The woman who inspires me
Today is International Women’s Day – while many people are using it as a day of marching and demonstrations to push for greater gender equality, I thought I’d use it as…
The Month in WordPress: February 2017
For a little over 2 years now, I have been posting monthly updates internally at WooThemes and now at Automattic in which I give a wrap-up of all the significant…
Stepping Up (Part 2)
Last week I wrote about how I’m planning on stepping up this year to speak at more conferences. Even though I also challenged you all to do the same, public…
Stepping Up
In 2016 I spoke at a local conference for the first time. It felt pretty easy because it was WordCamp Cape Town – an event and community with which I am…
Seriously Simple Acquisition
On 13 December 2012, I launched Seriously Simple Podcasting – a plugin that I initially built for my church’s website, but then expanded into a full-featured podcasting plugin available for anyone…
Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires
My fellow South Africans will be familiar with Bokkie making sure we know that only WE have the power to prevent bush and veld fires. The emotive tear and the damning words…
WordCamp Johannesburg: There is no “I” in WordPress
This morning I presented a talk titled There is no “I” in WordPress at the first ever WordCamp in Johannesburg. The video of my talk will be up on WordPress.tv at some…
WordCamp Cape Town: Democratising Community
Today I presented a talk titled Democratising Community at WordCamp Cape Town 2016. Even though I gave an intro talk last year, this is actually my first real WordCamp talk and…
Podcast: Chatting on WP Round Table
Last night I had a fun time chatting about WordPress, the community and what it all means on the 100th episode of the WP Round Table podcast. I had a…
Create a custom Featured Image box
When building a UI for adding meta data to a post in WordPress it’s always best to stick to the WordPress styling as much as possible. So, if you’re adding an image…
Democratising Podcasting
The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organisation founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratise publishing through Open Source, GPL software. That is…
A non-developers guide to getting involved in WordPress core development
WordPress core development is an exciting world to explore and I highly recommend that any and all WordPress developers go and jump right in. This post is not for developers though…
My intro slides for WordCamp Cape Town 2015
Last week was the much anticipated WordCamp Cape Town 2015, which was an undeniable success. I’m busy putting down some of my thoughts about the event and the WordPress community in South…
WPSessions: Community is to WordPress as Bacon is to Breakfast
Yesterday afternoon I presented a session on WPSessions that was all about the WordPress community and how we can all engage with it in a more meaningful way. The session…
Getting Started With WordPress Development
Last night I spoke at a meetup of the Cape Town PHP Group. I was speaking alongside the excellent Gareth McCumskey who was giving a run down of what we can expect in PHP 7 (we can expect a lot of awesomeness by the way – you should really check that out). My presentation for the evening was a primer on WordPress development and a guide on how to bend WordPress to your will (which would have made a way more awesome title for the talk).
Software development never changes
In the early ’80s, my father trained countless Cobol programmers. Today I write WordPress plugins, but there’s one thing that our work has in common.