WordPress News

Be a leader, not a boss

Brian Krogsgard

February 20, 2015

Another Medium post that caught my attention. The author heard someone actually say, "How do you make programmers in a startup work 60–80 hours a week?" The purpose of the post was best described by the image used. There are…

A/B test suspicion

Brian Krogsgard

February 20, 2015

What an A/B test doesn’t show, though, is how much a customer hates you for it. …it misses the human element. I could not agree more. A/B testing is awesome, but consider the humans.

Putting commercial plugin code on Github is not a change in “business model”

Brian Krogsgard

February 20, 2015

There has been a lot of talk lately around putting commercial plugin code on public Github repos. #thankspippin. Seriously, thanks. This is a good conversation to have. GravityView is the latest plugin to make this change. I'm pleased to see…

Press This and Customizer Theme Switcher slated for WordPress 4.2 merge

Brian Krogsgard

February 19, 2015

During the weekly core dev chat, held on #core of chat.wordpress.org, two feature as plugins candidates were up for merge consideration: Press This and the Customizer Theme Switcher. Both candidates were given conditional approval, meaning they are now preparing patches…

A user in total control is a designer’s nightmare

Brian Krogsgard

February 19, 2015

In an outstanding piece on Smashing Magazine, Matej Latin discusses balancing options versus decisions for product design. WordPress gets nice marks in the blog post for making smart decisions, thankfully. I like the usage of various applications as examples -- from…

Find shared terms

Brian Krogsgard

February 19, 2015

The other day I talked about term splitting and how it's getting fixed in WordPress 4.2. Today, Josh Eaton -- a web developer and partner at Reaktiv Studios -- has some code available to find and list shared terms. This…

Cedaro

Brian Krogsgard

February 19, 2015

Design

Keep an eye on Cedaro, the general purpose "playground" by the folks of Blazer Six. I discovered Cedaro last week using magic tricks, and asked Brady Vercher about the project. We enjoy the technical aspects of design and development, so…

Layers, by Obox, introduces a beautiful page building interface

Brian Krogsgard

February 19, 2015

DesignPlanet

Layers is the latest WordPress theme with page building as the core feature. Obox has made a heck of an effort to ship 1.0, and while I have some issues, I'm incredibly impressed with the overall user experience. I think Obox has created something that's worth checking out, though I think this market has plenty of maturing to do yet.

Wikimedia, Automattic, and others file amicus in Twitter privacy case

Brian Krogsgard

February 18, 2015

Security

Automattic joined Wikimedia, Medium, and other organizations in filing an amicus brief regarding Twitter's National Security Letters lawsuit against the US government. https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/567857616006676480 This is all a bit confusing, but the brief opens in this way: We are small Internet companies…

How Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace square up against WordPress

Brian Krogsgard

February 18, 2015

Over on the OSTraining blog, Steve Burge does an analysis of public data to try and determine the number of websites that Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace actually have, and questions whether they are legitimate threats against WordPress. Steve's process is…

WordPress 4.1.1 maintenance release

Brian Krogsgard

February 18, 2015

WordPress 4.1.1 was released today with props for twenty one WordPress contributors, including the late Kim Parsell. The updates will roll out over a twelve hour period. According to lead developer Dion Hulse, over 99% of updates in the first five…

Pickle is another WordPress restaurant solution

Brian Krogsgard

February 17, 2015

Design

Pickle is a project by Jason Schuller that offers both a hosted and self-hosted solution for WordPress restaurants. It's heavily focused on design and simplicity. I can't help but wonder why there is so much focus on restaurants in this space.…

WordPress.org theme visualizations

Brian Krogsgard

February 17, 2015

Kelly Dwan has a two-part post with some visualizations on the popularity of WordPress.org themes. These are some neat charts with valuable insights for anyone making free themes. I can't really do justice by showing my favorite parts, as there's…

A 7 year old WordPress bug fix

Brian Krogsgard

February 17, 2015

WordPress is an eleven year old application. Sometimes code can be introduced that ends up causing major headaches. Moreover, it's not always a simple process to fix; in fact it can be really complicated. Term splitting is one such bug.…

The commoditized state of web design

Brian Krogsgard

February 17, 2015

BusinessDesign

There has been a great deal of talk in general web design circles regarding what some call the commoditization of web design. I have many opinions on this, but they boil down to the part where I feel some agencies…

WordPress talent shortage versus WordPress pricing

Brian Krogsgard

February 17, 2015

Andy Adams (a Post Status Patron!) has written a great post, where he discusses the perceived WordPress talent shortage that exists today, as well as the perception of WordPress developer skills by potential clients. Andy is a Rails developer and a…