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Torque

Featured

On Shortcodes

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Featured

Published

January 2, 2014

3 Comments

In my work reviewing plugins for Tidy Repo and here at TorqueMag I come across shortcodes. A lot. If a plugin has some sort of front-end output, then you can bet that it will use a shortcode to accomplish this task. Shortcodes have made their way into theme development as well, and often times become almost proprietary in nature, chaining a user to a plugin or theme. In the year 2014, I think it might be time to start looking outside the box, and using the WordPress API more extensively to accomplish our goals. A Short History of the Shortcode […]

Here Are My 2014 WordPress Predictions…What Are Yours?

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Community, Featured

Published

December 31, 2013

5 Comments

Everybody loves to make predictions, especially this time of year. It’s human nature for us to analyze our environment and want to make educated guesses as to what is just over the horizon. We all do it. Yet few people actually follow through with checking on their predictions a year later. So let’s change that this year! As a big fan of the Tech News Today podcast and their prediction and prediction results episodes, I asked all of you for your predictions on the Advanced WordPress Facebook page. I also wanted to make a few of my own for WordPress in 2014 […]

Does Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?

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Featured

Published

December 31, 2013

2 Comments

Who Do Your Employees Represent? It started without a lot of thought. You can imagine that at any point in time, throughout all of history, two kids and a video camera is just a recipe for fun. But not this time. This time it would be a recipe for criminal charges—and even bigger consequences for their company. In 2009 two employees of a Dominos franchise decided to make a video. They did all sorts of horrible things to the pizza they were preparing. And then they uploaded it to the internet. Using clues found in the video, commenters figured out […]

Stop Blogging About Plugins Already

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Featured

Published

December 27, 2013

14 Comments

Somebody needs to build a dating site to match WordPress freelance designers and developers with agencies. Not a job board where you can merely post a job and have freelancers apply. Not a portfolio site where freelancers can post their work for agencies to browse. More like a dating site where you can connect based on common interests and philosophies—sniff each other out for a while and really get to know each other before climbing into bed. In the meantime, freelancers need to rethink what their job actually is if they are servicing agencies. The problem is not that there […]

Best Free WordPress Themes from 2013

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Featured

Published

December 26, 2013

9 Comments

2013 was a really good year for WordPress users. To begin with, we witnessed three major releases of WordPress this year. Furthermore, and most importantly, 2013 also marked the tenth birthday for WordPress as a software (launched in 2003, and still going strong). It goes without saying that a good number of WordPress themes were released during this year—both free and premium. Since Twenty Thirteen had set the trend in favor of blogging-centric themes, many new WP themes from 2013 focused on personal blogs and tumblogs. Of course, other niche such as magazine and portfolio websites were not overlooked either. […]

Will 2014 Be the Year of WordPress Tuck-ins and Roll-ups?

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Featured

Published

December 25, 2013

10 Comments

Like with most great things in the WordPress community, it started with WebDev Studios. Two founders, writing code and sometimes writing books. And a friend of theirs, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, also writing some code and writing books. And then they merged. If you were at Pressnomics this past year, you heard Lisa’s version of the story. And it was compelling. And I’m sure it made more than one small company think about its own position in the ecosystem. Should they partner with someone else? Should they merge? But how do you go about doing this? The questions were plentiful, I’m sure. […]

SNI: Why SSLs Won’t Need Their Own IPs for Much Longer

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Featured, Security

Published

December 23, 2013

9 Comments

Conventional wisdom states that in order to secure your website with an SSL certificate, you need a dedicated IP address. For a long time that’s been true; SSL (and its successor TLS) are low-level encryption protocols with no awareness of domains, or even HTTP. Because of this, there’s historically been no way to share IP addresses between websites that each have their own SSL certificates. This has always been very inefficient on IP addresses. Without SSL, shared hosting allows you to serve hundreds, or even thousands, of websites from a single IP, whereas an IP that’s used for providing SSL […]

A 7 Day WordPress Plugin Launch…With a Twist!

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Featured

Published

December 20, 2013

16 Comments

I’m Alex and I co-founded WP Curve with Dan Norris 5 months ago. Since then, we’ve built our customer base to 182 customers and as of today, we have a $118,000 annual recurring revenue run rate. Wait. What? Why so transparent? We have a habit of over sharing. An example is this post. I’m writing with Michelle (my favorite editor), watching my every keystroke. Isn’t that kind of weird? Yes…but it’s also a ton of fun. Fast feedback means I can ship this post in a day, instead of a week. We apply this method to all of our businesses, […]

WooThemes Hits 2 Million WooCommerce Downloads

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Community, Featured, News

Published

December 19, 2013

1 Comment

Today, WooThemes proudly celebrates a major milestone—reaching 2,000,000 WooCommerce downloads. Impressive, right? And yes, that’s Torque contributor Matt Cohen of WooThemes sharing his excitement in the photo above. (I “borrowed” a screenshot from the fun video they made to toast the occasion; you should check it out too.) We’re happy for them. According to statistics from builtwith.com provided on WooThemes’ site, 9% of ALL eCommerce websites are now using WooCommerce. Now that’s good business! Here’s the breakdown provided by WooThemes of the industry verticals currently leveraging WooCommerce for their businesses: In other WooNews, the community behind the platform is continuing to […]

Success Can Kill You Faster Than Failure

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Featured

Published

December 19, 2013

5 Comments

I had more customers than I knew what to do with. People were talking about me. Everyone knew my name. And they all were showing up—money in hand. They were ready to buy. I wasn’t really selling. I can’t call it that. Because this was too easy. All I had to do was let people know about my product, and they just came. We don’t like to believe the saying, “if you build it, they will come,” but in this case, I was living the dream. Until it all came crashing down. To be clear, I didn’t lose millions (that’s […]

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