Post Status Podcasts

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about various third party publishing apps available and how they work with WordPress. They dig into apps that currently exist, how the connect to WordPress, how the future of WordPress could improve the third party ecosystem, and many of the challenges that must be tackled when interacting with WordPress as a third party application. Apps We Discussed WordPress mobile apps Ulysses Desk Byword MarsEdit Windows Life Writer Evernote to WordPress Zapier iA Writer OneNote to WordPress Zapier Editor Interfaces TinyMCE (web editor) QuillJS (web editor) DraftJS (web editor) WordPress iOS editor (native editor) Other Links WordPress REST API Vienna Sponsor: Delicious Brains Today’s show is sponsored by Delicious Brains. WP Migrate DB Pro makes moving and copying databases simple. They are also working on an exciting new project right now for merging databases, called Mergebot. Go to Mergebot.com for updates on that, and deliciousbrains.com for more information on WPMigrate DB Pro, and thanks to the team at Delicious Brains for being a Post Status partner.

WordPress 4.6, “Pepper”, has been released. It’s named, as always, after a famous jazz musician, and this release is named after Park Frederick "Pepper" Adams III, a baritone saxophonist and jazz composer. The Release Lead for WordPress 4.6 was Dominik Schilling, known often as Ocean90, and the Deputy Release Lead was Garth Mortensen. There were 272 total contributors to this release. According to Aaron Jorbin, 85 of these contributors were first timers, so congratulations to all new WordPress contributors! For this release, we did a special episode of the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle — the CTO of Human Made — and me, Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and I discuss WordPress 4.6 and deep dive on a few of its features. About WordPress 4.6 Overall, this was a planned iterative release from the beginning, with a goal to fix as many longstanding bugs as possible, and to refine existing features, rather than to focus on a lot of brand new features. Folks have been clamoring for a release like this for a long time, and in most respects 4.6 delivered. According to Trac, 489 tickets were closed, across 53 components, during the 4.6 milestone. Also, it shipped exactly on time. User facing features WordPress 4.6 has a few user facing features that aren't huge functional changes, but nice interface enhancements. Shiny updates No more bleak screen of sadness, as the team working on this termed it. The plugin installation, updates, and delete process is much smoother than it used to be. There's a nice video of this from the initial proposal: This was the second release where "shiny updates" features were a focus. To see some under the hood considerations for developers, there's more information on that from Pascal Birchler. Native fonts WordPress is leaving Open Sans. You may have seen GitHub’s change to native fonts. Or if you’re running 4.6 in development, you’ve seen native fonts replace Open Sans in the admin too. Matt Miklic explains the switch from Open Sans to native system fonts in the WordPress admin. By the way, the declaration of fonts has a good bit of science behind it, and may be useful for those of you who wish to do something similar for your site body copy. Marcin Wichary has a really interesting post describing Medium's process for the switch. And if you're curious, the new declaration is this: font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; Inline link checker WordPress will now automatically detect improperly formatted links, as you write. While this doesn't check the validity of any properly written URL, it will ensure the URL you add in an href is properly formatted. So, it will catch if you accidentally type something like htp://w.org or http:/w.org and outline it in read for you to fix. If you copy and past a URL into the link editor, but don't include http:// at all (I do this a bunch), it auto detects and inserts it for you. Browser content caching Yet more efforts have been made to always ensure that you do not lose your content as you write. I followed the steps in the Trac ticket to see exactly what happens here. So I typed the first sentence below, saved a draft, then typed the second paragraph: What if I start typing and save a draft? Then start typing some more, because that's what bloggers do. And I chill here for a few seconds, then stupidly just reload this page? Then I reloaded the page without saving again, and got a notice that there is a more up to date version available. And just like that, the content is back, because it was saved in the browser's local storage. Pretty cool. Developer features There are several important developer centric features that you should know about. Enhanced meta data registration This is a significant aid to the (pending) REST API meta handling, but also improves other meta data functionality. The register_meta() function allows developers to tell WordPress more about what specific meta data is designed to do. In WordPress 4.6, the arguments for this function have changed, enabling more information to be communicated in the third parameter, which is now an array. The show_in_rest key, an experimental key (until the API endpoint goes in), finally solves the issue for the REST API for knowing when to include meta data in the API's default responses. It's one step of a few that need to be made to better support meta for the API, but it's a good step forward. For plugin developers not using register_meta(), be sure to learn more about it and the advantages, as there are quite a few. Jeremy Felt describes how to use register_meta on Make Core. Translation priorities and changes WordPress will now default to the translations from Translate.WordPress.org community translations, then pull from theme or plugin translation files. A procedure called “just-in-time” translation loading will be utilized, and for plugins and themes distributed through the official repository, load_plugin_textdomain() and load_theme_textdomain() no longer need to be used. Commercial plugin authors will still largely follow the same internationalization procedures they always have. In a related note, and quite impressively, WordPress 4.6 shipped 100% translated in 50+ languages. Resource hints Joe helped teach me more about resource hints on the podcast, and Aaron did a much better job detailing resource hints than I could, in his excellent field guide: Resource Hints is a rather new W3C specification that “defines the dns-prefetch, preconnect, prefetch, and prerender relationships of the HTML Link Element ()”. These can be used to assist the browser in the decision process of which origins it should connect to, and which resources it should fetch and preprocess to improve page performance. In 4.6, WordPress adds an API to register and use resource hints. The relevant ticket is #34292. Developers can use the wp_resource_hints filter to add custom domains and URLs for dns-prefetch, preconnect, prefetch or prerender. One needs to be careful to not add too many resource hints as they could quite easily negatively impact performance, especially on mobile. Resource hints can be very useful for certain situations, and it's a technique that I personally need to explore further. Those of you doing advanced performance-driven development will surely be excited about support for this in WordPress. Customizer APIs The Customize API continues to evolve and improve, and Nick Halsey walks through new developer-focused features and changes to the API for WordPress 4.6. Also quite notably, Weston Ruter describes new APIs for both settings validation and notification management in the customizer. Other developer-centric changes Multisite changes: Jeremy Felt describes WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query, and goes over a few new functions and filters. There is now a persistent comment cache, allowing more performant comment loading functionality. The WordPress HTTP API now uses the Requests library, as Ryan McCue describes. Aaron Jorbin describes some of the lower level WordPress loading priorities and defaults that have changed. He also describes how WP CLI and core have reconciled their differences in wp-settings.php, which makes backward compatability for WP CLI possible now. Boone Gorges describes the introduction of WP_Term_Query. He’s the term whisperer. As Joe and I discuss in the podcast, these sorts of changes make for better consistency in WordPress, and provide an improved developer experience. Learn more WordPress 4.6 is the result of hundreds of community members. You can find their names and links to their profiles on the official release post. Also check out the official 4.6 Codex page that has a lot of handy information and links to source Trac tickets. You can see all closed tickets from 4.6 on the Trac milestone. View all new functions, classes, methods, and hooks on the official Developer Reference. And learn more about some of what I discuss above, and other items, on the ever-helpful field guide. For the record, WordPress 4.5 was downloaded more than 45 million times. You can track 4.6 downloads on the page dedicated to the task. Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 4.6! I hope you have a 🍺 or 🍻 to celebrate if that's your kind of thing, or otherwise 🎉  your efforts. Podcast Sponsor: Prospress Prospress exists to make the world’s best eCommerce platform a little better, because they want to help entrepreneurs prosper with WordPress. They are the creators of WooCommerce Subscriptions, PayPal Digital Goods, and One Page Checkout. Check them out at Prospress.com.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and me, Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and I discuss how we choose plugins, code libraries, and frameworks for our projects. Direct Download Topics & Links How we pick plugins Analyzing a plugin on WordPress.org Using GitHub Picking libraries or drop-in frameworks Dealing with updates Differentiating between picking tools for our personal or internal projects, versus doing so for clients Sponsor: WooCommerce WooCommerce makes the most customizable eCommerce software on the planet, and it’s the most popular too. You can build just about anything with WooCommerce. Try it today, and thanks to the team at WooCommerce being a Post Status partner

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk scaling WordPress, and what to do when you think you might’ve reached WordPress’s limits. From meta data, to users, to traffic management, they break down some of the most common scaling issues. Topics Posts Meta Search Database Users Traffic (types of caching) Links Elasticsearch ElasticPress More Like This Query Elasticsearch WP_Query Memcached Redis Rarst Fragment Cache Plugin Human Made Fragment Cache drop-in Sponsor: iThemes iThemes has a full suite of excellent products to help you level up your WordPress website. From iThemes Security, to BackupBuddy’s new live backups, to Exchange for your next membership site, iThemes has you covered. Thanks to the team at iThemes being a Post Status partner!

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about Medium & WordPress and whether Medium and similar platforms are a significant threat to WordPress. They also discuss the benefits and challenges of open source platforms versus proprietary ones, and WordPress’s potential as a lower level item in the site stack. Links Interview with Matt Joe's REST API talk Vienna WordPress app concept Billionaire's Typewriter What to Consider When the Platforms Show up With Money Medium.com WordPress.com Calypso Medium compared to LiveJournal Sponsor This episode is sponsored by Pippin's Plugins. If you want to sell downloads, setup content restriction, or start an affiliate program, Pippin’s Plugins have you covered. If you need all three, even better. Pippin’s Plugins is well known for making some of the best coded and most reliable plugins in the market. Check out PippinsPlugins.com for more information.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. This episode of Post Status Draft is hosted by Sarah Gooding -- another WordPress journalist -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Sarah and Brian discuss how they do WordPress news, manage working remotely, and handle family life. Links WP Tavern opinion Sponsor This episode is sponsored by Valet. Valet helps keep your clients happy & coming back. They offer expert services and keep the websites they manage functioning flawlessly. They offer preventative care that provides peace of mind around the clock. For more information, check out their website and thank you to Valet for being a Post Status partner.  

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian discuss the structure and function of the WordPress.org website, which is the hub of the WordPress project. From the actual software distribution, to discussions about the project, to support, and buying swag: it all happens from WordPress.org. We break down what’s what and what we think you should know. Notes Who owns WordPress.org? Who works on WordPress.org How WordPress.org distributes software updates Different Sections of WordPress.org Navigation Showcase WordPress theme directory -- and reviews -- and commercial themes WordPress plugin directory -- and reviews Mobile -- Redirects to .com Support Forums / Codex "documentation" Make WordPress (Get Involved) About (many sub pages and also project structure) Blog Hosting Download (button -- in future to be Get WordPress) Other Sections core.trac.wordpress.org developer.wordpress.org mercantile.wordpress.org jobs.wordpress.net learn.wordpress.org Ideas Other Linked Sites WordCamp WordPress.tv BuddyPress bbPress WordPress.com ma.tt Active Projects for Improving Helphub Handbooks (theme), plugin published Plugin directory Links Blog for WordPress.org projects Sponsor This episode is sponsored by Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms  makes the best web forms on the planet. Over a million WordPress sites are already using Gravity Forms. Is yours? For more information, check out their website and thank you to Gravity Forms for being a Post Status partner.  

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. Joe and Brian discuss WordPress as a Headless CMS. They talk about what a Headless CMS is, WordPress’s strengths and weaknesses as a Headless CMS, popular frameworks to utilize, and offer up example websites to check out. Examples The Guggenheim A Day of Rest Boston ustwo Skaled Modern Tribe Links Angular React React vs Angular 2 Lean, an Agular for WordPress framework Decoupled CMS What is a Headless CMS? We Need to Talk about the REST API Introducing the REST API Authentication Broker Human Made's REST API White Paper Sponsor Today’s show is sponsored by OptinMonster. OptinMonster allows you to convert visitors into subscribers. You can easily create & A/B test beautiful lead capture forms without a developer. They recently released OptinMonster 3.0, with an all new builder interface and other great features.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. Security -- in WordPress core, distributed plugins and themes, and in our custom code -- is a constant battle. It’s important to be vigilant with our security practices, from the perspective of managing our websites and when writing code. In this episode, Joe and Brian discuss the nature of WordPress security, best practices for writing secure code, and dig into various situations WordPress developers and site owners may run into. Links Hardening WordPress About WordPress Security A Guide to Writing Secure Themes Writing Secure Plugins & Themes by Ben Lobaugh $wpdb WP Scan Understanding Vulnerabilities Sponsor: Pagely Pagely offers best in class managed WordPress hosting, powered by the Amazon Cloud, the Internet’s most reliable infrastructure. Post Status is proudly hosted by Pagely. Thank you to Pagely for being a Post Status partner.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. Everybody creates workflows to accomplish their development work. And sometimes you come upon a new tool that completely changes how you do things, and helps you improve your productivity. In this episode, Joe and Brian aim to share their tools in the hopes that it will help others review and refine their own processes. And Joe and Brian approach things quite differently themselves, so they compare and contrast their own workflows. Have something to add to the conversation, be sure to comment! Tools Gitify, lice-cap Captured (straight to S3), Gifhub, Screenflow, Cloudup Authy F.lux TunnelBear Alfred Slack Coding Tools & Debugging PHPStorm, Sublime, Atom, VIM, Coda Xdebug, var_dump, XHProf httpie Atom Packages: php-autocomplete, WPCS, php-linter React-console Query Monitor Sequel Pro, mysql command line iTerm2 wp-cli!!! Build Tools Grunt Gulp Make ImageOptim Grunt-sass vs. grunt-contrib-sass Version Control / Review Tools / Deployment Tig, Tower Hub Github Araxis Merge DeployBot / Beanstalk Transmit (S3/SFTP) Frontend Tools / Extensions Chrome Inspector / Console Postman Chrome JS Debugger IP & Domain Info extension Web Developer Wappalyzer CodePen Sponsor This podcast is sponsored by Yoast. Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin available, with a premium version to provide expert support and additional features. Thank you to Yoast for being a Post Status partner. Related Podcasts Understanding WP-CLI Local WordPress Development Strategies