22 January 2015

Build user appreciation links into your plugin

The other day I posted about showing plugin developers appreciation and how it’s actually really easy to do. The problem, as was pointed out to me, is that writing reviews, donations, etc. are all only accessible from the plugin page on the repo and there’s no quick way to get there from the WordPress dashboard. All is not lost, however! It is possible to add custom links to the plugin list table alongside the default links that point to the author’s website and the plugin details page.

20 January 201521 January 2016

Developers are people too!

When we release a plugin on the repo we don’t do it out of need or obligation – rather it’s out of passion and a desire to give back to the great community that enables us to earn a respectable living. We do it because we believe that being selfish with our code doesn’t benefit anyone and by making it available for the world to use we are adding to the overall value of WordPress as a platform and as a community.

9 January 2015

Important Upgrade Information for Seriously Simple Podcasting v1.8

On 13 January I will be releasing v1.8 of my podcasting plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting. If you are an existing user of the plugin then please read this before upgrading. If you are not then this is a neat overview of some of the new features, so please take note of these important changes as well as some of the more significant features being introduced.

18 December 2014

Introducing: Instant Featured Image

While WordPress is, I believe, the perfect platform for pretty much any kind of online publishing, it does have some occasional UX inconveniences. The great thing is that, due to the extensible nature of the platform, most of these inconveniences can be fixed via plugins. Enter Instant Featured Image.

17 December 2014

Introducing: Post Length Indicator

Have you ever found a blog post, noticed that the scrollbar is super long and decided to abandon reading because you just don’t have the time to read that much? How many times have you actually scrolled down to see how long the actual post content is before you arrive at the comments? If you took a minute to check the post length you would more often than not discover that the scrollbar only appears so long because the post has a huge amount of comments.

12 December 2014

Introducing: Export Plus

The great thing about WordPress is that, as an open-source and community-built platform, anyone can contribute code to it. Whether it’s small fixes, or big new features, patches can be submitted by anyone and everyone. Once such patch that I submitted was an improvement to the existing export tool that is built into WordPress itself. Unfortunately, that patch has not been merged into core yet and I’m not sure when it’s going to be, so in the mean time I packaged it up as a plugin.

10 December 2014

Introducing: WooCommerce Order Barcodes

A few of the WordPress plugins I have built have been WooCommerce extensions – that is, add-ons to WooThemes’ exceptionally popular eCommerce plugin. Some of these are free, while others are premium extensions available for purchase directly from the WooThemes website. One of these premium extensions that I built is WooCommerce Order Barcodes.

9 December 2014

Introducing: Quick Empty Trash

Find out more about Quick Empty Trash – a convenient way to empty your post trash without breaking your work flow.

8 December 2014

Introducing: Jetpack Contact Form Auto Reply

The first in a series of posts introducing all of the plugins that I have built and published. In this post I’ll introduce you to the why and how of my recently released Jetpack Contact Form Auto Reply.

25 November 2014

How to make your WordPress plugin stand out

So you’ve published your awesome plugin and it’s been downloaded a few times. What next? How do you push things to the next level? How do you make it more attractive to potential users? Here are five tips that I’ve learnt over the past couple of years.

29 October 201411 March 2019

WordCamp Cape Town 2014: Plugin Building Workshop

At WordCamp Cape Town 2014 I presented a workshop on building your first WordPress plugin. It was a pleasure to share my experience with everyone who attended the workshop and, as I promised at the end of the workshop, here are a few links regarding what we learnt.

26 February 201416 July 2015

A complete, versatile options page class for any WordPress plugin

Building an options page for a plugin can be a daunting prospect, so here’s a single class that will help you to create a versatile and user-friendly options page for your plugin that fits neatly into the WordPress dashboard.

26 February 201416 July 2015

WordPress: Add items to the ‘At a glance’ widget

The WordPress dashboard includes a handy widget that displays some brief information about your site at a glance – this snippet will show you how to add your own custom post types to that widget.

21 February 201416 July 2015

Snippet: Check for the latest WooCommerce version

With WooCommerce 2.1 having just been released, you’ll find that a number of functions that you have been using in your plugins and themes have now been deprecated in favour of better and more aptly named functions. Here is a simple function that checks if a site is running the specified version of WooCommerce or higher.

27 November 2013

Developing the future of podcasting

Almost exactly a year ago I released Seriously Simple Podcasting, a podcasting plugin for WordPress that does exactly what it says on the tin – makes podcasting simple. Now the time has come for a massive overhaul of the code – the end result of which will be v2.0 of the plugin.

26 April 2013

Seriously Simple Podcasting – User Survey

Since my podcasting plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting, has become relatively popular I am doing some customer research for the next steps for the plugin’s development. Any answers you can give will be invaluable.