The WordPress theme review process has become notorious for the sometimes long delay between making a submission and receiving approval. This waiting period is often understandable, given the vast array of new themes that are regularly submitted, but it doesn’t help when you’re trying to push your new product live quickly. With that in mind, the new Trusted Authors Program looks to fast-track developers of reputable standing, so their themes can be approved quicker. The hope is that waiting times will drop overall, while the directory and its offerings still maintain the high-quality WordPress is known for. This post will […]

According to Built With WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce solution used by shop owners. And the reasons are quite clear it’s free, flexible, simple to use, and has great documentation. It’s no wonder so many people use it! Though the plugin is incredibly full-featured, it can’t help in terms of shopping cart abandonment. In fact, a study by Barilliance shows that on average 78.65 percent of all carts are abandoned. In this article, we’ll show you how you can recover lost sales by saving and viewing abandoned carts and return customers who have abandoned their shopping carts by sending […]

It’s only recently occurred to me that I’ve been doing WordPress, PHP, and JavaScript development for a while. In the last 5-6 years, I’ve learned some best practices that are no longer the best. For example, state management — the practice of putting all of the dynamic values of your application — a user inputs to a form, the current page’s posts, etc. — in one place, was not common. Now, I can’t imagine life without all of my state in one place. When I started writing JavaScript, if I needed to know or update the value of a form […]

If you’ve never heard of ‘wireframing’ before, now is the time to learn everything you can about it. This technique for developing the structure and format of your solutions should be a vital piece of your overall development strategy. That’s because it’s a path to creating fuller-featured and more stable WordPress plugins and themes. For example, having a wireframe in place before you crack open your code editor gives you an overview of how your final design will look and provides a further opportunity to refine its User Experience (UX). Of course, UX is one of the most important aspects […]

Love it or loathe it, Gutenberg is here to stay. As such, getting your WordPress themes and plugins to work with the new editor should be a primary concern. Truth be told, if you’re only just thinking about this aspect now, you’re cutting things pretty close. However, there’s still enough time to prepare your products, especially with some third-party help. Daniel Bachhuber’s Gutenberg-related projects have been featured on the Torque blog previously, and this is another one that warrants attention. Tweaking your plugins to be compatible with Gutenberg could prove to be a tricky task, but the Gutenberg Migration Guide […]

If you have put in a lot of effort into your search engine optimization, you might be afraid that your efforts will go down the drain if you switch hosts. So does hosting affect SEO? Yes, it does. Web hosting for SEO is a critical factor for your rankings as it affects essential attributes such as the speed at which your site loads as well as the up and downtimes. Here are some of the changes involved when switching web hosts and how they affect SEO. Nameserver Change Simply changing nameservers should not result in any changes in your SEO […]

In March of this year, Iain Poulson published a post on the Delicious Brains blog called “Hey WordPress Plugin Developers, Stop Supporting Legacy PHP Versions In Your Plugins.” I agreed, and am a WordPress plugin author, so I read it and wished people would listen and moved on with my day without taking any action. Later, when we announced we were dropping legacy PHP support in Caldera Forms, I cited that post as one reason for the decision. I’m being honest here, I was going to wait for someone else because I was worried that if I dropped support for […]

The world is in the early stage of the so-called ‘fourth industrial revolution’, a time when technology is changing at a pace never before experienced. In the last decade, we have moved from mobile phones to smartphones and from virtual assistants to digital assistants, not to mention everything in between. As things progress in the digital realm, it is clear Artificial Intelligence will have an ever-increasing role to play. This is the case across every aspect of our lives, from driving cars to marketing products. Across the world, forward-thinking developers are incorporating AI into their online products, either directly into […]

It’s possible to get an ecommerce operation up and running in minutes on WordPress with the aid of plugins like WooCommerce. From there you can start accepting online payments using Stripe, PayPal, 2Checkout, and a myriad of other payment gateway services, some of which don’t even require shopping carts. One drawback, however, is that not every payment method is valid in every territory, and some customers may be hesitant to hand over their credit card details. This is where Bitcoin comes in. It can be utilized as a payment method from anywhere on the globe, and any Bitcoin paid to […]

Facebook offers a lot of different opportunities for online advertisers these days. With so many options available through a single website, it is easy to get confused and overwhelmed when trying to figure out which route is best for your advertising efforts. If you are new to digital advertising or Facebook as an advertising platform, this can be even more difficult since you are likely unfamiliar with the advantages and disadvantages of each option. It is impossible to cover every single type of advertising channel Facebook offers in a single post like this. Instead, this article is going to focus […]