WordPress’ native customizer has evolved considerably since its early days when it when it was introduced for adding live previews to themes. WordPress 3.9 added widgets to the customizer and the 4.0 release is set to expand the role of the feature into other aspects of WordPress with support for a wider array of controls.…
Over the past few months, WordPress developers have been experimenting with speeding up PHP execution with HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) and have achieved some amazingly fast load times. HHVM compatibility with WordPress is gradually improving and more hosting companies are moving to adopt it, as many believe that HHVM will soon revolutionize PHP. Changes in…
Earlier this year, the Piklist rapid development framework for WordPress rebranded with its 0.9.0 release and the team announced plans to launch commercial products. The framework is used by many developers to speed up tasks such as creating fields for settings pages, registering custom post types and custom taxonomies, adding post-to-post relationships and much more.…
Themosis is a new object-oriented development framework for WordPress that is currently in beta and set to be released soon. It’s aimed at developers of all skill levels but those with stronger PHP knowledge will have an easier time working with the framework. Themosis was created by Julien Lambé, a Belgium-based application developer. His framework…
Koding is an online development environment where you can create and run apps in the cloud. The platform encourages collaboration and social interaction with an integrated activity stream where you can post status updates, code snippets and topics for discussion. Koding includes an Ace code editor and a Linux terminal to your own private virtual…
This month we featured a project called VersionPress that brings version control to WordPress, a concept that has many in the community excited. The VersionPress development team is seeking $30,000 in funding by the end of June in order to get it off the ground. However, they aren’t the only ones working on adding git-based…
If you’re running WordPress trunk, then you may have noticed a new addition to the plugins screen. A “Beta Testing” tab now lists all available Feature Plugins that are currently ready for testing, including the WP API, Press This, and WordPress Frontend Editor plugins. Andrew Nacin added the tab to all development builds of WordPress.…
When developing locally without an internet connection, it doesn’t make much sense for WordPress to load external files like fonts or Gravatars. This can slow you down unnecessarily. WP Local Dev Environment is a plugin created by Andrew Norcross for developers who are working locally without an internet connection. It removes / unhooks the loading…
WordPress doesn’t have built-in support for developers working in multiple environments, i.e. local, staging, and production. It’s no surprise, given that this workflow isn’t part of the vast majority of users’ lives when publishing with WordPress. Nevertheless, running a separate development site can be a complex and tedious endeavor and WordPress doesn’t make it very…
The customizer is a powerful tool that allows users to make changes to WordPress themes and preview them live. Because it is native to WordPress, many theme authors are starting to employ the customizer exclusively, instead of creating their own option panels. Although the customizer is a frontend tool, it slides into view with a…
Query Recorder is a new tool that allows developers to record queries while working in the WordPress admin. The plugin was created by Brad Touesnard, author of the popular WP Migrate DB plugin. Touesnard introduced Query Recorder earlier this month at WordCamp Miami during his presentation on database deployment strategy. Once installed, the plugin allows…
WP-CFM is a new free tool for WordPress created by Matt Gibbs, author of the popular Custom Field Suite plugin. It provides configuration management for WordPress database changes, similar to Drupal’s Features module. WP-CFM lets you create and store bundles, which are essentially a group of one or more configuration options. The first step after…
Adam Clark, founder of Bottlerocket Creative, just launched a new WordPress service that churns out a website in one day. That’s right, a complete website in a single day, for $999. This new project is called wptheory and the service claims to be be able to customize and launch a WordPress theme in a scheduled…
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…
Every now and then the WordPress posts table will crash and screw up your website. Why does this happen? It’s not always clear how tables get corrupted, although it can usually be attributed to an unexpected event, such as the MySQL server or the server host getting killed in the middle of an update, causing…