Have Baby. Need Stuff! is a baby gear site that my wife and I just launched. I thought I’d share how I built it. WordPress Core WordPress is a Git submodule, with the content directory moved to the /content/ directory.…

Right now, the United States Congress is holding hearings on legislation that will have disastrous effects on free speech and the Internet. This video gives a good overview: One of the reasons that I help make WordPress is because of…

When you use the WordPress translation functions to make your plugin or theme translatable, you pass in a text domain as a second parameter, like so: This text domain is just a unique string (usually your plugin’s WordPress.org repository slug).…

I did a scan of the WordPress plugin directory today, and found the following shortcodes in use. The list is non-exhaustive, as some shortcodes are specified with variables. This is just the list of basic quoted string shortcodes that I…

My sessions for WordCamp San Francisco 2011 have been confirmed. This post is a quick teaser. Please let me know if you have any questions on what will be covered, or if you have any suggestions: Scaling, Servers, and Deploys…

Running a WordPress site on your local machine is a great way to do development. I’ve taken advantage of this to do development while on flights (and yes, I realize that in about 5 years it’s going to seem positively…

I tend to be very fastidious about the WordPress plugins that I’ll install. I’ll often write my own simple version of a plugin rather than install one from someone else that does a bunch of stuff I don’t need. Here…

WordPress uses Subversion (SVN) for revision management. Before Subversion, it used CVS. Right now, Git is a hot option in the SCM category. It offers really nice features such as decentralization, speed, fast and cheap local branching, better merging, more…

WordPress 3.1.3 is available now and is a security update for all previous versions. It contains the following security fixes and enhancements: Various security hardening by Alexander Concha. Taxonomy query hardening by John Lamansky. Prevent sniffing out user names of non-authors by…

In 2007, I wrote this about the job of software: That’s when I know WordPress is doing its job: when people aren’t even aware they’re using it because they’re so busy using it! I cited that more as a direction,…

Jealous? Custom WordPress skin for MacBook Pro It took forever to cut out, because it was printed against a white vinyl background, and I wanted the background to show the aluminum of the laptop. But I think it turned out…

I’ve customized the WordPress login screen for several of my clients. It is a nice professional touch that goes a long way toward making a site feel like “home.” Today, I’ve released a plugin called Login Logo [install] that lets…

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year.…

WordPress 3.0.2 is available and is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. Haiku has become traditional: Fixed on day zero One-click update makes you safe This used to be hard This maintenance release fixes a moderate security…

Some people are confused about the Post Formats feature that will be made available to themes in WordPress 3.1, especially how it differs from Custom Post Types. Custom Post Types These were poorly named. Think: Custom Content Types. That is,…

Ricky asks: Thanks for your time. I’m working on a site where I’d like members to be able to submit posts, but I’d like to be able to moderate them first before they go live. Kinda similar to what WP…

Six Apart is closing the doors on Vox, a blogging service they launched three and a half years ago. You have until September 30th to export your content from Vox, or you’ll lose access to it. Yikes! They helpfully included…