Daniel Immke has published his own primer on using native user interface elements for the administration of plugins. By following his basic primer, you’ll be on your way to creating a plugin that looks and functions as if it were a part of the core of WordPress which is what plugin developers should be aiming…
In-depth article by Siobahn McKeown that breaks down how commercial plugin developers are monetizing their efforts through the WordPress.org plugin respository. The article covers the guidelines that plugin authors should follow, examples of successful plugins as well as plugins that didn’t meet the guidelines, and various ideas plugin authors can try. One of the things…
WordPress consultant, Konstantin Kovshenin has published an excellent guide describing what theme/plugin lock-in is and how to avoid it. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a long time but have never been able to put into words for a post. The biggest culprit in my opinion when it comes to lock-ins are…
Dev4Press has an interesting post that contains performance benchmark numbers that show just how much of an impact certain plugins have on loading times within WordPress. Amongst the 35 tested plugins are bbPress, W3 Total Cache, WooCommerce and a few of the plugins developed by Millan. I as well as many others were shocked to…
@WraithKenny – #WordPress plugin repo should have a favorites button. – via Twitter Now THAT’S a good idea! Stretch it further by giving us the option decision to make our favorite lists private or public on WordPress.org. There are all sorts of things you can do from there on in.
Making the rounds on Twitter today is a WordPress plugin called Dashboard Site Preview that allows you to preview your website from the WordPress dashboard. The plugin was created by 10 year old, Jesse Friedman who goes by jesseenterprises on WordPress.org. According to Brad Williams, this guy attended WordCamp Philly in 2011 and used what…
With the Santa hat on, Matt Mullenweg has decided to try out an experiment specifically for plugin authors and their respective plugin pages. He’s decided to give plugin authors a little more control with regards to how their plugin pages look by offering them a chance to upload a 772 x 250 pixel image that…
David Decker has published his list of seven cardinal sins that he’s run into when diving into the localization/internationalization of plugins and themes. For beginners who want to start making it easy for others to localize their code, you should read this article on the Codex entitled, Translating WordPress. While David didn’t chastise developers for…
Scott Reilley who also goes by Coffee2Code is continuing his trend of releasing small but useful plugins for niche audiences. This time, he has released a plugin called No Browser Nag that removes the Outdated Browser nag found within newer versions of WordPress. While it’s a bit foolish to condone the use of outdated browsers,…
Congrats to Donncha O Caoimh for releasing version 1.0 of his popular caching plugin, WP Super Cache. The release is an incremental improvement over previous versions but contains a number of bugfixes and new features such as a “Delete Cache” link within the admin bar. Back in 2009 when the plugin was first released, it…
Comment administration within WordPress has come a long way. As illustrated by Lorelle VanFossen, the comment administration panel these days has 18 different features for comment management. While the current iteration of comment management features are great, there is one particular quick link that I hope gets added in a future version of WordPress. It’s…
SmashingMagazine has a great article that covers some tips on how WordPress plugin authors can create better readme.txt files. While the code within the plugin is important, the readme.txt file is what users are going to encounter first. It’s the means by which we discover plugins within the repository so it’s important that relevant information…
Some interesting numbers have been published by Dev4Press.com which show just over 50% of sites reporting data back to the WordPress.org mother ship are registering as using version 3.0. 10.8% for 3.1 and 16.2 percent use 3.2. When looking at the big picture, those are terrible numbers. That 50% number would ideally be 3.2 but…
Siobhan McKeown has published a disturbing yet not out of the ordinary article that explains how a couple of plugins were recently added to the plugin repository that were using a version of J-Query from J-Query.org which after investigation proved to be a fake website. The purported J-Query file was actually propagating sites with CPA…
One of the terms you’ll hear a lot within the WordPress community is Metaboxes. These boxes are what users interact with the most when using WordPress. For instance, when writing a post, you interact with the Publish, Categories, Tags and if need be, Post Format metaboxes. If you are a developer or consultant, the chances…