David Decker has published his list of seven cardinal sins that he’s run into when diving into the localization/internationalization of plugins and themes. For beginners who want to start making it easy for others to localize their code, you should read this article on the Codex entitled, Translating WordPress. While David didn’t chastise developers for their code, Eric Mann weighed in from a plugin authors point of view that I think many other developers can relate to. ∞
WPshout which is one of many sites devoted to WordPress has published the results of their early 2011 survey that asked readers to review their webhosting company. The results are from 252 independent reviews. In the grand scheme of things, this is a miniscule number but it’s cool to see so many independent reviews from WordPress centric customers in one place. WPTavern is running on HostGator and so far, I don’t have anything to complain about. When I’ve needed it, support has been great. The live chat actually works and for the most part, gets my issue settles without it being escalated. Unfortunately, it looks like many people who reviewed HostGator didn’t like the performance of their site. I’m on the opposite side of the spectrum where HostGator performs very well for me out of all the previous hosting providers I’ve used.
Hostgator had 23 reviews and, impressively for such a large number, everyone rated their experience and support as “good”. A couple of people had had “some” problem with downtime, but comments gave the impression support was quick and friendly. However, a number of people had moved away from Hostgator to another host and commented that their new hosting was much faster, suggesting Hostgator’s a bit slow, just you don’t really notice when you’re hosting with them. For this reason, I’d consider the other hosts with more solid performance across the board.
It’s no surprise to me that GoDaddy ends up in last place with most of the reviewers mentioning that they switched hosts. Just as everyone has an opinion, they also have their choice of which webhosting provider to go with. Ask 100 people in a room which place should host your website and 75% of the answers will be different. With that said, you can add these independent reviews from WPShout to your list of legitimate researching material when it comes time to decide on a webhosting provider.
By the way, for those that have an opinion on which host to go with, WPShout is still conducting the survey and has plans at some point to release more detailed information regarding the reviews.
Dreamhost has a section on their Wiki explaining detailed ways on how to optimize WordPress using such tools as WP Super Cache, Nocache, Fcgi, and various combinations of the latter. I don’t understand the gobbily gook presented within the document but if you’re using your own dedicated server or VPS, these tips might be of interest to you. An aside but also interesting article regarding WordPress configuration tricks was published by Jeff Star on the Digging Into WordPress site back in 2009. Lesson learned is that the WPConfig file that is apart of WordPress is pretty powerful. ∞
Andrew Nacin who is one of the core developers of WordPress has published an extensive field guide for developers regarding WordPress 3.3. The guide contains links to relevant articles and discussions on the WordPress developers blog such as admin bar API changes, Javascript and editor changes, Help screen along with API changes, etc. All developers should take note of the links published by Andrew so you’re well prepared for the release. ∞
Michael Fields, one of the many theme wranglers for Automattic has published his wishlist of items he’d like to see implemented into the WordPress media manager. Of the things he mentioned, The ability for a theme to define multiple types of images like Logo, Custom Header, Body Background, Content Background, etc. We have two of these already, but IMHO it would be awesome if themes could define more than these two sounds like a really cool idea. What’s on your wishlist? ∞
Scott Reilley who also goes by Coffee2Code is continuing his trend of releasing small but useful plugins for niche audiences. This time, he has released a plugin called No Browser Nag that removes the Outdated Browser nag found within newer versions of WordPress.
While it’s a bit foolish to condone the use of outdated browsers, sometimes users don’t have a choice. At least with this plugin, that user group will be able to remove the constant nag and allow WordPress to get off their backs about a situation they may not be able to control. However, if possible, you should upgrade to the newest versions of your browser of choice as they often contain important security updates, performance improvements, etc.
Congrats to Donncha O Caoimh for releasing version 1.0 of his popular caching plugin, WP Super Cache. The release is an incremental improvement over previous versions but contains a number of bugfixes and new features such as a “Delete Cache” link within the admin bar. Back in 2009 when the plugin was first released, it was THE plugin that everyone suggested using if you wanted to increase performance on your site due to caching. Now a days, it seems as though W3 Total Cache has taken over that position. However, it’s nice to see Donncha still improving the plugin to provide users an alternate choice in caching solutions. ∞
Interesting case study using a number of cool data points that shows how WordPress has won the crown amongst Joomla and Drupal for being the most widely used CMS in the world. One things for sure, it certainly paid off for WordPress to be focused on making the democratization of content publishing as easy as possible first, then making WordPress incredibly extensible later. There is an entire laundry list of reasons of why WordPress is at the top of the mountain right now, the success of the platform can not be traced back to one thing. The comments in the article contain a couple of those reasons while the others are spread amongst the various comment and forum threads on the web.
The past 7-8 years is very interesting to look back upon to figure out how WordPress ended up in it’s current spot of being the best in breed within the content management space. But, what I find even more interesting is if whether or not the things that made WordPress successful in the past will continue to stick around so that the platform is equally or more successful in the future. Focus, ease of use, extensibility, etc. Be right back, I’m going to go ask my magic 8 ball. ∞
Limiting The Amount Of Text In Comments
By Jeffro on December 9, 2011
Eric Teubert over at WPEngineer has shared some Javascipt code that can be used to limit the amount of text that users can place within the comments field or any text field for that matter. Could be used to combat those comment spammers that like to post a bazillion words but the negative side is that lengthy, legitimate commentators will need to be cut short. ∞
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Posted in WordPress | Tagged comments, javascript, snippets, text | 4 Responses