WooThemes developer and sometimes-WPCandy-contributor Matty Cohen wrote a post explaining how to get started with WordPress’ transient API. The codex describes transients as “very similar to the Options API but with the added feature of an expiration time”, and developers can use them in a number of different ways.
On the 29th episode of the WPCandy Podcast we talked about the sometimes poor state of plugin user interfaces. Many WordPress plugins are inconsistent with the native WordPress user interface in how they implement settings in the administration area for users.
I’m writing this guide to outline a (completely unofficial) set of best practices for implementing settings pages that is consistent and current with the native WordPress administration user interface. I’ve based these guidelines on my observations and experiences with using plugins in WordPress. They’re also totally a work in progress—if you have suggestions, feel free to add them in the comments section.
Orman for president! He might be a little late announcing his candidacy, but he’d probably be a strong competitor. It looks like Orman Clark is hiring a UI/web designer for a full time position to help him create WordPress themes and design resources. From the listing:
Working alongside myself (as well as keeping developers in check), you’ll be responsible for producing some of the most pixel-perfect, trend-setting, awe-inspiring, ridiculously-pretty-yet-functional designs this industry is yet to see. Roughly translated, you’ll be working on WordPress themes, web applications and other cool stuff. 2012 will be awesome.
This sounds like an awesome job for a freelancer looking for some stability. I’d be tempted to apply myself if I had forty hours each week to commit. Hit up his post for more details and to submit your application.
Earlier this week Storify.com announced their brand new plugin for WordPress, which integrates with your site allowing you to use your account from within your Dashboard. It seems this particular feature is highly requested by Storify users who also blog with WordPress.
You might be wondering just who, or rather what, Storify are? In short, you would use Storify to drop in social media stories on your blog, instead of using something like Twitter Blackbird Pie. You also might have seen Storify used regularly by the White House, New York Times, Washington Post, and many others, gathering all the social going-ons and delivering it all in one place. To quote their about page:
Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media.
I like that. I like it a lot.
With the number of WordPress events with many attendees and chatter happening on social networks, I can imagine the WordPress community really jumping on board and taking advantage of Storify now. Have you ever used Storify.com before? Does the plugin make it more appealing than it might be otherwise?
Learning to develop WordPress plugins is becoming simpler due WordPress’ extensive and helpful community. At PippinsPlugins.com, Pippin Williamson is building a bit of a teaching community of his own. In addition to the free tutorials, beginning January 1st users can register and access subscriber-only tutorials as well as gain access to previews of new plugins, member-only giveaways, and more as the year progresses.
His prices seem pretty reasonable, too: a free trial for four days, or $2 per day, $6 per month, or $60 per year.
I spoke with Pippin to learn a bit more about his project. Pippin says the goal of the subscription model is to provide him the means to produce large quantities of high quality content—both tutorials and plugins. He says that he isn’t trying to create the WordPress tutorial site or outdo others, but just trying to offer tutorials that he hasn’t seen before in his own way. For instance, he argues that while “there never needs to be another tutorial written on how to create custom post types, but there do need to be tutorials written on really great ways to use custom post types.”
In the coming weeks Pippin says he will be seeking out other developers who are interested in contributing editorials. He plans to write the bulk of the content, but would like to see at least one guest tutorial per month.
Have you tried out any of Pippin’s tutorials on his site yet? Where do you go to find the most useful WordPress tutorials?
WordPress consultant Konstantin Kovshenin wrote about how certain WordPress themes and plugins can “lock you” into using them and now allow for portability between other options. When building a theme or plugin, I think it’s generally a good rule of thumb to respect a user’s settings and content the same way that WordPress itself does.
This might be a little bit of inside baseball, but I found it interesting. AddThis, the social stat tracking service that I’ve used on WPCandy for a little while now, sent out info graphics to publishers today that show just how visitors shared content in 2011. I received my info graphic just a few minutes ago, courtesy of Aaron Jorbin.
Even though I’ve already posted our year in review and 2011′s tag clouds, I went ahead and published the info graphic, in full, just after the jump.
WooLabs, which you may remember as the department within WooThemes that formed when Mike Jolley and Jay Koster joined the WooThemes team. Since they joined the team, quite a bit has happened over there for WooCommerce: they’ve seen 45,000 downloads, created 52 extensions, and developed 16 parent and child themes.
The various releases have put a strain on the team, Jay said, and in order to continue the growth the team is looking to hire an experienced WordPress developer to join their team and contribute to the WooCommerce project.
WooThemes is accepting applications on the WooThemes job board, which itself has a number of WordPress related work if you’re a developer that’s looking.
Onswipe, the business that partnered with Automattic to bring a new form of tablet browsing to blogs on WordPress.com in early 2011, has announced enhancements to their plugin in version 2.0. The new version, which is available on WordPress.org, nearly doubles the total number of available layouts. Layouts in Onswipe control the various ways a site’s table of contents are laid out. Also in this new version adds comment support, which means comments are viewable and can be added to from tablets.
Do you use Onswipe on your blog, or do you prefer to leave your site mostly untouched for tablet visitors? In the past WPCandy readers have seemed to react somewhat negatively to Onswipe, but I’m curious whether or not this 2.0 update will sway anyone over. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
In a good followup to the post I linked up here last week, Milan Petrovic has outlined some ways that plugin developers can better optimize their work. In particular I like how he stresses that plugins should check to see where the user is, and avoid loading up resources if it’s not somewhere the plugin is in use.
