WordPress News

The best WordPress plugins

Brian Krogsgard

May 1, 2015

Rob Neu wrote a ridiculously long, but very high quality, listicle of the best WordPress plugins "since the dawn of time." I don't agree with every single one of his picks, but he has tested them all and they definitely each…

Obox enters exclusive agreement with Envato to monetize Layers

Brian Krogsgard

May 1, 2015

I covered Layers, by Obox, when it launched. The page building theme showed promise, and it was a big hit during launch. It was downloaded thousands of times, due in part to a very successful run on ProductHunt. They blogged about…

There is no fold

Brian Krogsgard

April 29, 2015

I know my readers are smart enough to know that "the fold" doesn't really matter on the web. But that doesn't mean all of your clients know. I created a post with links to good resources on the fold in…

Automatically expire passwords for WordPress users

Brian Krogsgard

April 29, 2015

Security

Frankie Jarrett has created yet another handy plugin, this time to auto expire passwords for users of certain roles based on a customizable number of days. This plugin could be handy for organizations that require password resets, or just for…

Replace media sitewide

Brian Krogsgard

April 29, 2015

Sometimes I run into a plugin that really blows my mind with how useful it is -- especially when it's also free. The Enable Media Replace plugin is active on over 100,000 websites and has been on the plugin repo…

Sync adds customer maintenance reports to their site management tool

Brian Krogsgard

April 29, 2015

Business

iThemes Sync has a decent amount of competition between ManageWP, Jetpack Manage, and others that offer site management services that allow you to manage and update themes, plugins, and WordPress core. But they've recently come out with a feature that…

Slurped data from the WordPress theme repo

Brian Krogsgard

April 29, 2015

Aaron Jorbin created a script to download every theme from the WordPress theme repository, and Devin Price has used the script to slurp some interesting data from those themes. For instance, he guesses that ~17% of themes utilize Underscores as…

WordPress REST API 2.0 Beta 1 released

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

It's a big day in the land of the WordPress REST API. Beta 1 of the 2.0 branch -- the one that will be proposed for core -- has been released after many months of development. Twenty three contributors are…

Hosting giant Endurance slammed by “independent research” company with suspect motivations

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

Hosting

I looked into this story for hours, and have concluded that the doomsday scenario described in the headline on Business Week and the report by Gotham City Researchers are exaggerated at best. Gotham City Research publishes these reports depicting crash…

WordPress 4.3 kicking off

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

WordPress 4.3 lead Konstantin Obenland has created a kickoff post for the release to highlight some areas of focus. The first meeting for the release will be tomorrow, and the target release date is August 18th. There will be about two…

Working with transients

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

Transients have been relatively common practice for some time now. On CSS-Tricks, Scott Fennell gives a very thorough walkthrough if you still aren't comfortable with them.

A problem with the theme customizer and child themes

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

In response to the recent change to require the use of the customizer for theme options, Puneet Sahalot brings up an issue with the way saving options works by default when using the customizer: To use the Live Preview feature, we…

Advantages of ems and rems over pixels

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

Design

I've long preferred a mix of ems rems (and percentages for that matter) over pixels in web design and front-end development. However, some of the original reasons have gone away as browsers have gotten smarter. Yet, Vasilis van Gemert has collected…

WordPress zero day vulnerability on comment text patched in 4.2.1

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

HostingSecurity

Many readers have likely heard by now that WordPress 4.2.1 is out (and probably already patched on your installs). The patch is in response to a zero day vulnerability reported by Jouko Pynnönen of Klikki. WordPress 4.2.1 includes a check on…

Major Tom to slug control

Brian Krogsgard

April 23, 2015

Mark Jaquith has released an early version of a plugin to convert WordPress post slugs into more logical units. It does things like replace symbols with words, break out contractions, etc. I love this idea, as someone who often fails to…

Test your i18n knowledge

Brian Krogsgard

April 23, 2015

The Automattic engineering team has a fun quiz to test your i18n (internationalization) knowledge. I'm curious how everyone else does, but the point is to learn. Take it!