This year, WordCamp Tampa is teaming up with Happy Joe to present WP BootCamp, a workshop to help teach WordPress to U.S. veterans. This day-long seminar kicks off on the first day of WordCamp Tampa, which runs from September 25-27th at the USF’s Marshall Student Center in Tampa, FL. If you know of any vets that might be interested, please help spread the word. “Our objective for launching WP BootCamps is to educate thousands of our military veterans with the incredible opportunities available to them in WordPress and the web tech industry,” James Dalman told Torque in an interview. Dalman, a U.S. Army […]

Can WordPress make you sweat? Absolutely. Just ask anyone who attended WordCamp Europe a few weeks ago in Seville. The weekend saw temperatures swell to nearly one hundred degrees (or forty degrees for our friends using Celsius). Beyond temperatures, the material at this year’s WordCamp Europe was equally “hot.” Speakers like Matt Mullenweg, Karin Christen, and Becs Rivett turned up the heat with insights that are sure to set the WordPress world ablaze over the next few months. For those who didn’t attend, here are five things you missed: Ethics and Social Responsibility Ethics and social responsibility aren’t exactly the first […]

Email remains one of the most effective marketing tools. Having a direct channel for connecting with your audience is a priceless way to bypass all the noise on the Internet. Among the many email marketing providers is MailChimp. The service is a favorite for bloggers and small businesses. And the best part is, it completely free to use up to 2000 subscribers. In this article we will go over the basics of using MailChimp for email marketing. Our goal is to help you create your very own MailChimp account, start collecting email addresses on your website, send out your very first email campaign, […]

I think most people my age have fond memories of playing with Lego sets as a kid. I remember building tower after tower, again and again. It made for hours of enjoyment. What I think is most remarkable about this toy is how limitless it is. You can create anything you want, and, with enough blocks, you can keep building and creating as far as your imagination will take you. Throw in a few themed sets and the sky’s the limit. Now as an adult, I recognize the infinite learning potential Lego gives my kids. But I can also see […]

This year at WordCamp Miami I had the pleasure of meeting John James Jacoby, or JJJ. Many of you may know him as the man behind BuddyPress, but I got to know him for another, older project, that he used to be involved with, BackPress. The more I learned about BackPress, the more I became intrigued. That’s when JJJ and I started talking about the revival of the BackPress project. The BackPress Back Story BackPress started its life as the foundational library of WordPress. It was more or less the wp-includes directory, which granted access to all of the php functions that […]

“Just for once, I would like to rank first place in Google.” How many website owners have thought that to themselves? Probably most of them. If not all. No wonder. Search engines are a major source of traffic and ranking high in the search results means more visitors, more customers, and more revenue. Luckily, a number of tools out there can help your WordPress site rank better and get more love from Google. So, without further ado, here are the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools for 2015. All-in-One SEO Solutions Search engine optimization is not just one thing. It […]

Most of the discussion around the WordPress REST API has been about querying the default routes. In that sense, we’re treating it as a monolithic API—like the Twitter API, for example. The truth is, however, that the WordPress REST API is not one API, but millions of highly customizable APIs, which can also be leveraged as a tool for making APIs. Yes, it comes with default routes, but, by necessity, those routes are a compromise between tens of millions of sites, including many that haven’t been made yet. Just like WordPress isn’t just the global WP_Query object, the REST API isn’t just the default […]

One of the core aspects of the WordPress platform that we all know and love, is it’s emphasis on freedom and transparency, and an open dialog between platform, developer, and end user. With these freedoms comes the opportunity to develop software in whichever style one chooses, with any customized interfaces or stylings. With great power comes great responsibility. Over time, overly-complex interfaces and code structures can create high maintenance, as well as a not so extensible, structures for other developers to integrate with. Today, I’ll be running through a few core concepts to apply when creating your WordPress plugins, to […]

At the recent WWDC, Apple made several huge announcements. These included the new version of Mac OS, named El Capitan, as well as Apple’s new streaming music service, and a lot many other things. One such announcement was related to Apple’s flagship web browser: Safari. The new version of Safari will have many changes and features in store for web designers and developers alike. What sort of changes and new features can we expect from Safari 9? In this post, I will attempt to answer this question. Safari 9: What’s in Store for Web Designers and Developers? Unprefixed CSS and […]

Question: Which plugin appears first in Google when you type in “WordPress SEO,” has over one million active installs, a 4.5-star rating in the WordPress directory, and is a regular on the favorite plugins list? If you just answered “WordPress SEO by Yoast,” you would be correct. The plugin by team Yoast is one of the best plugins out there. It is powerful, offers tremendous value, is meticulously updated and supported and used by literally hundreds of thousands of users. That includes me. I have the plugin installed on basically all of my blogs and client websites. However, with its […]