How do you get insight into all of your content at a glance? WordPress’ admin area does not show you much about your pages, posts, users and comments. We will demonstrate some simple custom solutions and a ready-to-deploy plugin to overcome this problem.
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UX design hasn’t been the same since Sketch arrived on the scene. The app has delivered a robust design platform with a refreshing, simple user interface. A good product on its own, it achieved critical success by being extended with community plugins.
The open nature of the Sketch plugin system means that anyone can identify a need, write a plugin and share it with the community. A major barrier is stopping those eager to take part: Designers and front-end developers must learn how to write a plugin. Unfortunately, Objective-C is difficult to learn!
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I’ve been a long time Photoshop and Illustrator user. Both programs are really useful and powerful, and they’ll remain a key part of any digital artist’s or designer’s toolset, including mine. However, for all user interface, web and icon design workflows, I recently converted to Sketch. Here is why.
While Photoshop is awesome at what it does, defining what it is might not be so easy anymore. I remember watching a storyboarding tutorial by Massive Black’s El Coro (unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available for sale anymore). In it, he says that 17 or so years ago, Adobe had no idea that digital artists were using Photoshop to digitally paint pictures! So, it had to catch up with its own user base by adding more — you guessed it — painting features.
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JavaScript module bundling has been around for a while. RequireJS had its first commits in 2009, then Browserify made its debut, and since then several other bundlers have spawned across the Internet. Among that group, webpack has jumped out as one of the best.
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A year and a half ago I released my first premium WordPress plugin, Advanced Ads. It’s true that once the plugin was out, my most important task was support. Support is a crucial element that determines not only the success of the project, but also how happy everyone will be, me included.
With this in mind, I constantly optimized my approach to providing support. Let me share with you what I learned. Read on to find out what I learned about support, the four sides that will help you understand each request, which fears of mine proved to be unfounded, what an efficient support system looks like and, last but not least, how to optimize support.
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Anyone who has created a WordPress plugin understands the need to create configurable fields to modify how the plugin works. There are countless uses for configurable options in a plugin, and nearly as many ways to implement said options. You see, WordPress allows plugin authors to create their own markup within their settings pages. As a side effect, settings pages can vary greatly between plugins.
In this article we are going to go over three common ways you can make your plugin configurable. We will start by creating a settings page and create our fields using the default WordPress Settings API. I will then walk you through how to set up your fields with a custom handler. Finally, I will show you how to integrate a great configurable fields plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into your own plugin.
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If you’re looking for some great ways to improve your WordPress workflow, read on for a massive collection of free themes, plugins, tools and tutorials. These resources were all linked via the Smashing Magazine Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and other social-media streams around the Web.
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An increasingly large number of publicly available APIs provide powerful services to expand the functionality of our applications. WordPress is an incredibly dynamic and flexible CMS that powers everything from small personal blogs to major e-commerce websites and everything in between. Part of what makes WordPress so versatile is its powerful plugin system, which makes it incredibly easy to add functionality.
We will walk through how I made GitHub Pipeline, a plugin that allows you to display data from the GitHub API on WordPress pages using shortcodes. I’ll give specific examples and code snippets, but consider the technique described here a blueprint for how to consume any service API with a plugin. We’ll start from the beginning, but a degree of familiarity with WordPress and plugin development is assumed, and we won’t spend time on beginner topics, like installing WordPress or Composer.
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Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is a free WordPress plugin that replaces the regular custom fields interface in WordPress with something far more powerful, offering a user-friendly interface for complex fields like location maps, date pickers and more.
In this article I’ll show you how you can extend ACF by adding your own controls to tailor the experience to your needs.
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If you’ve worked with WordPress for a while, you may have tried your hand at writing a plugin. Many developers will start creating plugins to enhance a custom theme or to modularize their code. Eventually, though, you may want to distribute your plugin to a wider audience.
While you always have the option to use the WordPress Subversion repository, there may be instances where you prefer to host a plugin yourself. Perhaps you are offering your users a premium plugin. Maybe you need a way to keep your client’s code in sync across multiple sites. It could simply be that you want to use a Git workflow instead of Subversion. Whatever the reason, this tutorial will show you how to set up a GitHub repository to push updates to your plugin, wherever it resides.
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