All posts by Eric Juden

Development

September Developer Meetup Notes – Making WordPress Plugins and Themes Extendable

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Presentation

This presentation was about how to add your own hooks to plugins and themes. Code from the demo can be found here.

Other Cool Stuff Talked About

WordPress Plugins to Check Out

  • MinQueue – Plugin to minify and concatenate enqueued scripts and styles

Slack Stuff

WordPress uses Slack now. Check it out: https://wordpress.slack.com

  • Prowd – A Slack integration to recognize your team’s work.
  • Tatsu – Standup meetings for remote teams
  • Polls – Add polls to slack

Misc Stuff

  • GitUp – Makes git painless
  • Kanbanize – Online Kanban software
  • speetest-net – NPM package for running a speedtest from the command line
Design, Development

January Developer Meetup Notes – Intermediate CSS and CSS Preprocessors

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When it comes to CSS Preprocessors, there are 2 big ones: Sass and Less. In Matt’s presentation he covers Sass stating that the two really have about the same features and Sass just has a bigger following.

Slides will go here when Matt sends them!

 Key Features of Sass

 Sass in WordPress

Automattic’s _s theme (pronounced “Underscores”) uses Sass by default. It is also a good reference of how to setup your Sass files for ease of use. Check out _s’s Sass folder here.

Useful Tips

  • Want to try out your own Sass code online? Check out http://sassmeister.com
  • Matt showed some of his code and noted that he keeps a Sass file called shame.scss for all of his “hacks” he is not proud of…I like the idea
Tips and Tricks

New, Must-Have Plugin: WPCore Plugin Manager

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Wow, I’m impressed! WordPress has been needing something like this for quite some time. I just wish I would have thought of it first.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it’s a new plugin called WPCore Plugin Manager. This plugin allows anyone and everyone to create a custom collection of plugins for WordPress and install them all at the same time on a WordPress website. You can have private or public collections.

Screen for adding a custom plugin on wpcore.comIt even allows you to add custom plugins that aren’t on the wordpress.org plugin repository! This is a serious game changer!

Questions?

You no doubt have some burning questions that need answering…

How much does WPCore cost?

Nothing, it’s free…seriously, why are still reading and not installing this plugin?

How do I get started?

Great question, register!

I typed in a plugin name and it doesn’t show up. What do I do?

I’ve noticed while searching it doesn’t always list your plugin. All you have to do is find the plugin on wordpress.org and grab the slug from the url for that plugin.plugin-slug

Other Questions?

Check out WPCore’s FAQ or ask em in the comments below!

Development

July Developers Meetup – Mobile Apps and WordPress

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This month we had two presenters: Chris Kiersch and Alex Rodriguez speaking about mobile apps and WordPress.

Chris Kiersch

Chris talked more at a high level about the difference between a mobile app and mobile website. When he sends his notes from the meetup I’ll post.

Alex Rodriguez

Alex talked about the different options you have for pulling information out of your WordPress website using APIs:

  • JSON REST API (more useful for those using wordpress.org self-hosted sites)
  • Jetpack REST API (more useful for wordpress.com hosted sites)
  • Thermal API (just another api that Alex had found)
  • Roll your own

Roll Your Own

Alex shared some code that he had created on making his own JSON API for WordPress (available on GitHub).

Presentation


The presentation is also viewable on slides.com.

Next Month’s Meetup

Next month will be more of an open discussion about plugins you’ve had problems with and how you overcame those issues. Originally it was going to be called “Plugins that Suck”, but we are hoping to find out the bad plugins and what you did to work around the problem. Did you find another plugin, talk to the developer, etc…

Other Cool Stuff

  • JSON View plugin for Chrome – formats JSON into an easily readable view and adds collapse buttons on the different JSON nodes.
  • AppPresser – a set of tools to help you build an app on top of WordPress.
  • Aesop Story Engine – I never got to show this to the group, but it’s a plugin for creating rich, interactive experiences using WordPress to help tell a story. I’ve not used it, but it looks really cool.
  • InfiniteWP – If you manage updated across multiple WordPress websites, this is a must. This is a separate product that must be installed on your server, but it monitors your WordPress websites and allows you to update plugins, themes and the core files all from one place. It’s free, but it has commercial add-ons.
Development, Meetup News

June Developers Meetup – Developing for WordPress Multisite

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Presentation

Questions From the Meetup

Calendar Plugin

There was a question about a good calendar plugin that can pull data from other sources. I believe that All-in-One Event Calendar might be able to help.

WordCamp St. Louis Planning

Want to help out with the next WordCamp St. Louis and make it even more badass? Join the group!

Next Month

Our next meetup will be about mobile apps and WordPress.

General

Community Features

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You might be asking yourself, “What’s so great about this new community site, stlwp.org?”. Well, let me tell you about the things we have to offer.

Forums

Get your questions answered in the forums by one of your very own knowledgeable community members.

Groups

Got a particular topic you like about WordPress? Find a group with that same interest, or create your own!

Blog

Got something to write about? Submit an idea and we’ll set you up as an author on the site and you can help build the community!

Suggestions

We are very open to suggestions on how to make the community better. Feel free to contact us (or leave a comment below) with other ideas you have to improve the community!

Photo by Susanne Nilsson – licensed under Creative Commons

General, Tips and Tricks

WordPress Multisite Infinite Redirect Loop After Updating to 3.9

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If you use WordPress Multisite and have it setup to use subdomains, you may want to want to have a look at this article before updating to WordPress 3.9: http://www.webhostinghero.com/wp-multisite-stuck-in-redirect-loop/

It talks about how to fix the infinite redirect loop some users experienced after updating their instance of WordPress to 3.9.