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

WordPress, you use it, you love it, wouldn’t it be nice if it would also buy your beers and some more? Over the recent months, a site that can make you big money has really found its audience, from a clever promising idea to an active community of users. I’ve already mentioned it when it [...] → Read more

As a sequel to my previous post about the number of functions across WordPress history, let's talk now about files and sizes. Through the 54 releases to date, WordPress has grown from an immature toddler to a big healthy kid. The following graph shows the evolution of the zip archive size and the total uncompressed [...] → Read more

A few fun and useless facts I collected while mining through 54 WordPress releases, from 0.7.1 to 3.0.1: The latest version of WordPress, 3.0.1 as of publishing, has 3240 PHP functions defined. The first version (0.7.1) had 309 Across all WordPress versions, 3920 PHP functions have been defined and used On average, each ".X" release [...] → 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

Weeks ago, Ronald Huereca sent me a complimentary copy of his ebook WordPress and Ajax and I finally took some time to read it. I knew Ronald can craft good things (you've read stuff from him on WLTC) so I was curious but, hey, a whole book just about Ajax? Five word review Did not [...] → 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