For those of you looking for in-depth reviews of both paid and free WordPress plugins, you may want to add WPNuggets.com to your feedreader or bookmarks. The site is brand new and so far, features three different plugin reviews. From what I’ve read thus far, Adela does a good job of describing how the plugin works as well as outlining the good and the bad. Considering the large breadth of plugins available for WordPress, Adela shouldn’t be running out of plugins to review anytime soon.
New Site Dedicated To Reviewing WordPress Plugins
The Theme Hook Alliance
It looks like after three years since the discussion took place on the WPTavern forums regarding the standardization of theme hooks, Doug Stewart has decided to put together a Theme Hook Alliance project to get theme authors all on the same page.
Child theme authors and plugin developers need a consistent set of entry points to allow for easy customization and altering of functionality. Core WordPress offers a suite of [action hooks](http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/) and [template tags](http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_tags) but does not cover many of the common use cases. The Theme Hook Alliance is a community-driven effort to agree on a set of third-party action hooks that THA themes pledge to implement in order to give that desired consistency.
It will be interesting to see how far this goes and what the adoption rate will be like. Doug is looking for some feedback so if you’re keen to the idea, let him know in the comments of his blog post.
Three Plugins To Monitor Site Uptime
Adam Burucus has published his overview of three different WordPress plugins that can be used to monitor a websites up-time. It seems to me that Pingdom is the most popular player in this market based on their history and how many major websites I’ve seen mention their service. At least by his overview, Pingdom is the only one out of the three that provides mobile alerts which is a deal breaker for me. I have my phone with me everywhere I go so that would be the perfect option to be notified of when a site goes down.
How many of you are using some sort of up time monitoring service?
How WordPress Changed The Career Of Eric Karkovack
Short post on how WordPress changed the career of Eric Karkovack. I imagine similar designers/developers feel the same way he does.
Of course, WordPress isn’t the only powerful CMS out there. You may enjoy working with different platforms. No matter what you’re using to build websites, the modern tools we have available are making us better designers and developers.
While I’m no where close to considering myself as a designer or developer, WordPress has provided me the opportunity to learn how certain functions within PHP work and has given me a better appreciation of the many technologies that have to work together in order for something like WordPress to function effectively.