’ve moderated every comment submitted to WP Tavern. Not only was it an experiment to see what would happen but a new way for me to use WordPress. The experiment introduced me to several drawbacks in WordPress’ comment moderation system. Lack of Context Comments that (more…)
One of the key features in WordPress 4.3 is that comments on pages are disabled by default. If you only enable comments for posts, you may be interested in WP Comment Humility, a new plugin created by John James Jacoby that moves the top-level Comments menu item to the Posts (more…)
Moderating replies to comments in the backend of WordPress is tough. For example, WordPress 4.3 displays the reply and who it’s in response too, but doesn’t show the text of the parent comment. You can’t see the parent comment unless you open the author link in a new browser tab. (more…)
Since enabling comment moderation on the Tavern, I’ve discovered that WordPress does not notify commenters when their comments are approved. On the Tavern, I’m using the Comment Approved plugin by Niels van Renselaar. It allows me to create a custom notification message that is sent when a comment is approved. (more…)