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, Justin Tadlock and me. Let…
There has been one of the funniest && geekiest meme ever on Twitter this week-end: #DeveloperMovies, where people suggested movie titles using code. A lot of fun stuff, some clever stuff, various languages. Here are a few of the best things I've found and could understand (I did have to Google a few hints sometimes, I feel like I lack…
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 started, and I mentioning it…
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.