Last night WP Beginner sent out a Tweet asking how many plugins people used on their sites. This is one of my favorite questions, simply because I always love to see the response people send back. As I’ve mentioned quite a few times, I’m an avid opponent to the idea that a lot of plugins…
An open source project means that anyone can take and freely modify the source code, and also re-release it as a different product. WordPress is open source, as are the vast majority of WordPress plugins. As someone who makes their living off of WordPress, I have to ask myself the question “is open source right…
Github is a wonderful way to share your projects with the world, as well as a tremendous development tool for developers. This is a simple plugin that will let you display a grid of all users that have made contributions to your Github projects.
One of the most useful functions to both theme and plugin developers, when it comes to working with images, is add_image_size(), which allows you to create additional automatically generated image sizes to the WordPress image upload process.
WordPress includes a lot of helper functions that can make your life as a developer much easier. One function in particular that I really love is add_query_arg(), which provides an extremely simply way to append query variables to any URL. Query vars, in case you’re not familiar with them, allow you to perform any number…
A powerful short code for searching post types and taxonomies.
The WP List Table is what we call the table of data that is displayed when you click on any post type in WordPress. For example, click on Posts and this will display a table listing all of the posts (or perhaps the latest 20) that you have created in WordPress. In this tutorial, we…
Easy Digital Downloads, which is my take on an eCommerce plugin for selling digital products, has been growing rapidly over the last couple of months. In just over three months, it has passed 11.4 thousand downloads and has grown from just 24 downloads per day to nearly 200 per day. Due to this growth, and…
In Episode 8 of Plugin Thoughts, I discuss some of the benefits of creating clean, readable code, and some of the downsides to writing poorly formatted and unreadable code. Whether you build plugins or themes, CSS, HTML, Javascript, or PHP, this applies to you. This entry is part 8 of 9 in the Plugin Thoughts…
I’ve spent a lot of time lately dealing with a little known, under-documented but extremely useful class in WordPress called WP_Filesystem. WP_Filesystem is used throughout WordPress to handle core/plugin/themes updates and various tasks that require writing files to your webserver. The WP_Filesystem class is a base class that has many extensions depending on what ‘method’…
Most of the time I prefer to create my own plugins for advanced pieces of functionality on a site, but when it comes to related and/or connected pieces of content, there is no better plugin or solution than Posts 2 Posts.
There are a lot of premium membership tutorial sites out there, this one included, and they usually require that memberships purchase a subscription to the site in order to access the premium content. In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through the process pf creating an À la Carte tutorial site that lets users…
The Fanciest Author Box plugin is a nice and simple, yet powerful, way to display author’s personal information at the top or bottom of WordPress posts. It’s a great addition to just about any multi-author blog. I was asked to review the plugin by the developers, and after doing so was very pleased. In the…
In episode 7 of plugin thoughts, I show you a demonstration of just how much CSS you don’t need to write for your WordPress plugins. WordPress core has a very large amount of CSS and you can utilize it when developing your plugins. This entry is part 7 of 9 in the Plugin Thoughts Series
The Stripe API includes a system called “webhooks”, which are used for notifying your site of events happening in your Stripe account, such as received payments, account creation, customer cancellation, etc. One of the first features you will find webhooks are useful for is sending payment receipts, both for one time payments and recurring subscription…
