How to Create a WordPress Widget: 4 Killer Tutorials You Should Read

by Timothy Bowers March 31^st, 2012 6 Responses

There comes a time in every blogger’s life when they yearn to create their own WordPress widget.

They grow tired of the default selection of widgets that ship with WordPress, and try as they might, they just can’t find what they’re looking for in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

If this sounds like you, perhaps it’s time to step up your game and . . .

Getting started with widget development

At a minimum, you’ll need the following:

An understanding of the Widgets API
At least a passing familiarity with PHP scripting

How to create your very own WordPress widget

Development, Plugins

Get Some Sexy AJAX Functionality With These Free WordPress Plugins

by Timothy Bowers February 22^nd, 2012 Leave a comment

If you pay much attention to trends and developments in the WordPress universe, you’ve no doubt heard something about the web programming technique known as Ajax, and how it can be used to make your WordPress site more dynamic, engaging and downright sexy.

If you haven’t, then it’s high time you got schooled.

The mighty Ajax

Use these free Ajax-powered plugins on your WordPress site

Community, Development, Plugins

Developing WordPress Plugins 101 (Part 2)

by Patrick Garman February 20^th, 2012 1 Response

Prerequisites: If you have not read Part 1, you should do that now.

Class is in Session
Yesterday we got started with the first piece of the plugin puzzle, the header. This is what tells WordPress all about your plugin and also includes your license information. Today I will show you a little bit more about developing your own plugin.

Development

Easily Edit Your WordPress Theme With Google Chrome Developer Tools

by Tom Ewer February 18^th, 2012 3 Responses

If you are a theme “tweaker” or even a full-blown “frameworker”, Google Chrome has an extremely powerful tool that can make your life a whole lot easier. Chrome Developer Tools allows you to inspect and edit (in real time) any web site. Any edits you make will not of course be effected in reality, but the Developer Tools emulates the change in your browser window so that you can inspect the impact of your actions.

Development, Multisite

BitNami WordPress Stack Adds Multisite Support

by Sarah Gooding February 15^th, 2012 1 Response

A few months ago we featured BitNami WordPress Stack in 10 Ways to Set Up a Testing Environment for WordPress. In the meantime BitNami has announced the release of their new BitNami WordPress Multisite Stack. The multisite stack download is available via the native installer, a virtual machine or you can deploy it directly in the Amazon Cloud.

Development, Plugins

Developing WordPress Plugins 101

by Patrick Garman February 15^th, 2012 Leave a comment

Trying Something New
Writing your own WordPress plugins is a lot less complicated than you may think. If you have basic PHP skills then you are more than capable of writing your own plugin. To help explain the process over the next few days I am going to take a plugin I recently wrote for Solve360 (by Norada) and explain the basics of how it was built.

Solve360

Development, Plugins

Handy Tool for WordPress Plugin Developers: Readme File Generator

by Joe Foley February 7^th, 2012 1 Response

If you’re a plugin developer, you may want to check out the WordPress Plugin Readme File Generator.

This convenient tool lets you go through a checklist of fill-in-the-blank boxes to help you make up your readme files for your plugin.
Required Fields
The generator’s first section presents a list of required fields.

The required fields include the following:

Plugin Name
Contributors
Tags
Requires at least (lowest version the plugin will work on)
Tested up to (highest version plugin has been tested on)
Stable Tag (the Subversion “tag” of the latest stable version)
Short Description (150 characters max – the generator conveniently keeps track of how many characters you’ve used)

Optional Fields

Development, Plugins

Apparently ‘Super Cache’ Is The Most Popular WordPress Caching Plugin

by Timothy Bowers February 3^rd, 2012 12 Responses

WordPress caching has been a bit of a hot topic round here this week. We originally received a question from one of our readers, asking which is the best caching plugin to use on a WordPress site. This kicked off a pretty solid discussion, which we then followed up with a second article on the best caching plugins, as voted by our readers.

Finally, I thought we should aggregate the results from both of those articles, and bring a little pie chart lovin’ to your Friday afternoon.

Choosing the right cache plugin for WordPress

Development

Display a Different Header Image on Each Page of Your WordPress Site

by Timothy Bowers February 2^nd, 2012 14 Responses

Thursday’s WordPress Q & A Session covers some pretty familiar territory: dynamic header images.

A reader of this blog named Allan has graced us with today’s question, in the hopes that some of you WordPress magicians might be able to help him out. He asks:

How do you display a different header image in WordPress, according to which page is currently being viewed?

Add changing dynamic header images to your WordPress site

Development, News

Monitor and Backup Your WordPress Sites with the Free WP Remote Service

by Sarah Gooding January 31^st, 2012 19 Responses

WP Remote has undergone a total reboot and is now officially out of beta. If you haven’t used it before, this is a webapp for managing, organizing, searching and tracking the versions and updates of multiple WordPress sites.

This handy web-based service gives you a dashboard displaying all of your WordPress sites with key information related to version, plugins and themes, and keeps your bits and pieces all up to date. WP Remote even allows you to backup your sites remotely, and enables automatic daily backups just in case something goes wrong while you slumber.

Oh, and WP Remote is totally free.