October 2013 • Page 4 of 4 • Post Status

WP Remote enters the WordPress website management big leagues

WP Remote has had a few years to grow and mature since its inception in 2010. For an interesting backstory, you can read the history of WP Remote. WP Remote was a free product for years. It was a solution from Human Made to scratch an itch. It’s always been supported, but only more recently received their full attention.

This product has iterated, grown, and improved consistently for a long time. And their hard work is paying off. WP Remote is now quite polished, still free for basic features, and very affordable for advanced features.

Today, the Human Made team is announcing a new WP Remote.

An all new WP Remote

WP Remote has been completely redesigned, from branding to app interfaces; but the simplicity that has always been WP Remote’s best feature is still dominant, despite the now significant power of the app.

WP Remote also has an amazing new API. How can I say it’s amazing, you say? Well, it’s true, I haven’t used the code myself. But WP Remote does. In fact, they use the WP Remote API to run the WP Remote app itself. Check out the API features and documentation to see what you can do with it in your projects.

An example use case for the API, where it’s used in a completely different way than the web app, is the WP Remote CLI, a command line site management tool inspired by the WP CLI project.

WP Remote commercial plans

With the new WP Remote, they’ve added some commercial features.

Internationalization (i18n) and translation is one of those fuzzy gray areas for many of us in the WordPress community, especially amongst Americans. We’re simply not very accustomed to a multilingual society, therefore we sometimes erroneously don’t think about internationalization of our code and translating our projects to other languages.

But WordPress is 20% of all the web, not just the English speaking web. People all over the world benefit enormously when developers offer their projects in a variety of languages. In fact, a third of all WordPress installs are non-English.

A primer on i18n

There is a difference between being “translation ready” and actually supporting languages. To be translation ready, you need to have used proper internationalization in your code itself, and then create files with all of your strings ready for translation. This process is called localization (l10n). That’s what POT (.pot extension) files are.

Here’s a quick rundown of the files in play:

POT: Portable Object Template – a file with all i18n ready strings.
PO: Portable Object files – a file with the translated strings and English strings.
MO: Machine Object files – a PO file converted to a format optimized to be read by machines.

There are a few ways to create POT files, but Tom McFarlin does a great job showing direct steps for doing it one way. I’d love for people to add their favorites to the comments. The Codex also has tools listed for translating WordPress, and 3.7 will have i18n tools included in core. They’ve been public for a long time, but as Nacin noted to me, “no one knew where to find it [the POT creation script]”. I’ll have more to say on i18n and core that I’ll cover in the next couple of weeks.

Retroactive Composer support for WordPress with ComposerPress

Tom Nowell has created a project called ComposerPress which analyses an existing WordPress install … Read more

Take the WordPress economy survey

The folks behind Pressnomics are asking business owners to fill out a survey to … Read more

Markdown tools for bloggers

I’ve written an introduction to markdown as a language for writing for the web, … Read more

Polish your code

If we can polish a turd, we can polish our code. Your code doesn’t … Read more

Top ten search terms for themes on the MOJO Marketplace

Here’s a quick but interesting little post. MOJO Themes has shared their top ten … Read more

OptinMonster aims to be the dominant WordPress conversion plugin

WordPress lead generation or conversion plugins are not typically my type of thing. In fact, I’ve hated every instance I’ve ever seen of them. But Syed Balkhi and Thomas Griffin have created OptinMonster, their take on a WordPress conversion plugin that I don’t hate.

That’s a strong compliment for this kind of plugin from me.

Syed is the founder of WP Beginner, and Thomas created Soliloquy. I’ve met these two guys and I like them. They do good work, and they excel in their respective crafts. You should learn more about Syed and Thomas in their interviews on the Matt Report. When I sat down with Syed in Birmingham a couple of months ago, I tried to poke holes in his product, calling out all the things that bother me about lead generation plugins. And he shot down my critically assuming questions one by one.