So, peeps, I have good news and bad news. And by good news, I mean super mega hyper exciting announcement. The good news: three persons, carefully handpicked among all the three most important people in WordPress, are writing a book, I mean, THE book, on WordPress Plugin Development. These three fine chaps are Brad Williams, [...] → Read more

The bad news: in 8 days as of writing, Twitter will be shutting off basic authentication for third party applications. No more entering your login/password, but a more secure OAuth system that redirects you to Twitter’s site and confirm you’re allowing access to your account. All this, honestly, kind of sucks. The good news: I’ve [...] → Read more

I honestly don’t give a whatever to soccer and the ongoing World Cup, but for the last few days I received a few really hilarious emails with pics mocking the South African vuvuzela (for a great inspiration and laugh, the dedicated subreddit is a good start) I could not miss the opportunity for a silly [...] → Read more

There’s a cool (and underused by plugins) API in WordPress: the Transients API. Transients are temporary options, ie options set with an expiration time. Anytime you’re storing options and they have a short life span, you should use transients instead. Share This Related posts WordPress Themes with an Admin Menu (10) WordPress Theme Toolkit Upgrade [...] → Read more

Matt Harris, Developer Advocate at Twitter, posted in the wp-hackers mailing list some important information about the Twitter API. In substance, On the 30th June the Twitter REST API will stop supporting Basic Authentication and instead switch to OAuth. This means all user authenticated requests to the API must be OAuth signed, preferably using OAuth [...] → Read more

A few days ago, Twitter published a new tool that lets you embed a tweet on your site, simplifying the old school way: take a screenshot, crop the picture, upload it, embed it. The problem is: this Twitter tool is way too lame. Basically you need to cut and paste a lengthy code snippet full [...] → Read more

Christmas is around the corner, so how about a little giveaway? I feel like offering one of my readers a copy of The Smashing Book (313 pages, paperback, full-color images on coated paper, seems like a pretty book indeed). Drooling yet? Enter the giveaway! Share This Related posts WordPress Plugins Meme, and Contest (0) State [...] → Read more

A few months ago (yeah, that long) I was asked by Packt Publishing if I would like to review a copy of WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide by Vladimir Prelovac. Needless to say, I thought this could be fun and interesting, so I jumped on the occasion, and finally found some time to read the [...] → Read more

As you may know already (and if you don’t, dude, follow me) I was one of the judges in the WordPress Plugin Competition held by Weblogtoolscollections. The podium for this year’s comp has been finally revealed so, as promised, I’m now publishing the 43 reviews of the 43 contestant plugins. Warning: this is going to [...] → Read more

Short intro for readers who don’t follow me or this blog’s feed: I’ve been a judge in the annual WordPress Plugin Competition, and as such I have reviewed a number of plugins. Read more about this. As promised, I’m going to share a list of the most common mistakes, errors, misunderstandings, bad habits or wrong [...] → Read more