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.[...] → 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

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 […][...] → Read more

In case you haven't noticed, and chances are you didn't notice because actually I didn't really mention it anywhere, updates from Planet WordPress are also on Twitter: @planetwp. Follow![...] → Read more

The essence of plugins is giving to WordPress users more control over their blog, that is, most of the time, more options. Typically, a plugin adds a page under the Settings menu, where you can modify the options (see this article on register_setting() for best practices). But if you think about multi user blogs, it […][...] → 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![...] → Read more

I've recently moved to WordPress an active community site which is run and moderated by several editors and administrators. Each post gets dozens of comments, and I wanted to highlight those made by staff members. What not to do If you've googled a bit for a solution on how to identify authors' or admins' comments, […][...] → 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

By Joel Fisher in the wp-hackers mailing list: I in fact choose to use a coffeemaker to boil vegetables. Why? Because if I used something else that just makes coffee, my client would ask me "Can it boil vegetables?". WordPress is a powerful and flexible tool. Period. I love this :)[...] → Read more