Santamattic came early this year. I was surprised FedEx could ship a package to Russia in only one week. It would have been faster if their Russian partners didn’t go knocking at the wrong door for two days in a row, but that’s okay since I was expecting this to arrive in January. Unfortunately I can’t disclose the contents of the box, because some of my coworkers haven’t...
WordPress 3.5
WordPress 3.5 is here and it’s awesome. Media’s lovely, hyphens in shortcodes now work, and switch_to_blog() is so fast, your dog will never catch it, unless your database is down, in which case you should try HyperDB. Always nice to see your own name in the list of contributors, which makes 3.5 the fourth major version I contributed to with at least one patch. The feeling is good...
Theme Publish is now on WordPress.com
I released a WordPress theme called Publish earlier this month, and today, thanks to the awesome Theme Team of Automattic, Publish has been made available to all WordPress.com users. Publish is a clean and minimal WordPress theme, perfect for (but not limited to) single-author blogs. While working on shipping Publish to WordPress.com customers, a bunch of improvements have been made to the theme...
Reminder: Don’t Use the Short PHP Open Tag
Jetpack 2.0.1 was released last night, immediately followed by 2.0.2, which fixed a fatal error on some hosts, caused by a short PHP open tag. So here’s a reminder: never use the short form of the PHP opening tag: <? _doing_it_wrong(); ?> Always use the long form: <?php _doing_it_right(); ?> If your grep can do Perl regular expressions, you can search your entire codebase with a...
A handsome gaggle of Automatticians
Here we are, in San Diego, earlier this year on our anual company meetup. Bonus points if you can find me in the photo :)
Double Titles when Sharing on Google+
If you’ve got double titles when sharing your WordPress posts on Google+, it’s probably due to duplicate OpenGraph tags, which might have been caused by the latest update to Jetpack, which added OpenGraph tags in version 2.0. If you’re already running a plugin that outputs the “og:” tags in your document head, you’ll have to disable one or the other. For...
WordPress Community Summit 2012 Photos
I’m not very good with cameras, but here are some photos taken during the WordPress Community Summit, held in Tybee Island, GA earlier this month.
Publish: A Free Minimal and Responsive WordPress Theme
I’m pleased to announce that Publish is now available for download in the WordPress.org themes directory. Publish is a theme I’ve been working on for quite a while, started back last year and then released to GitHub in February this year. When I started contributing to _s, I did a complete revamp of the theme, but kept the main intent — a minimal blogging theme with focus on the...
The WordPress Settings API Video
Here’s the video of my session about the Settings API in WordPress from WordCamp Sofia 2012. You can find the slides and notes/transcript in a post I published earlier: The WordPress Settings API.
If you’re interested in making the Settings API better and less painful to use, please chime in to the discussion on this core ticket: #18285. Have fun!
WordPress.org Plugin and Theme Reviews
As reported by Otto, plugin and theme reviews on WordPress.org are live, and here’s a demo! This allows plugin and theme users to not only give a one-to-five star rating, but to also provide some actual feedback, of what they liked or disliked about that particular theme or plugin. It provides an extra channel of communication between the users and developers, which makes it easier to...