Tech

Cool tools and tech talk for designers, developers, and engineers working with WordPress.

Creating a widget

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Brian Krogsgard
Widgets are one of WordPress's most powerful features. They are very easy to create but are often created in a wrong way. This posts explains the how to create a basic widget the right way.

Automate Git to SVN with Scatter

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Brian Krogsgard
Evan Solomon has completely rewritten a command line automation tool for deploying to SVN with Git. It's called Scatter, and it looks pretty awesome. He's also got usage examples and a fully updated readme. This looks like a nice way…

WordPress theme design trends for 2013

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Brian Krogsgard
Simon Ward, of Pingable, shares 20 design trends he sees in WordPress themes this year. I think his take is mostly accurate, even if I'm not a big fan of some of them. h/t Mike Schinkel.

A case against shortcodes

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Brian Krogsgard
Tom McFarlin has written a thoughtful article on WordPress shortcodes, and why he generally doesn't like them as a method for enabling custom content functionality in WordPress. I left my own thoughts in the comments of his post.

Never load jQuery from Google in themes and plugins

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Brian Krogsgard
If Pippin reminds us to not dequeue the WordPress version of jQuery in plugins and themes enough, maybe people will eventually listen. This goes for custom client sites too, in my opinion. For the minimal savings, it's just too much…

Introduction to pluggable functions

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Brian Krogsgard
Rakhitha Nimesh has done a nice job on wpTuts+ with his introduction to using pluggable functions in WordPress. I personally tend to prefer filters for adding flexibility in my projects, but there are times where a custom pluggable function is…

Site showcase: Batman News

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Brian Krogsgard
Here's an awesome WordPress site to check out: Batman News. It's a blog about all things Batman, and it is pretty awesome. I think it's really well designed and put together. It was built by Brady and Brody Vercher, of…

ProductPier wants to be the host for WordPress eCommerce stores

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Brian Krogsgard
I recently found this teaser page for a service called ProductPier, that's aiming to be a go-to hosting solution for WordPress eCommerce stores. They list WooCommerce, Jigoshop, Shopp, WP E-Commerce and Cart66 as supported platforms on the landing page. I'm…

Lisa Sabin-Wilson on CodePoet, DradCast

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Brian Krogsgard
Lisa Sabin-Wilson is a partner at WebDevStudios, and the author of multiple WordPress for Dummies books. She's given a very nice interview on CodePoet, and she'll also be hosting the DradCast WordPress podcast tonight with Brad Williams and Dre Armeda.…

Genericons

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Brian Krogsgard
Genericons is a 100% GPL icon font by Automattic. It's in use with twenty thirteen, and I'm excited about it. It looks like a great option for most themes that need fairly few, simple icons. I'll be bundling this with…

WordPress user registration options with pros and cons

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Brian Krogsgard
Cristian Antohe has published a pretty nice walkthrough of various user registration plugin options with pros and cons for each. Personally, I use Gravity Forms User Registration module, but it's nice to see what else is out there.

Sidebar navigation is back

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Brian Krogsgard
As WP Lift proves with this list of themes, sidebar navigation is back. Some of these are beautiful, but it makes me kind of sad to see there are a few leaders taking risks with their themes, but many, many followers.

Automate WooCommerce order status changes

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Brian Krogsgard
Chris Lema has posted a nice tip for automatically changing WooCommerce order status when some orders a product. It's especially useful in his context, as he sells digital downloads, and there's no waiting period between processing and completing the order.
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