Seamless and intelligent collaboration and version control for writers is hard to come by – even with WordPress 3.5 it’s cumbersome and anything but elegant. Sure, with the next release of 3.6 we’re going to see some dramatic changes that will up the collaboration features greatly and that’s going to help a lot but I think it might be a good idea to look at what Draft is doing and see how they have created a fully-featured (and trim) solution that’s got me thinking big. I got a sweet email a few hours ago from the founder citing the already-overwhelmingly […]

The largest update so far in the history of Pippin Williamson‘s Easy Digital Downloads plugin was released this morning – and the epic list of revisions and additions is intense. As he shares, the biggest change is the checkout page which sees a much improved user interface and experience. A new RESTful API has also been introduced with new fee classes, improved ability to provide discount codes, reporting and export capabilities, and smaller less noticeable changes. Many of this community is already aware of the quality work that Pippin does and are already updating as we speak – if you […]

But not by much. If you’ve been watching Core trac and the proposed schedule then you would have known that Beta 1 was supposed to be done today. Not a big deal but’s it’s important to know why, as Mark Jaquith explains: Our original schedule had us hitting beta 1 today, March 13th. We’re not quite there. Beta should mean that we’re feature complete, and we’re not. We could do what we’ve done in the past, and declare a beta, while continuing to do feature work, but that just devalues the meaning of “beta”. I want people in the WordPress […]

Wow, now this would be something sweet and you’ve got just a month to get in your application as they close it April 15th. So you’ll want to jump on it! It’s paid by the way, so that’s straight-up legit: As a paid intern, you’ll be working on a range of projects depending on your skills & passions — everything from doing development work on plugins that improve WordPress functionality for large media companies to working on core WordPress.com features and development. Last year, our interns had a great time developing code for WordPress.com that launched and is still in […]

I get pinged at least once a week, if not a few times during a week, about plugins – which ones they should use, download, and how many a blog or WordPress website should have. Ultimately, there isn’t any exact science to these questions but there are some general principles that seem to be agreed upon by those who work with WordPress professionally. I wanted to post simply here so as to direct people to this so they can have their questions answered succinctly, especially around performance and security. The question usually is asked like this:

As you know we’ve previously covered more than a handful of CMS solutions, some which also include blogging features. We do this so that we can continue to be present in the much-larger conversation of digital publishing and blogging so that we all can benefit from best practices, innovation, and be spurred on by a little healthy competition. To be sure there are plenty of CMS and blogging applications out there that are looking pretty lame and that aren’t worth covering as they don’t push us or push the technological envelope for all to achieve greater things. But occasionally we’ll […]

We’re stoked as WordCamp Atlanta (it’s completely sold out!) is just a few days away – it’s getting hot and heavy as we’re preparing not only our talks (most of this team is scheduled to speak) but also organize the event and speaker / VIP party after. Yikes – lots to do and lots to get ready. Even my wife is working (hah…) and coordinating the afterparty – it’s been a rough couple nights if I can be completely honest. In addition, we’re expecting more of our staff that are from out of town to show up too, including our […]

Evan Solomon has been busy and his busyness hasn’t been without cause and value. A few months ago he shared a new project with the world, a “helper” with deployment called Scatter. The idea was to create a support mechanism that would help you deploy your code via a custom script for different projects. You can use any system you’d like, by the way, making it easy to access the custom script as you need. It’s basic design is to help keep your deploy and web code separate. In addition, it’ll make it easy to access one or the other […]

Although you may already have some opinions on the new and upcoming yearly theme, Twenty Thirteen, perhaps it was just the color that was the most “dramatic” for you. Well, if you’re not a fan of the orange then Otto has a solution – go blue folks, go blue:

Many of us will do whatever it takes to simplify the rote systems and processes that we have to accomplish on any given day – this is why many of us subscribe to different philosophies of GTD and try many of the different and varying mobile and desktop applications that help us accomplish things faster, better, and smarter. It’s those types of applications that I really like coming into our inbox since time wisely-saved is time available for more fruitful endeavors! Chris Chaudruc is a man to be thanked because he’s created the first iteration of a new WordPress-powered serviced […]