WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 was released tonight right on schedule. The release haiku pays tribute to the new features-as-plugins approach to core development: Alphabet soup of Plugins as features galore The future is here In stark contrast to 3.7, where many of the greatest improvements were under the hood, WordPress 3.8 incorporates a number of…
Browsing ManageWP.org, I came across a submission that piqued my interests. George Kordas, an interactive designer and front end developer based in Melbourne, Australia, submitted a project to the creative social network Behance.net. WordPress Admin Theme Redesign is the name of the project and it shows a fresh new perspective on what the WordPress backend…
For years, I’ve been telling WordPress users that the day we can control when and where widgets are displayed is the day WordPress takes a huge leap forward. I always thought instead of having a WordPress theme with sidebars of widgets displayed on specific posts or pages that it would be better if we could…
Today WordPress.com announced that the platform now supports Markdown, the plain text to HTML conversion tool. The syntax was created to be easy to read and easy to write and is rapidly gaining momentum among online publishers. Support for Markdown has also been added to WordPress mobile apps, which will make it much easier to…
Yesterday John Blackbourn publicly released Query Monitor, a brand new debugging plugin for WordPress. Query Monitor gives developers an easy way to monitor database queries, hooks, conditionals, HTTP requests, query vars, environment, redirects, and more. The repository is trending on github today as more WordPress developers are discovering it. There are many excellent debugging tools…
Tamper-evident seals are common in the marketplace for physical goods. They instantly boost consumer confidence, because nobody wants to buy the peanut butter that has already been sniffed and tasted by a total stranger. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an equally easy way to tell if WordPress files had been tampered with or…
Nearly a year ago, Chris Wallace proposed that the WordPress core adopt a CSS Preprocessor to help move admin UI CSS into the future. Including a CSS preprocessor allows developers to speed up tasks with the use of variables in stylesheets. Variables will make tasks like reskinning the WordPress admin a breeze. Wallace argued strongly…
Today was an important day for moving forward on the WordPress 3.8 project schedule. The merge window is now closed for new features, which means that all the main features included in this release are set. There were no surprises during the regularly scheduled WordPress development chat. All of the expected plugin candidates made it…
During Matt Mullenweg’s keynote speech at the Joomla World Conference this past weekend, he announced the date WordPress 3.8 would be released. The magical day is December 12th. It’s not that the release date was a secret, considering the project schedule was published before development got started. It’s just that for as long as I…
This past weekend Matt Mullenweg joined Joomla fans and contributors for the second Joomla World Conference in Boston, MA. Mullenweg gave the conference’s closing keynote on Sunday and shared some insights gained along the way on his journey with WordPress. During his presentation, Matt highlighted the mission of WordPress: Democratizing publishing by making it easy…
Last week WordPress.com released Writr, a beautiful free theme that really puts your content in the spotlight. The tumblelog style is perfect for power bloggers who like to utilize post formats for different types of content. The good news this week is that Writr is now available for self-hosted WordPress sites via its new page…
For the past two years or so, Hotfix has been one of those essential WordPress plugins that many users have added immediately upon installation. This plugin was created by Mark Jaquith in early 2011 to provide early, automatic fixes for WordPress based on the version you’re using. He created it during a time when WordPress…
Some dogs are just plain naughty. Mine is 100% mischief so naturally I’m a pretty big fan of Dogshaming.com. I was thrilled to find out that this popular site is running on WordPress. Inspired by her own naughty pup who chews holes in underwear for kicks, Pascale Lemire originated the online trend of “dog shaming.”…
Earlier today, I read an article that took all of the hard work volunteers completed for inclusion into WordPress 3.8 and flushed it down the toilet. The main reason for their criticism is that WordPress is boring. The software is not changing enough to keep pace with competitors such as SquareSpace, Ghost, or Medium. The…
WordPress 3.7 made big strides towards helping users create stronger passwords with the new password strength meter, powered by the zxcvbn library. Despite having this excellent tool available, many users have admitted that they are in fact too lazy to come up with a strong password and would prefer to have a password generator available…