InstantWP is a free tool used to quickly and easily create a WordPress testing environment. It ships with everything you need to get a local install of WordPress up and running. Apache, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress 3.6 are prepackaged. You may be wondering why WordPress 3.6 is installed and not the latest version. Seamus Brady,…
In the old days, WordPress theme developers used to build loads of specific functionality into their themes, i.e. recipes, portfolios, testimonials, analytics, fundraising capabilities, custom post types etc. Commercial theme providers competed fiercely with one another to see who could pack the most functionality into their offerings. Many companies sought to become a one-stop-shop for…
I never used to pay much attention to WordPress’ Distraction Free Writing mode. When the feature landed in WordPress 3.2, I thought I’d never use it. I was so used to the post editor screen as it was that I thought I was able to tune out all the extra noise related to content creation.…
WordPress.org user profiles already display a user’s activity, plugins and themes they’re associated with, and their favorite plugins. What if data from WordCamp.org could be displayed as well? If this sounds interesting, keep an eye on the Make WordPress Community blog. Ian Dunn has begun the process by asking what kind of data to display…
Eric Mann has put a proposal together for an editor that works offline and would synchronize to WordPress once an internet connection is established. The idea is that if there is no internet connection, you would still be able to create posts or pages and edit existing content. Those changes would then be synchronized with…
Mark your calendars for Tuesday, Feb 25th. WP Elevation will be hosting WP Think Tank, a panel discussion about the future of WordPress. The event will take place live on Google Hangouts at 8PM UTC and participants will be able to join via a chatroom and ask questions. Inspired by topics that have come up…
Did you know that WordPress has built-in support for finding and using special characters in your content? This was news to me, after noticing a tweet from Mel Choyce, inquiring if anyone ever used the feature. The replies indicate that most have never used it. But what if that’s because nobody knows it’s there? After…
It wasn’t long ago when I could count the number of core WordPress committers on one hand. These days, it’s hard to keep track of who does and doesn’t have access. In fact, some developers are getting temporary access for release cycles to work on specific features. I remember in 2010, community member DD32 or…
A suspicious request has been circulating via email, soliciting WordPress.org plugin authors to give a third party write access to their repositories. The originator of these requests goes by the username bestweblayout on WordPress.org and operates the bestweblayout.com domain. The issue was first reported by WordPress user FractalizeR, who posted the contents of the email:…
If you visit make.wordpress.org/core, you’ll find that there’s a new greeting in place. This addition is part of Andrew Nacin’s most recent round of updates for WordPress contributors. The greeting serves to introduce visitors to the development blog and weekly meetings, and also helps to quickly funnel bug filing and contributions to the appropriate screens.…
Tom McFarlin has published an awesome blog post about developer’s tunnel vision. The gist of the post is that although Markdown is a simplified markup language that makes it easier to format and style content, it shouldn’t be forced onto users. In the post, Tom goes on to say: To that end, I will always advocate…
The Widget Customizer plugin is now cleared for takeoff and will land in WordPress 3.9. During the core development meeting today, the plugin was approved to be merged into the WordPress trunk. The days of editing widgets blind will soon be over, as widget editing with live previews will now be a native part of…
Did you know that you can set up notifications for topics on WordPress.org? Sign in to your account and then navigate to your notifications by visiting: http://profiles.wordpress.org/username/profile/notifications/ Once you are there you can create new notifications by adding a search string for a topic that you’re interested in following. The “notification name” field will be…
The Internet is made up of millions or perhaps billions of websites. To visually put the Internet in perspective is difficult. Martin Vargic also known as The9988 on Deviantart.com has published a miniscule portion of what he thinks the Internet would look like on a world map. Martin states that 1.0 is not the final…
A few days ago on Twitter, I noticed an interesting tweet by Themelab inquiring about the W.org domain. Since when did @WordPress get the http://t.co/t8ZkKybZ0w domain? Just noticed it. — IsItWP (@isitwp) January 28, 2014 Matt Mullenweg has a history of acquiring great domains. In 2009 he announced he had obtained the only two letter…