WordPress News

What is Code?

Brian Krogsgard

June 12, 2015

"What is code?" Paul Ford answers the question, with a 38,000 word masterpiece in Bloomberg. This is the first article I'd tell an aspiring programmer to read, and the one that anyone working in technology should have in their permanent collection.

Results of a WordPress maintenance survey

Brian Krogsgard

June 11, 2015

Jenny Beaumont did a survey of 124 professional WordPress service providers in May and has published the results. 77% of the people she surveyed offer long term maintenance for their clients, and they offer a variety of services, using a variety…

Port settings from the Settings API to the Customizer API

Brian Krogsgard

June 11, 2015

Chip Bennet has a tutorial on Make Themes that outlines how to port from theme settings pages using the Settings API and into the customizer. The Customizer API has the option to store settings in the options table, which the…

Moving Dashicons from an icon font to SVG

Brian Krogsgard

June 11, 2015

Design

Mel Choyce has started the conversation on Make Core to change WordPress's Dashicons icon font to SVG: In the next couple months, we’re going to focus on converting the Dashicons icon font in core to SVG. The process of adding and…

Web pages are now 2MB on average, and it’s largely because of images

Brian Krogsgard

June 11, 2015

Business

The steady climb in average website sizes isn't stopping. And according to Tammy Everts, more than 60% of page weight today is due to images. As internet users, we crave images — the bigger, the better. Site owners play to…

Dealing with ROT content

Brian Krogsgard

June 11, 2015

Design

A lot of big websites have ROT (Redundant, out-of-date, trivial) content, and it can make maintaining and improving websites incredibly difficult. If you've ever worked on a website with a few thousand pages you know what I mean; but the…

A review of WP Rocket

Brian Krogsgard

June 10, 2015

A number of Post Status members have talked in Slack about WP Rocket, discussing whether it was a worthwhile caching solution. Steven Gliebe tested it for his new Pro Plugin Directory project. He shows the graphs and summarizes like this:…

A series on the Google Maps API and WordPress

Brian Krogsgard

June 10, 2015

Tom McFarlin has started a series on using the Google Maps API (or rather a collection of API's) with WordPress. What I like about this series is that Tom is being incredibly thorough by not just showing the how but…

Twitter and WordPress — going beyond 140 characters

Brian Krogsgard

June 10, 2015

Chris Sacca is one of Twitter's largest shareholders. He's a billionaire that's gotten really lucky, is really smart, or both. He also owns stock in Medium and Automattic (ugh, in the post he just says "WordPress"). Anyway, he has opinions…

Responsive image brainstorming

Brian Krogsgard

June 10, 2015

I enjoyed Morten Rand-Hendriksen's self-proclaimed "Morten thinking out loud" posts on responsive images in WordPress. As Morten notes, the responsive images community group is working on a plugin that may become a WordPress feature plugin proposal for core some time…

Quick tip: Disconnect Jetpack from the WordPress.com side

Brian Krogsgard

June 10, 2015

Planet

Before now, deleting Jetpack enabled sites from WordPress.com was pretty hard unless you were in the WordPress admin. Now you can finally do it from the WordPress.com side, which is nice when the site no longer exists.

The third step for shared terms: elimination

Brian Krogsgard

June 9, 2015

You may even call it... termination. Okay, I'm sorry. This is from Boone Gorges: Work on the taxonomy roadmap, started in earnest during the 4.1 dev cycle, continues to chug along for WordPress 4.3. We’ve been focusing on the elimination…

NUX: New User Experience versus Novel User Experience

Brian Krogsgard

June 9, 2015

Andy Skelton discusses two types of NUX: New User Experience and Novel User Experience. (NU)X is the experience provided to new users. (New User)’s Experience N(UX) is when any user experiences something unfamiliar. Novel (User Experience) “NUX” commonly means (NU)X. We…

Goals for live previews in the customizer

Brian Krogsgard

June 9, 2015

In a Make Core post co-authored by Ryan Boren, Helen Hou-Sandí, and Sheri Bigelow; they attempt to highlight some bigger goals for live previewing WordPress websites via the customizer. One of the most important things in WordPress is users being able to…

Cowboy coding as a service

Brian Krogsgard

June 9, 2015

WP IDE is a service to take "WordPress development to the cloud." It's a bit facetious of me to call it cowboy coding as a service, but it's what it reminds me of. It's made by a guy named Wesley…

HelpScout over forums for customer support

Brian Krogsgard

June 9, 2015

Syed Balkhi explains why he thinks HelpScout is a better option than forums for customer support, and gives insights on how they do customer support for OptinMonster. I got some good value from his tips on mythbusting the forum value-add.…