Unit Testing WordPress Plugins

Nikolay Bachiyski gave a good talk at this year’s WordCamp San Francisco about unit testing WordPress plugins. His method uses PHPUnit, which is an additional PEAR package you have to install on the server. You can then use MockPress to simulate WordPress in the tests. Another option is the SimpleTest for WordPress plugin, which uses SimpleTest […]

Continue reading...

The Internet Was Built on Open Principles

“The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles… If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the […]

Continue reading...

A Primer on Responsive Web Design

Ben Callahan from Sparkbox shared some good links on responsive web design recently, one of them being this introduction to the subject from A List Apart. One of the things that struck me from the article was that “[mobile] browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years.” Another link to Smashing Magazine was a […]

Continue reading...

Performance Improvements for Dedicated WordPress Servers

Mark Maunder benchmarked several performance tuning measures with a WordPress installation on a VPS server to show which are most effective. The biggest improvements were from installing PHP-APC, setting up Nginx to proxy concurrent connections for Apache, and using MySQL’s query cache.

Patent Trolling

NPR has a really good article on the absurd state of patents in the U.S. ” ‘We’re at a point in the state of intellectual property where existing patents probably cover every behavior that’s happening on the Internet or our mobile phones today,’ says Chris Sacca, the venture capitalist. ‘[T]he average Silicon Valley start-up or […]

Continue reading...