Traditional display advertising is set apart from editorial content. They exist on the same page, but in different worlds. In the editorial world, the measure of content is creative, factual, and reader-focused, untainted by financial considerations. In the realm of advertising, it’s all about the bottom line. Of course, this is a fiction — although […]

I’m often asked whether WordPress is the right CMS for high-traffic websites, often with the implication that the person asking has experienced more than one slow WordPress site in the past. They may doubt whether WordPress can be scaled to meet the demands of a site with millions of visitors a month. One way to […]

Getting a theme into the WordPress Theme Repository can give a big boost to a WordPress developer’s credibility, especially if it proves popular with WordPress users. It’s also a great way to promote a premium theme — many theme developers publish “light” versions of their theme for free to promote a premium version with more […]

If you follow the scuttlebutt in the WordPress world, you’ll be aware that WordPress head honcho Matt Mullenweg has set overarching goals for this year’s WordPress development effort. Chief among them is an enhanced WordPress editing experience. As part of that process, WordPress’ dev team is gathering information about what users and professionals think of […]

A huge botnet of home routers has targeted WordPress sites with brute-force attacks over the last few weeks. Brute-force attacks are a risk for WordPress websites with insecure passwords, and they can cause problems even if a site has secure passwords by consuming a significant proportion of its resources. A botnet is a collection of […]

Magento Connect, which has for many years been the official source of Magento extensions, will shut down in September. The role of Magento Connect will be taken over by the Magento Marketplace, which was introduced a year ago and will become the official Magento-sanctioned repository of extensions. Magento’s extensions are one of the most important […]

A WordPress site with web-facing forms will be spammed. If there’s a form to be filled in, it will be filled in by spammers, even when there is no clear motivation for doing so. Spammers register for membership of any site they find, they fill in forms for gated content, they submit fake email addresses […]

If you run a WordPress site, the following scenario is probably familiar to you. You have what seems like an excellent idea for a change to your site. You log in to the administration dashboard, make some changes, and everything looks good. Then you refresh your site’s homepage to find that instead of the elegantly-designed […]

A few weeks ago we, wrote about a proposal to add data collection facilities to WordPress. The proposal was rejected, but that doesn’t mean the points it made weren’t valid. Collecting data about real-world software use can be valuable to developers. Wisdom is a premium WordPress plugin that allows plugin developers to collect information about […]

The release of WordPress 3.7 introduced a feature that was met with mixed reactions: automatic background updates. In all versions after 3.7, WordPress completes minor updates without asking for permission. Left to their own devices, site owners often neglect to perform updates. Updates — particularly the minor updates that can be applied automatically — include […]