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 size: In the early days,…
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 (2.1, 2.9…) introduces 225,2 new…
My practice and what I recommend doing when coding plugins is not to bother about backward compatibility, to always code for the latest stable release available or against the trunk version, and not to support plugins coded for old, deprecated and insecure versions of WordPress. This said, there can be situations where you need to backport something, or to make…
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 updated my YOURLS: WordPress To…
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 plugin. After a quick web…
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? Six word review It did not waste my time! 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.
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 headers. If you're a WordPress…
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 of HTML and CSS. How…
Justin Tadlock just sent out a funny and honorable tweet: This is honorable because, yes, everybody was a clueless noob at some point and that's something to be remembered when you're asked what looks like stupid questions. Even when it seems like a trivial waste of your time, your answers might help today's noob become tomorrow's leet. And this is…