Developer User Group: Bending WordPress to Your Will
I gave a talk at the Cape Town Branch of the Developer User Group this week that covered the basics of getting started with WordPress development. I have given this…
Tag: Plugins
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…
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Introducing: Quick Empty Trash
Find out more about Quick Empty Trash – a convenient way to empty your post trash without breaking your work flow.
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.
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.
Setting up my WordPress development environment
Plenty of posts have been written about setting up a local development environment for WordPress, but when I moved to a new Macbook (running OS X Yosemite) I couldn’t find a post that contained all the instructions I needed. After some searching I got everything up and running and thought it would be worthwhile to share my process and tools here for posterity.
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.
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.