We all know that WordPress is awesome - but being awesome isn’t always enough. Does it perform well under pressure? Can it deal with traffic from millions of visitors every month? There’s no question that WordPress can be used for your or my blog, but what about multi-authored blogs with thousands of comments? How do developers make it scale and perform?
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This article will guide you through the process of creating a front-end page in WordPress that lists your authors. We’ll discuss why you would want to do this, we’ll introduce the WP_User_Query class, and then we’ll put it it all together
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In a post on her blog last year, WordPress designer, business woman and author, Lisa Sabin Wilson, talked about how thankful she is to be part of the WordPress economy. It’s an economy that thousands of people, the world over, are benefiting from (including me!). It is an economy built on free, open source software.
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The admin area is the heart of any WordPress-powered website. It’s where everything is controlled and where admin, editors, authors and contributors publish content to posts, pages and other custom post types. The default features of WordPress are fine for some website owners, although you may find that certain features need to be improved and others need to be added.
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Recently, we discussed “How Commercial Plugin Developers Are Using The WordPress Repository.” This article provided a solid explanation of the plugin repository, how to use it, how not to abuse it, and how to leverage it for success, even with premium plugins.
Now is a great time to be working as a WordPress developer: the community is active and growing, the platform has a solid API and the platform is under constant development. Despite these advantages, many developers have a hard time getting started building premium products.
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When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didn’t matter much if I broke it. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat.
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Custom post types add a level of flexibility to WordPress that makes this open-source Web development platform more useful on many levels. Whenever I have been faced with a Web-based task, especially one that involves organizing information, the first thing I do is examine WordPress to determine if it can handle the job. It usually can.
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A few weeks ago I wrote about how you can put together a great readme.txt for the WordPress plugin directory. In addition to using a WordPress readme as a tool to help out your users, you can use it to promote your commercial products and services.
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If you’re a plugin developer and you just love to write code, then writing a readme.txt file for a plugin in WordPress’ repository might be your idea of hell. When you’ve written all of that lovely code, why must you spend time writing about how to use it?
Unfortunately, some plugin developers view writing a readme.txt file as the least important part of their job. So, we end up with things like the following.
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Forums have been around forever, so it should come as no surprise that several plugins for the popular publishing platform WordPress provide this feature, as well as support for integrating other forum software. One project, however, has a special place in the WordPress community, and that is bbPress. This is the software created by WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, as a lightweight system for the Wordpress.org support forums. In true open-source fashion, the bbPress project was born (at bbpress.org, of course) as a lightweight standalone alternative for forums.
The problem is that the project never really kept up the pace; and while the WordPress community wanted to use it, and bbPress saw some promising spurts of development, it never really caught up to the alternatives. Most of us who needed a forum went either with a plugin alternative that integrated perfectly or with forum software such as Vanilla.
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