Category Archives: WordPress

Progressive Enhancement with Backbone.js

I’m mostly focusing on back-end development these days, so I’m a bit behind the curve on a lot of the recent front-end practices, but I’ve been playing around with Backbone.js a bit, and one of the things that’s been nagging me is the hard dependency on JavaScript for the core functionality of the site. Looking around for some […]

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Preventing Clickjacking on WordPress Sites

WordPress already sends the X-FRAME-OPTIONS header for wp-login.php and the Admin Panels in order to prevent clickjacking, but it doesn’t send it on the front end because that could interfere with remote services that legitimately frame parts of a site. That’s only relevant for a small number of pages, though, so I’ve added a snippet to my functionality plugin skeleton […]

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WordPress.tv Developer Presentation Roundup

I’m one of the mentors for WordPress’ SupportPress project in this year’s Google Summer of Code, and I wanted to put together a list of WordPress.tv videos to help introduce Varun to the WordPress community and some development best practices. I figured it’d be good to save it for future reference, so I’m also posting […]

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Challenges for the WordPress Community as it Matures

Mike Jordan’s post on the WordPress community has some great insight and challenging thoughts. The truth is, however, that our community does not have these rare traits simply because its members are just that awesome. The primary reason that our community is so approachable, is that for the first several years of its life we had to […]

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Hide PHP Warnings and Notices from Poorly Written Plugins

Update: Zack Tollman wrote a plugin called Ostrichize that does an even better job of this, so I’ve reverted my version out of my functionality plugin skeleton and will use his in the future. Pro tip: search for existing code before writing new code ;) * * * There are a lot of WordPress plugin and theme […]

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The Right Way to Customize a WordPress Plugin

Video: I presented on this topic at WordCamp Dayton 2014. It’s very common for developers to customize and extend existing plugins to fit their own needs, which is one of the great advantages of using open-source software. They often do it by making their changes directly to the plugin, though, which creates a security vulnerability […]

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Security Reward for new Google Authenticator Plugin

I just released a new plugin into the WordPress.org repository, and am fairly confident that it’s secure, but since it modifies some of the default login behavior, I’d love to get some extra eyeballs on the code. To that end, I’m offering a $150 Amazon.com gift certificate* to anyone who can find a significant vulnerability. By “significant”, […]

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Reusing P2’s ajaxUrl Short-Circuits Other AJAX Requests

I just spent awhile tracking down some odd AJAX behavior that was puzzling me, so I thought I’d share the solution. I was working on a plugin to extend P2 and my AJAX requests were always responding with -1. After a lot of digging and some trial-and-error, I figured out that it was happening because I was […]

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WordPress’ Insularity and Architectural Shortcomings

Even though a huge fan of WordPress and have chosen to develop for it exclusively, there are still some big areas where the underlying architecture is out of step with modern development practices. Mike Toppa just wrote a great response to that “Dire State of WordPress” article that’s been going around, where he defends WordPress […]

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How WordPress Saves Lives: Freedom, Hope and Custom Post Types

Paul Clark’s presentation at WordCamp Phoenix 2013 is a must-watch for any developer who’s interested in using technology to advance human rights and social justice. He describes how his team used open-source technologies to help a human-rights organization in Burma manage their information in ways that have a direct impact on their mission and the lives […]

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The Social Dynamics of Open-Source Contributions

Diaries of a Core Maintainer #6: A Tale of Two Developers makes some insightful points about different approaches towards contributing to open source projects, and how collaboration and social dynamics can play a big role in whether or not the contributions are accepted. It’s written by a Drupal dev, but I’ve seen the same things […]

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