The upcoming WordPress 4.1 release is going to pass the release candidate mark, so we now have an opportunity to look closer at the forthcoming features. Those features vary from the introduction of new UI elements, and modes in the dashboard, to  the query API and performance enhancements — there’s something for everyone to get excited about. John Blackborn is leading the cycle and proposed improvements affect a widely range of core...

Responsive design not only challenge our tools and approaches to web design and development, but also forces us to review our ways of planning and managing content. New workflows require the right tools. Upon first thought, this opens an opportunity for completely new content management systems (CMS) and publishing platforms (and we’ll probably see plenty of them in the near future). But anyone who has ever migrated from one CMS to another...

WordPress has evolved hugely over the years from simple fork of blogging software to a powerful platform. According to a WordPress Survey, 66% of respondents use WordPress as a CMS, not just blogging software. The growth of WordPress adoption for various type of site has created a new market with its own landscape. Companies and individuals are creating new products and services that cannot be qualified as plain website building. It's something...

The greatest sites out there are always notable for their attention to detail. One often underestimated detail is the existence of a useful and user-friendly 404-error page. WordPress provides an easy way to create and customise the 404-error page, but unfortunately, the simplicity in customization does not automatically mean effectiveness. The well-known WordPress SEO expert Joost de Valk (aka yoast) reports his recent findings from...

The most recent WordPress release, 3.5, has passed the 6 million download mark. It brought us a renewed media experience and various improvements in the dashboard. But life moves on, and the scope of the upcoming version 3.6 release has already been settled. There’s been much debate over what to expect, especially in terms of improving our publishing workflow. Fortunately, the developers give us some hints via the discussion on trac and...

WordPress is a powerful and popular CMS for nearly all types of websites. But what about content creation? Writing is one of the most important aspects of a website especially for freelancers, small business owners and individuals. WordPress is actively criticised for this part of the experience. Users frequently find themselves using other software to write and then somehow transferring it into WordPress (very often by copying and pasting)....

Creative thinking is an integral part of design and all art-related professions. Hyper-creative people appear to conceive of brilliant ideas as easily as magicians pull rabbits from hats, but the truth is that we all meet with creative blocks. Usually, lack of creativity or originality isn’t the problem — if it was, we wouldn’t have chosen these professions — but we must learn to be creative regularly and according...

There is no need to ask why anybody would want to write a plugin for WordPress. It's one of the primary features that makes WordPress so flexible and a good fit for a wide range of projects. In the first part of our series we created the base for a WordPress plugin recognisible by the core. Then, in the second part we learnt how to alter the default functionality of the core. Today we're going to look at plugin options. This is one of the most...

In the previous part of our series we created the base for a WordPress plugin recognisible by the core. Today we are going to learn how to actually alter the default functionality of the core. The concept of hooks, actions, and filters is responsible for that; being the real heart of the whole WordPress plugins system. Everything starts from the "hooks" provided by the core itself. What is a "hook"? It is a specially marked place in the code (of...

One of the primary reasons for WordPress' continued popularity is the ease with which it can be extended and customized with plugins. Building a plugin may seem like an impossible task, but it's simpler than you may think. Today we begin our "Building your first WordPress plugin" series that will cover the most important principles and how-tos of the process. By the end of the series you'll be fully prepared to make further experiments of your...

Amongst all the new features and improvements that the recent WordPress 3.4 release has introduced, there is a hidden gem. The Custom Header Image feature has been supported by WordPress for some time, however previously its fixed dimensions made it too immobile to be of much use in the age of responsive design. The new release makes it flexible and introduces easier and cleaner code for this popular option. As theme developers we can now go...

The evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform into a fully-fledged CMS, simultaneously turns it into a solid framework for developers to build outstanding projects and applications upon. The WordPress core, powers not only the users' publishing engine but also provides developers with a robust set of classes, APIs and helpers, designed to address a wide range of needs. One of hidden gems of WordPress that allows developers to perform...