As most people in the community know, over the last few months things have pretty much gone to shit in WordPress-land. Every time you think it can't get any worse, it somehow manages to. WP Engine won their preliminary injunction against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, which meant that about a week ago, the status quo was mostly put back in place - that meant, amongst other things, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was returned to its rightful owner, WP Engine, and the loyalty checkbox on WordPress.org was removed (and then strangely replaced with a pineapple on pizza pledge box instead). Most ...

A few weeks ago, I sat down with my WordPress installation to see how difficult it would be to actually use a different API endpoint entirely instead of the default WordPress.org site. As others have pointed out, there are roughly 1,500 hard-coded WordPress.org links throughout the code, pointing to various API endpoints and reference documentation. What I discovered is, despite what some people are parading online, that there is no real easy way via the code to swap out the API entirely. In fact, the HTTP API within WordPress is probably one of the least useful APIs in terms of being able to ...

We just did a quick update to WordTwit to include support for the Ow.ly service, and also fixed a few old bugs (the most important of which is the weird one involving encoded characters in the update message). The WordPress repository is updated, so you should see it shortly. That is all. ...

We whipped together a little script to scan the WordPress plugin repository for common errors. You can check out the end result here. Hopefully plugin developers can use it as a resource to improve plugins and let them be used by a wider audience. If you click the link and it doesn’t work, try again in a bit — I’ve been having a few server problems today. ...

Tons of new changes. Read about them here. ...

A few years ago I sat down to write my very first WordPress plugin, and ended up writing Crossroads. My goal at the time was to integrate Flickr comments into the normal comments on my blog, which was something I ultimately did. Unfortunately though, some of the limitations of the Flickr API made that feature fairly slow to use, and so it’s something I ditched on my own blog a long time ago. A few days ago I sat down and started working on version 2.0. It’s a 100% complete rewrite, which given the state of the old code is definitely something that’s going to improve it. I’m writing it ...

I posted an article about QR Codes a few months ago. QR Codes are two-dimensional barcodes that can contain a great deal of information in a relatively small area. They are heavily used in Japan, and are slowly starting to gain traction in other parts of the world. One of the best uses of QR codes in my mind involves the inclusion of QR code hyperlinks in printed media. That way a user could be reading a poster or a paper version of an article and still be able to navigate hyperlinks using their phone. Typically this is accomplished using a QR code reader on a cellular phone, which causes the ...

Well, this is interesting. I gave a few individuals an alpha version of the Viper Cache plugin I’ve been working on. It has just been reviewed on Anieto2k, one of the largest plugin sites. The author compared it against all the WordPress plugins available today for caching. The full write-up is available here. The article looks like it is in Spanish so you’ll just have to settle for the pictures. Based on a few guesses in the translation, it looks like Viper Cache is the lowest in memory out of all four, and allows around 1330 pages per second on the test machine compared to the second place ...

A few days ago, Flickr gave me the not-so-subtle warning that my account was about to expire. Since I’ve had a pro-Flickr account for a full year now, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share my thoughts on the service so far. Flickr sort of came to the limelight about 18-24 months ago as one of the leading websites that had real Web 2.0 technology. If you haven’t been there you should definitely check it out. Most of the website utilizes Ajax and as you use it, sometimes it feels more like an application than a mere website, and that was really one of their original selling points. Most ...

A few months ago, I wrote a flickr plugin for wordpress that integrated with a few different image galleries including Lightbox and Greybox. As last count, 126 different blogs were using the crossroads plugin to show their flickr images in their posts. While updating my blog theme last night, I realized one of the current problems I have with most of the themes I downloaded. Typically, a theme will present the full content of a few blog entries on the main page. A few of the “cooler” themes I’ve seen only show one post on the main page, which is sort of a neat idea if you don’t write very ...