Community Strategy, Open Source & Gaming
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…
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…
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).
As part of a recent Sensei update we added some custom capabilities to the editor role, but we discovered that some people have deleted that role from the database as a way of cleaning up unused data on their sites. This meant that our add_cap() calls were causing fatal errors for these sites. Here’s how we solved this problem for ourselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Find out more about Quick Empty Trash – a convenient way to empty your post trash without breaking your work flow.
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.
“WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” That’s how WordPress is introduced on WordPress.org – a humble introduction for software that powers a huge chunk of the internet. Not only that, but to many people (myself included) WordPress is more than just ‘web software’ – it enables and signifies something far greater than that. This is what WordPress mean to me.
Organising community events isn’t necessarily as altruistic as it sounds – on a personal level I gain a lot from being involved. Here are three reasons why you should do the same.
WordCamps are brilliant. They’re a great time to learn from some awesome people in your local (and international) community in a friendly and relaxed environment. If you’re lucky you’ll generally also get some top notch food, coffee and an after party to remember. But there’s something else that makes WordCamps truly valuable.