Extendability and flexibility are two of the main reasons for the success of WordPress. Because you can find WordPress themes and plugins en masse in the official directory, the CMS lets you build pretty much any type of website you want. No doubt about it, the WordPress directory is a central part of the WordPress ecosystem. However, it is far from the only place where you can find WordPress components. By now there are many other places that offer themes and plugins. To give you a better understanding of who they are, in this blog post we have compiled a […]

Publishing an open-source WordPress theme sounds relatively simple if you follow the steps provided in the Theme Developer Handbook. However, what happens once a piece of code breaks the theme, while you’re in the middle of developing another feature? Without a way to easily track and manage code, your theme may soon become unorganized and unwieldy. Version control enables you to track changes to your WordPress theme so you can revert to a previous iteration when something breaks. You can also work on new features in one place while fixing bugs for old versions in another. In this article, you will […]

One of the many ways we’ve talked about Gutenberg is comparing its usability to CMS’s like Medium. This comparison assumes that the primary reason that Medium is often a go-to for blogs is the quality of the interface. With this in mind, it’s logical to assume the reason people sometimes choose Medium over WordPress is the quality of their writing experience. I’m not arguing that Medium’s writing experience isn’t excellent. It is, and I enjoy reading the site lot. At the same time, people seem to be employing tweetstorms more and more. I know plenty, from personal experience,  about how […]

What began as a blogging platform 14 years ago now powers 28 percent of the Internet, and even the world’s biggest superstars trust WordPress to run their websites. These are the biggest musicians using the CMS. Beyoncé Queen Bey herself uses WordPress, and honestly, I could stop this article right here. Beyoncé uses her site to house links to her music, tour, shop, and more. Jay Z We complete our music royalty with Jay Z. The famous rapper’s site is laid out like a museum for all things Jay Z. Look at his music, art, shop, and more, all in […]

Like most people in the WordPress world, I have no formal training with programming. My educational background is explicitly transdisciplinary. As a result, I learned a lot about how to learn things. This has helped me a lot with educating myself in web development. I’ve written before about how teaching is part of my learning process. But, I have not written about the earlier part of that process — actually acquiring and practicing the skill. This article is more about process than anything. This is something important to me because I had a lot of trouble learning to read when […]

Though WordCamp organizers try to keep events as inclusive as possible, the truth of the matter is, not everyone can afford to travel to attend one. Unless you have one right in your city, you’re looking at paying for travel, food, and accommodations. For a freelancer or small business owner, this can be a lot to ask. That’s why Happiness Engineer at Automattic, Ines van Essen created DonateWC. The initiative looks to utilize the most important part of WordPress, the community, to send those who can’t afford such an event to a WordCamp. According to the website, “All donations will […]

‘Metadata’ is additional information about a site (or individual posts) stored in your WordPress databases, such as the author or post date. Without an understanding of how to use metadata, your themes may not utilize everything WordPress has to offer. You can improve your WordPress themes by learning to use the appropriate metadata for your posts. For example, in an outdated theme, having the post date format hard-coded means your client won’t be able to modify it from their WordPress admin area. In this article, we’ll explain what exactly post metadata is. Then, we’ll show you four ways to add and […]

The decoupled or “headless” CMS is rising in popularity among developers because of its capabilities for innovation, flexibility, and future-proofing. Building WordPress-powered websites via the WordPress REST API and the Create React App is a relatively new, but very powerful phenomenon. During the 2017 WP Engine Summit, Phil Crumm, Director of Strategy at 10up, and Weston Ruter, the CTO at XWP, discussed how to take advantage of headless WordPress, create meaningful user experiences, and harness all of the capabilities of a decoupled infrastructure. How do we define Headless? It can be difficult to define Headless because there are many varying […]

All developers spend a lot of time debugging code. The thing that makes this frustrating is that it isn’t always obvious what the exact problem is, and people are left guessing. As someone who provides support for WordPress users for all experience levels, I hate saying “something is wrong, we’re going to have to do some work to find out what something means” but too often that’s what I have to do. This has put me on a mission to find better ways to discover these problems fast. In this article I want to share some cool stuff we built […]

Organizing a WordCamp is no easy task. On top of a full-time job, side projects, and a social life, it can take hundreds of hours to put such an event together. After a three-year hiatus, organizer Ryan Hoover is helping to bring WordCamp Austin back. It’s a labor of love Hoover has been a co-organizer of the Austin Meetup group and helped out with the Austin and San Antonio WordCamps, but this is his first time organizing a WordCamp. “As we talked about how to bring back WordCamp [Austin], I was the one who had the interest and the flexibility […]