For years, I’ve been telling WordPress users that the day we can control when and where widgets are displayed is the day WordPress takes a huge leap forward. I always thought instead of having a WordPress theme with sidebars of widgets displayed on specific posts or pages that it would be better if we could…
Jetpack is a plugin developed by Automattic, made up of a bunch of useful modules.. However, some of these modules require a connection to WordPress.com. You also can’t use one or two modules unless Jetpack as a whole is installed. I decided to challenge myself to see how many plugins it would take to mimic…
Earlier today, I read an article that took all of the hard work volunteers completed for inclusion into WordPress 3.8 and flushed it down the toilet. The main reason for their criticism is that WordPress is boring. The software is not changing enough to keep pace with competitors such as SquareSpace, Ghost, or Medium. The…
wpXtreme is trying to take the WordPress App Store idea to the next level. The site recently launched and provides a method to download plugins and themes through their marketplace. While their plugin didn’t function properly on my local WordPress install, it worked just fine on the Tavern website.
About three years ago, WordPress introduced pie charts and a stats API to the plugin repository. These stats gave plugin authors a chance to see which versions of their plugin were activated while also giving a glimpse into how many actual users the plugin had. The API provided a method to getting access to the…
Now that WordPress 3.7 is out in the wild and has already accumulated over 1.5 million downloads, the complaints are starting to roll in concerning the automatic update feature. On the Make.WordPress.core website where Andrew Nacin published a great guide on the different ways of configuring auto updates, users started questioning why there wasn’t an…
Kevin Muldoon has published a great post that may change the mindset of both WordPress end users and developers. In his post, he talks about WordPress, GPL, and ethics but further into the post, he mentions that perhaps we should not be thinking about what sites like GPL Avengers or GPL Club are doing as…
For the first time since returning to the airwaves, we had all three contributing authors to WordPress Tavern on the show at once. While we originally scheduled Alex Denning for this episode, we needed to reschedule him for October 25th. So in this episode, we each took turns discussing this weeks headlines. As a bonus,…
With WordPress 3.7 steadily approaching the release candidate stage with a full release soon after, I thought it would be interesting to poll the audience to determine how you plan on configuring auto updates. There are a couple of things to keep in mind before participating in this poll. WordPress 3.7 and above will only…
Back in June, I reviewed an experimental plugin by Christopher Finke called Inline Preview. Since that post was published, Christopher has made a number of improvements to the plugin. Now when you publish a post, the WP Admin slides to the left with a shadow bar in the middle, and the content on the right.…
No guests this week which provided Sarah and I a oppurtunity to go in-depth on some topics such as the new password meter for WordPress 3.7. We also had a great discussion surrounding the question of whether code revisions should be added to the core or not. After the discussion, Sarah and I are both…
Amidst the different projects currently ongoing around WordPress, there is one that will potentially change the way in which we edit published content. It’s called Front-end Editor and is being developed as part of the features as plugins program. While the initial concept and mockups look good, there is another perspective by Mark Root-Wiley that…
Brad Touesnard, founder of the WordPress App Store has published a detailed post that explains the reasoning for why the app store failed. Hind sight is 20/20 so it’s great to get this kind of perspective from Brad. We find out what went right but more importantly, what went wrong. One of the major reasons…
A week ago, I was contacted by a WordPress user who asked an interesting question, Is it ethical for a company to use its own staff to bump plugin ratings on wp.org? At first, I didn’t give much thought to the question until I investigated the links they provided me. I researched the plugins they…
It’s a fear many WordPress users had in 2009 and it’s one that continues to be near the top in terms of reasons why people won’t upgrade their sites. It’s the fear that their plugins won’t be compatible with the new version of WordPress. Back in October of 2009, the WordPress core team tried to…