Looking to build a native mobile version of a WordPress blog or site this year? We all know that there is nothing stopping the growth of mobile and it’s something that every site owner has to consider constantly as they seek to provide the best experience for their users as well as engage potential customers. But building a native mobile application isn’t necessarily easy nor can it be entirely cheap – not as cheap, say, as downloading and installing WordPress onto your own server cheap! That’s why it’s great when we come upon open source frameworks built for mobile application […]

WordPress has been accepted as a mentor for the Google Summer of Code, 2013 which is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for *gasp* open source projects! Naturally, it makes sense that WordPress provide some level of mentoring and coaching for the youngins to get their feet wet. The student list is growing at a fast pace – now it’s time to get the mentors in line. This means that Jen Mylo is looking for you: IF you have worked on an assigned feature team in one of the last few releases, you can be a mentor, […]

A lot has changed since I first jumped on to the web; I can still remember watching the Netscape browser icon rotate and shine at me as I waited eagerly for some random .gif to load (perhaps it was the dancing banana or some flaming horizontal rule gif on a website). I remember the rise of the Web 2.0 movement and how every corporate enterprise was high as fudge on “getting in” with it, without really knowing what they were really doing. I remember working during those years of Technorati and Flickr dominance and thinking meta data, meta data, meta data (all […]

Now this is some big and very sweet news – audio and video support has been added to core, courtesy of the incredible MediaElement.js library. John Dyer, the man behind MediaElement.js, is someone I’ve known for many, many years and is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met – I don’t say that flippantly or facetiously, he really is that smart. But besides his brilliance he’s got a great heart – one that’s been giving back to the open source community for sometime. For his MEjs library to be included in core is a huge plug for not only his […]

Working with WordPress at any development level requires that you get your hands a bit dirty; PHP-dirty that is. And if you’re serious about developing apps on top of WordPress then you’ll need tools and packages to get your work done – which may include refactoring apps that help you move faster through tons of code. This automatic refactor for PHP generates diffs that describe the refactoring steps – this, naturally, prevents simple mistakes during refactorings and automates it. Simple concept but the combination of libraries that they’ve included may make it worth a few moments of your time to review: […]

1.7 is now out and it’s called “Totonno” and apparently it’s the best version ever. They’ve been hinting at it for quite some time (although it’s not like it’s a secret or anything) but with your WordPress theme compatibility now active you won’t have to dig or search for a BuddyPress theme anymore. This is a significant boon for site owners as the paring down of things to check-off in terms of compatibility is a huge win. Better group management and administration also received a big boost with better and more powerful ways for members to connect. You can bulk-delete groups, […]

Or at least look at the following infographic. This decision-making tree, although a little funny and naturally silly provides an interesting perspective into the psychology of that “next great website or app” – if it wasn’t funny then it wouldn’t be somewhat true, right? One of the most common things that happens when I go publicly speak about entrepreneurship or startups is I get a lot of 1-on-1 feedback from people who “have a great idea” but who don’t have the necessary skills to pull it off. A question that I generally ask them in the front-end of this dialogue […]

As shared first on WP Realm, there might be a new take on the local meatspace experience for WordPress – that is, another format for those interested in gathering to hang out, talk about, and even hack WordPress: The WordPress community in Portugal is starting a new experiment, calling it the WordPress Residency: a week-end for WordPress enthusiasts to meet and and generally get to know each other. It sounds like the start of something interesting. And it really does. What you get is the opportunity to hang out for much greater and more intimate time with other WordPress junkies, […]

I’ve been looking for a killer combination of the comment layer of WordPress blogs and making these sit also in a forum environment too. There are a number of systems and solutions that do this – for example, I’ve played around with Vanilla Forums for quite sometime and their WordPress integration feature has become better and better over time. What Vanilla Forums does is provide a way for users to comment on the blog post and then mirror these comments into a direct forum where the conversation can live in parallell as well as persistently. There are a lot of reasons that […]

We shared the news a little while ago about Tung Do’s DP Dashboard and it got a lot of attention as well as both a handful of “heck yeahs!” and “um, I hate this” responses. Tung has taken all of that on the chin and responded very positively, continuing to move forward in his project and taking the great pieces of feedback that was received in the v0.1 release. This one, called Haymaker, sees an incredible update with the design and actually does see some “Wow!” factor in terms of look and feel. This new admin theme, called Hunter, see auto-updates, media […]