WordPress 4.6 is scheduled for release on August 16th. This release streamlines the installation, activation, and update process for plugins, uses native system fonts for the WordPress backend, and improves the post editor. It also includes a number of enhancements under the hood. Outside of the improvements to the plugin and theme management process, there’s not…
PhpStorm 9 was released this week with a slew of improvements and new features for PHP and web developers. The popular IDE is used by more than 300,000 developers and its development team usually puts out one major release per year. Version 8 was released last September with official support for WordPress. Highlights of version…
Last April, Christopher Sanford launched Hookr, a WordPress hook/API reference for developers. He initially wrote the parser/indexer for his own use, to improve efficiency in his work, and was inspired to make it a public resource. “I have been professionally working with WordPress since 2.8, but most of which I would describe as ‘superficial development,’”…
Codio is a cloud-based IDE that is primarily used in the education sector but is also available to developer professionals. The service provides instant coding environments with support for code editing and a large array of popular programming languages and software components. By making the IDE available to users through the browser, Codio eliminates the…
Brad Parbs and his colleagues at WebDevStudios have created a new tool for the thousands of developers out there who utilize Varying Vagrant Vagrants for WordPress development. As Vagrant development environments are a daily staple of work life at WDS, the team needed a faster way for setting up new WordPress sites with VVV. Variable…
WP Stagecoach has been in beta for the past few months and the team behind it is busy planning for an official launch in early 2015. The startup, created by Jonathan Kay, came in second, behind WP Curve, in the first round of Matt Report’s WordPress Startup Challenge. The new service aims to create the…
Taylor Lovett, director of Web Engineering at 10up, announced today that the company is open sourcing its engineering best practices. 10up has historically been a leader in contributing to open platforms, most notably being one of the first development agencies to sponsor an employee to work full-time on WordPress core. The company used GitHub pages…
Some Like it Neat is a new starter theme for WordPress, based on the popular ultra-minimal Underscores theme. It also incorporates Bourbon, a lightweight mixin library for Sass. On top of that it adds Neat, which applies a semantic grid framework for Sass and Bourbon, enabling you to build any responsive layout that you can…
Version 1.0 of the Themosis development framework is now available. Belgium-based application developer Julien Lambé created Themosis in order to accelerate object-oriented development with WordPress. It offers a routing system for managing WordPress behavior on an application level and also includes a Laravel-esque templating engine for view files. Last week Lambé announced that the framework…
If the WordPress community is your only barometer of knowing how an open source community works together, then you might want to explore outside a bit further to gain a broader outlook on other cultures. Some of the differences are worth examining. A few days ago I noticed an interesting observation regarding the relationship between…
PhpStorm from JetBrains is far and away the most favored IDE for PHP developers. In March, PhpStorm announced that the upcoming version 8 would add official support for WordPress. The official release is finally here and delivers on that promise, adding a deeper level of support for developers who work with the WordPress code base.…
The open source NetBeans IDE has support for several different languages and frameworks and a worldwide community of developers who depend on it to code more efficiently. A recent survey conducted by SitePoint placed NetBeans as the third most favored IDE among PHP developers, capturing 15.6% of the votes, trailing not far behind Sublime Text…
Version 3.0 of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was released today. The open source project was started in 2011 by Tom McFarlin as a GitHub repository for storing code while he learned plugin development. Over the past three years, the boilerplate has matured beyond his expectations with the help of 39 contributors. It now has more…
Earlier this year we featured the /r/ProWordPress subreddit on a post exploring various WordPress watering holes. If you’re not familiar with subreddits, they are essentially focused topics where where registered users can vote article submissions “up” or “down.” Subscribing to a subreddit allows you to hone in on specific topics where you have an interest.…
Yesterday we featured a plugin, created by application developer Jeroen Sormani, that clones Google Keep functionality in the WordPress dashboard. Sormani has produced a number of other interesting experiment with WordPress, including a little known tool for generating WordPress settings. The WP Settings Generator is a tool for plugin and theme developers. It generates a…