Category Archives: WordPress
May 22, 2013 by Matt | Posted in WordPress
It’s no secret that the WordPress codebase is a mess. It seems that not a week goes by without some blogger publishing a post criticizing it. Unfortunately, fixing it is no simple matter.
One of the goals the WordPress project holds is to maintain compatibility with older plugins and themes that may not have been updated to work with the latest version, which means, well, not changing things that would break old plugins. Or adding new functions and leaving the older, redundant ones behind to maintain compatibility. It’s that methodology that led the developers to bake the infamous Magic Quotes functionality into WordPress itself, when it has been deprecated and removed from newer versions of PHP, so as to not break plugins expecting that behavior. (Which means plugin developers have to unescape strings before passing them to prepared statements, like they should be doing.)
That’s just one example of something I find vexing about WordPress, and not really indicative of the deeper structural issues that others complain about.
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Apr 24
There has been news lately of a distributed attack against WordPress sites. A growing botnet has been running dictionary attacks against sites powered by WordPress, in effort to gain access to the the admin panel and infect the server. As is usually the case…
Apr 10
Here’s some great news from the WordPress development blog: WordPress 3.6 is going to have built-in support for audio/video playback. You will be able to upload a media file, and WordPress will handle playback with the MediaElement.js. Shortcodes will be available, as well as…
Feb 6
Back in 2010, I wrote a post on Using the WordPress Uploader in Your Plugin or Theme that went on to be one of my most popular tutorials of all time. Then the WordPress team went and added a much cooler media uploader in…
Jan 30
Smashing Magazine recently released a new WordPress theme that’s definitely worth a look. Frank, as it is called, is a lightweight and elegantly simple theme that’s designed for very fast loading times. It boasts a JavaScript dependency of zero, and no external images to…
Jan 16
I’ve been working on a WordPress plugin that takes advantage of the WP-Cron system (which, for the uninitiated, is a sort of event scheduling system that runs functions in WordPress at predetermined intervals). Unfortunately, that’s a bit of a pain considering the nature of…
Nov 21
Automattic’s Jetpack plugin has certainly grown since I first looked at it. I originally dismissed it, not wanting to unnecessarily tie my own self-hosted blogs to WordPress.com for a few niceties like in-Dashboard traffic stats and very thorough spelling and grammar checking via After…
Oct 3
WooThemes launched a new redesign of their site this month, bringing some interesting changes along with the more modern style. The navigation has been restructured to highlight their non-theme offerings, making it clear that WooThemes is very serious about their plugin offerings (especially WooCommerce).…
Sep 28
Starting in WordPress 3.5, the Links feature will no longer be a part of the WordPress core. The blogroll feature will be available as a plugin, Link Manager, so it’s not completely going away. Though it could be more convenient to use the Menus…
Aug 9
If you’ve been working with PHP for awhile, you’re probably familiar with one of the worst ideas the language’s developers ever came up with: Magic Quotes. If not, here’s a brief history lesson. In order to help newbies write functioning MySQL queries, they thought…
It’s no secret that the WordPress codebase is a mess. It seems that not a week goes by without some blogger publishing a post criticizing it. Unfortunately, fixing it is no simple matter.
