WordPress News

The latest How I Built It…

Brian Krogsgard

May 5, 2017

The latest How I Built It Podcast features Shawn Hesketh and goes into how WP101 was put together. There are some nice tidbits here, including Shawn talking about his recording setup, for you gear heads.

Business in a Box is a…

Brian Krogsgard

May 5, 2017

BusinessHosting

Business in a Box is a new small business eCommerce toolset from Paypal, and they have partnered with WooCommerce and Xero to provide a bundle to those looking to setup eCommerce sites. Michael Steele goes into more detail about it,…

MailChimp is offering their marketing automation…

Brian Krogsgard

May 5, 2017

MailChimp is offering their marketing automation features for free for all MailChimp users. Besides using this to build an email list, you can accomplish tasks such as following up on purchases, sending order notifications, and recovering abandoned carts. It's amazing…

James Laws talks about how about…

Brian Krogsgard

May 5, 2017

James Laws talks about how about the impact of automatic renewals over at Ninja Forms. The switch from products to subscriptions has been only been active for a half month, but James is already noting a "4x increase in renewals…

DreamHost is the first host to offer Jetpack commercial option en masse

Brian Krogsgard

May 4, 2017

HostingSecurity

DreamHost has announced a new benefit for DreamPress customers: all customers can get Jetpack's commercial version -- including VaultPress backups and Akismet spam protection -- included in their plan for no additional cost. The deal was structured between Automattic and…

Maintaining Legacy WordPress Websites — Draft podcast

Katie Richards

April 30, 2017

DraftPlanet

In this episode, Brian and Joe discuss maintaining legacy WordPress websites, including how to decide between third party code vendors.

Reliance on third party code

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2017

One of the most challenging components to making decisions in web development is determining when and how strongly to rely on code written by other people. Most of the code we rely on for a website was written by someone…

WP Sent Mail is a commercial…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

WP Sent Mail is a commercial WordPress plugin made by Objectiv that logs outgoing emails. The plugin is able to save an exact copy of outgoing emails (including attachments) and has an "airplane mode". It's a handy looking plugin to…

Lara Hazard Owen reports on Nieman…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

Lara Hazard Owen reports on Nieman Lab about the new Wikitribune, a project by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) to, "combat fake news." This project, because it's a wiki-based concept, got me thinking about what role a platform plays in the…

Here’s a unique plugin: Better Plugin…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

Here's a unique plugin: Better Plugin Recommendations for WordPress. It removes the default featured and recommendations tab in the backend WordPress "Add Plugin" screen. It then replaces the recommendations tab with plugins that Nick Hamze hand selects. Joey Kudish assisted…

If you’ve ever wanted to add…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

If you've ever wanted to add something to the "publish box" in the WordPress editor, it's not as hard as I would've anticipated. Mika Epstein shows how in a recent tutorial, which is cool, because I was just thinking recently…

Speaking of Nick and Mika above,…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

Speaking of Nick and Mika above, I followed along with an interesting Twitter thread of theirs today, because it turns out the official WordPress Shopify plugin is no longer in the directory. I haven't yet dug into the specifics of…

I enjoyed a post about how…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

I enjoyed a post about how The New York Times handled unprecedented traffic during the electron night in the US last year. The Times encountered an, "8,371 percent increase in the number of people visiting the site simultaneously." Today, they…

WooCommerce 3.0 has been on the…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

WooCommerce 3.0 has been on the scene for a short time, and Codeable has a nice guide to successfully upgrading to it. Spyros Vlachopoulos covers a variety of the new features, including the CRUD commands and WP-CLI, but more importantly,…

Hidde de Vries writes about how…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

Hidde de Vries writes about how to make error messages accessible. He covers three areas for improving on this for accessibly: identifying errors as errors, notifying the (screenreader) user of new content and describing what happened in clear language.

Scott Bolinger has written an extensive…

Brian Krogsgard

April 25, 2017

Scott Bolinger has written an extensive guide to help developers speed up WordPress sites on mobile devices. This is especially important, because as Scott points out, "sites usually load slower on a mobile device because they don’t have as much…