It’s no secret: I don’t like how WordPress development is handled over the past year or so. And best thing I can say about WP 3.4: it is a big maintenance release; all important changes are mostly tweaks or API related. My favorite features are Twitter embed and toolbar click top scroll.
New WordPress is here, and it is first major release in the past 3 years I have mixed feelings about. It has several interesting features for developers, but it doesn’t offer anything that important for most WordPress users, with a small drop in the overall performance on admin side.
There are many services to shorten links, including one supported by WordPress, but if you have a great short name domain, best thing to do is to have your own service to shorten links. And to power it, best solution available is YOURLS and its WordPress to Twitter plugin.
Regenerate Thumbnails is a must have plugin for any dynamic website that deals with a lot of images, theme changes and expanded list of image sizes in use. Also, it should be part of any development environment, and for sure has saved me a lot of time in the past few months.
Brand new WordPress 3.2 is very important release, not so much because of the new features, but because it is a crossroads version that finally puts support for PHP4, mySQL 3/4 and MS IE6 (and IE7 will soon be gone) where they really belong: into history. Check your servers before upgrade!
There are many free plugins you can use for adding all sorts of forms into your website, but none of them comes even close to the power and flexibility of Gravity Forms. Long list of features, great implementation, extensions and excellent support are worth paying for.
There are many services on the Internet for tracking website visits and overall analytics, some are free, some not. More than a year ago, I have decided to try Clicky Web Analytics based on a recommendation, and now, it’s the only analytics system I am using for all my websites.
WordPress Top Plugins is rather unique book published by Packt Publishing. Book is written by Brandon Corbin, and it contains description and examples of use for some of the most popular WordPress plugins in use with introduction chapter on working with plugins in Wordpress.
Couple of months ago (october 2010) Packt Publishing published another very useful jQuery book. Book is written by Giulio Bai, and it contains very detailed info on how the make plugins for jQuery with several full examples and also info on many useful small plugins and snippets.
Third version of the Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr amazing book Digging Into WordPress is released last week. I got my updated copy from Chris yesterday. I already reviewed first version of the book last year, so this is only a small reminder post.
For a long time FamFamFam icons were standard when small 16×16 were needed. But, they are not developed anymore and they are lacking many common icons. So, in search of better set, I have found truly amazing Fugue icons by Yusuke Kamiyamane.
Few months ago Packt Publishing published interesting book on WordPress 2.7 written by April Hodge Silver and Hasin Hayder. This is a guide for people starting with either WordPress.com or self hosted blogs. All chapters are easy to follow, with many screenshots that will help guide you.