2012: a Year in Review

2012 has been a great year for me. I expanded my plugin development business, I started a large community-driven plugin project, I contributed to WordPress core and plugins that were not mine, and my wife and I started a family by bringing our first baby girl into the world.

The Status of the WordPress Plugin Business

I have been doing WordPress plugin development as a business for about two years now. When I first started, by releasing my very first plugin on Code Canyon, it was very much a side project that brought in a little side residual income. Today, I make 100% of my needed income and more off of…

Custom Taxonomy Friendly Archives

I do not write about themes very often, but I have just published a tutorial over at WP Explorer on how to ensure that your theme’s archive files work well with custom taxonomies. As a plugin developer, I get frustrated at times when I have a plugin that utilizes custom taxonomies and I get support…

Featured Comments Plugin

Featured Comments is a great little plugin that lets you easily feature and / or bury comments. The idea is to emphasize comments that you want to stand out and to hide (bury) comments that have little or no value. When featured, comments will get a new “featured” class added to their HTML. When buried,…

New Microblog for Bad Code

As a WordPress.org plugin reviewer, someone that writes a lot of plugins, and someone that does a lot of support for more than 4 dozen plugins, I see a lot of bad code. Tonight I started a new micro blog specifically for showcasing some of the “gems” I’ve come across.

Build a Search Logging Plugin

Knowing what your users are searching for can be extremely useful and important. In this members-only tutorial we’re going to look at how to create a simple search logging plugin that will record every search query performed on your site. We will be using the WP_Logging class that I released a week or two ago…

Review: MyMail Email Newsletter Plugin

MyMail  is an email newsletter plugin written by revaxarts that provides you a complete system for creating newsletters, collecting subscribers, building campaigns, and more from within your WordPress Dashboard. It is a fully featured email newsletter plugin, including autoresponders, that gives you the power of a system like Mail Chimp, except without a subscription and it’s…

Hide wp-login.php with Restrict Content Pro

With membership sites, it is very common that admins want to hide the default WordPress login screen and force users to go to a custom, front-end login page instead. Restrict Content Pro has an option that makes this really simple to do. This entry is part 7 of 22 in the Customizing Restrict Content Pro…

Full Screen Background Images Pro Gets a Slide Show Option

Full Screen Background Images Pro is a plugin I wrote to add full screen background images to your website. It allows you to set as many images as you want across your site and also lets you set specific photos for individual pages, posts, categories, etc. Two days ago I pushed out an update that…

Stripe Integration Part 8 – Working with Invoices

The Stripe invoice system allows us to easily add charges to our existing customers subscriptions, such as one time sign up fees, extra monthly charges for new features, or anything else. Just like every other feature in the Stripe API, it’s extremely simple to use, and in this part of the Stripe Integration tutorial series…

WP_Logging – A General Use Logging System for WordPress

WP_Logging is a general use logging system that I have written for WordPress. It was first written for my Easy Digital Downloads but I have adapted it for general use. The main idea behind the class it to provide a simple solution for logging events, actions, errors, etc, inside of your WordPress plugins or themes.

bbPress – Private Replies Extension

I run several support forums on the bbPress plugin and one of the issues I have constantly run into is how to provide a good way for users to post private information in their support threads, without having to email it or open a private ticket in a separate system. In order to solve this,…

I Wrote Some Really Dangerous Code

Sometimes when looking back at something I wrote in the past, perhaps two years ago, I discover some really terrible code I’ve written. Some of it is simply poor quality with really bad formatting, and some of it is outright dangerous from a security point. This evening I discovered some of that “dangerous” code inside…