If you hadn’t guessed it already, I really, really love WordPress plugins. I love writing them, using them, reviewing them, and everything else involved with plugins. There is just something about them that really excites me; I always love writing new plugins. I’d like to explore a few of the reasons why I have so…
Closed Beta is a WordPress plugin that makes it really simple and straight forward to allow beta access to your website. With the plugin, you can restrict access to the site to only approved users, let users request access, moderate beta access requests, and show a really nice splash page to non-approved users.
Have you ever pushed out an update that included modifications to scripts or styles and then later had to tell someone to clear their cache or do a hard refresh in order to see the updates? There is actually a very simple way to avoid this scenario and force the browser to display the updated…
During the WordPress Community Summit, Otto announced a new Amazon-like review system for themes and plugins hosted on the WordPress.org repositories. This new system now requires users to leave a review of the plugin or theme before they are allowed to give the plugin or theme a star rating. I’ve recorded a quick demonstration video…
When you build a plugin or theme, I’d encourage you to really think about whether your settings page is really needed. Have you added the settings page just because it’s the normal thing to do? Maybe because users expect there to be a place to go and “configure” the plugin? Perhaps you just didn’t think…
bbPress includes a feature that allows users to subscribe to forum topics, meaning that anytime a new reply is posted to that topic, all subscribed users will receive an email alerting them of the reply. bbPress does not, however, provide an option to customize the contents of this email, so that’s what this extension for…
If you have ever written a plugin that uses any form of Javascript, you will probably have come across the problem of passing configuration options from PHP to Javascript. Take an image slider plugin, such as Soliloquy for example: most likely there is a settings page of some kind that lets the user set the…
In the previous part of Creating a User Follow System, we looked at the basic shell functions that we need to write for our plugin to function. Now we are going to get into actually writing those functions. We will go one by one and write each one from scratch. Also note that we will…
As of yesterday, I have joined the WordPress.org plugin review team. We are the group of people that moderate all of the plugin submissions to the official plugin repository. This is a volunteer position, but one that I’m very happy to be helping out with.
Part 1 of the User Follow System series looked at laying out the main structure of the plugin. For part 2, we’re going to continue that and lay out the main skeleton functions that we need for our plugin. These will include the functions for following a user, unfollowing a user, checking if a user…
Writing clean code is something you should always strive for in your WordPress projects, and you should always do what you can to adhere to the WordPress Coding Standards. I tested out a really awesome tool today that you should seriously consider adding to your workflow if you are a Sublime Text 2 user.
One of the best feelings that one gets from being a developer is the sense of elation that comes with finishing a product. You make the last change or addition to the code and that particular key stroke designates the product as done (at least for that version). Once complete, the code sits there unchanged,…
Most event calendar plugins are either way too simple, or extremely overly complex and bloated. Sugar Event Calendar is designed to be simple, light weight, and provide just the major features you need for event management.
A giveaway for Easy Digital Downloads extensions and themes is being held from now until the 10th of October. Three winners will be chosen at random once the giveaway is over. There are two themes and three commercial add-ons up for grabs, so get your entries in for your chance to win!
This plugin will enable a simple short code that you can use for embedding Google Maps in any WordPress post or page. The short code uses the WordPress HTTPS API and the Transients API for delivering cached maps with little to no impact on your site’s performance.
