Easy Digital Downloads started as my own personal project but has quickly moved to a community project. There are more than 23 developers that have contributed code to the project, and many other developers, users, and designers that have contributed in other ways. One of the ways that I hope to actively promote further community…
There is a terrible, terrible practice among theme developers to remove some of the default filters that are applied to post and page content. The goal in removing these filters is to fix formatting problems with short codes, primarily column short codes. If you have ever done this, or would like to know why you…
Mike McAlister published a phenomenal article this evening titled “You Can Do Better Things”. It is targeted at the WordPress theme design / developer industry and really hits the nail on the head. There is a problem that many theme and plugin authors face that one might call “buyers’ demands”, and it’s the idea that…
Occasionally a plugin is released that really excites me. Today that happened with the new plugin from Kathy Darling called “Nav Menu Roles”. It’s a really simple plugin that makes it possible to restrict nav menu items to users of a specific role, and it works really well.
The vast majority of WordPress plugins function as stand alone “systems” within WordPress. By this I mean that most plugins run more or less by themselves and do not interact with other plugins running on the same install. Depending on what you’re plugin does, this can definitely be a good thing, as you do not…
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…
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…
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
Easy Translation Manager is a plugin developer by the Right Here group and is a plugin for easily translating the content of your website into multiple languages. It can handle plugin, theme, content, and menu translation and is, overall, a very robust and quality plugin.
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at WordCamp Kansas City titled “Modular Plugins”. The talk was focused on the idea of writing extensible code when building plugins. I’d like to continue a discussion of the same topic here.
The official website for Easy Digital Downloads, a plugin for selling digital products, has just gotten a large redesign. The new design features a much simpler layout, better flow of information, and overall better visual appeal.
WordCamp Kansas City, 2012, was this past weekend, and I presented on Modular Plugins. The general take away from my presentation was that WordPress plugins should be developed with extensible code that allows them to be modified and interacted with, without ever changing core plugin code. Keep reading to view the slides from my presentation.
