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Torque
Since
September 11, 2013

Jay Hoffmann

Plugins as a Platform: The Future of WordPress Plugins

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Featured

Published

May 13, 2014

7 Comments

Last week, MaxGalleria announced Version 2.0 of their gallery plugin. The update featured a bit of a change in scope for the plugin. The team decided to shift it from a simple plugin to a much more complete gallery platform. Though the core functionality is remaining more or less the same, it’s far more extendable now than ever before, with over a 100 actions and filters for developers to hook into. This means that the core plugin will remain fairly slim, while facilitating a number of add-ons either in the personal or commercial space. MaxGalleria likened the philosophy to that of […]

Learn Something New, Every Day

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Published

May 6, 2014

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A couple of weeks ago, John Resig wrote an article entitled Write Code Every Day. Resig is the creator of the jQuery library, among other open-source projects. In the post, Resig discusses a shift in the way that he works on open source projects. He went from writing code whenever he had time on nights and weekends, to contributing valuable code every day—though individual contributions were a little more concise. Resig set some ground rules for himself, such as keeping projects open source on GitHub, and writing code before midnight, but generally stuck to the “write code every day no matter what” […]

The Possible Effects of Automattic’s Auquisition of Scroll Kit

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Published

April 29, 2014

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To add to its list of recent acquisitions, Automattic snatched up New York startup Scroll Kit last week, and added its creators to the WordPress.com product group. If you haven’t heard of it, Scroll Kit is a visual website building tool, with a snappy drag and drop interface. Their platform features simple WYSIWYG tools that allow users to create a simple one-page website simply by dragging images and text around a page in pre-configured templates. These tools were able to recreate the NY Times “Snowfall” website in just under an hour, and allow people to create a series of “scrolls” […]

The 3 Best Map Plugins for WordPress

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Published

April 23, 2014

11 Comments

To find more great plugins, check out Torque’s free eBook, The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins. Download it here.  Maps are one of those things that make the web great. They allow you to provide directions, context, and a good amount of information about your business, all in a single interface. But for WordPress there are a lot of different options for the simple task of placing an interactive map on your site—big, medium, and small. Here’s a good option from each. Simple Google Maps Shortcode Simple Google Maps Shortcode, by Pippin Williamson, is one of the most compact implementations […]

Important Updates for Plugin Developers in WordPress 3.9

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Published

April 15, 2014

2 Comments

The WordPress update ready to drop this week will lack the flair and pomp that accompanies some of the more extensive updates. It will mostly feature a few UI enhancements in the Post Editor, a better theme preview, and a few stability and security improvements. But, if you’re a plugin developer, there are a couple of things to pay attention to in the update. Consider this a heads up. PHP’s MySQL Functions Deprecated As of PHP 5.5 the MySQL extension is officially deprecated, which means it will no longer be supported in WordPress. Instead, WordPress will be switching to the […]

Diving into Dictator: A Provisioning Tool for WordPress

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Published

April 8, 2014

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Some of you may have seen the announcement of a new WP-CLI package known as Dictator. Dictator allows you to define the “state” of your WordPress install. It keeps a running record of your WordPress configuration options, broken up into three categories. “Settings” stores basic site information like title, description, and active theme and plugins. “Users” stores the name, email, and display_name of each user. “Terms” holds categories, tags, and other post metadata. All of this information is stored neatly in a small YAML config file. That way, you can hand off a config file to various members of a […]

WP RSS Aggregator Review: Do More with RSS Feeds

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Published

April 1, 2014

5 Comments

RSS (Rich Site Summary) was invented to make sharing feeds of content from an external site really simple. Still, it can’t be easily done with WordPress right out of the box. And why should it? That’s why we have plugins. Introducing WP RSS Aggregator WP RSS Aggregator was built in order to accommodate this need. The plugin allows you to add any number of RSS feeds to your site, then output them on posts and pages using a shortcode. You can set a limit of how many posts to show for each feed, and then choose which feeds to output […]

Taking a Second Look at the Plugin Repository

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Published

March 25, 2014

10 Comments

Just last week, the WordPress plugin repository passed the 30,000 plugins hosted mark. This is, of course, an incredible achievement and one that reflects both the magnitude of the WordPress project and the spirit of its community. It also got me thinking. 30,000 is a lot of plugins. There are many plugins that are outdated, ineffective, and potentially harmful to WordPress installs. Finding those, however, can be a daunting task, and regulating them can be even more difficult. I began thinking out loud on Twitter, and was able to come up with a few suggestions. I think that it’s certainly a […]

Finding the Right WordPress Backup Plugin

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Published

March 18, 2014

6 Comments

Trust me, it’s best to think about WordPress back-ups before there’s a problem. Afterwards won’t do you much good. So as you’re looking for a proper WordPress backup plugin, here are a few things to consider. What Do I Need to Back Up? First things first, it’s important to understand what “backing up a WordPress install” means. Your average WordPress site has a lot of moving parts, some of which are essential, and others that are not. In general, WordPress can be divided into three types of content. The first is WordPress core files, the second is site-specific files and […]

Accept Bitcoin Today with The GoCoin WooCommerce Extension

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Community

Published

March 4, 2014

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In the past few weeks, Bitcoin has been a pretty hot subject in the press, with the recent Mt. Gox disaster and the world’s first Bitcoin ATM’s rolling out. But even with all the controversy surrounding Bitcoin, it may be able to help you as a WordPress user. Bitcoin is becoming a currency of choice for a lot of educated consumers, and you may end up with many customers who prefer it. First, the basics: Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency. Let’s break that down. Bitcoin is decentralized, which means–unlike, say the US Dollar which is controlled by the Federal Government—it […]

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