Supporting the WordPress community at Automattic
Earlier this month, I chaired a panel at WordCamp Cape Town that was all about contributing to WordPress. As I wasn’t answering the questions on the day myself, I thought I’d pick out a few of the interesting ones and answer them here.
With Seriously Simple Podcasting crossing 35,000 downloads and v1.8 of the plugin being released recently it was high time that I put together complete documentation for it. After spending some time building the site that you can now find on my new docs subdomain I thought it would be valuable to share the tools I used for posterity. Here you will find the theme and plugins that I used to get my docs site up and running.
The other day I posted about showing plugin developers appreciation and how it’s actually really easy to do. The problem, as was pointed out to me, is that writing reviews, donations, etc. are all only accessible from the plugin page on the repo and there’s no quick way to get there from the WordPress dashboard. All is not lost, however! It is possible to add custom links to the plugin list table alongside the default links that point to the author’s website and the plugin details page.
So you’ve published your awesome plugin and it’s been downloaded a few times. What next? How do you push things to the next level? How do you make it more attractive to potential users? Here are five tips that I’ve learnt over the past couple of years.
Plenty of posts have been written about setting up a local development environment for WordPress, but when I moved to a new Macbook (running OS X Yosemite) I couldn’t find a post that contained all the instructions I needed. After some searching I got everything up and running and thought it would be worthwhile to share my process and tools here for posterity.
At WordCamp Cape Town 2014 I presented a workshop on building your first WordPress plugin. It was a pleasure to share my experience with everyone who attended the workshop and, as I promised at the end of the workshop, here are a few links regarding what we learnt.
With WooCommerce 2.1 having just been released, you’ll find that a number of functions that you have been using in your plugins and themes have now been deprecated in favour of better and more aptly named functions. Here is a simple function that checks if a site is running the specified version of WooCommerce or higher.
I put together a .gitignore file that will exclude all WordPress core files from your repo so that only your themes and plugins will be uploaded – this works recursively, so that it will ignore all the copies of WordPress you have in the sub-folders of the repo.
