Tag: plugins

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Test Drive For Plugins and Themes is Not Popular Enough

The pricing dilemma with WordPress themes and plugins is a critical problem, mostly due to the widespread race to the bottom. Unfortunately, people don't understand the magnitude of a problem until they are personally involved and affected by the consequences. Discussing Business With Developers [caption id="attachment_11439" align="aligncenter" width="752"] Business owners and Developers working together[/caption] That's on of the reasons why I often have a hard time discussing business with developers working on a payroll for large companies. Part of them are not interested, nor involved with the actual business processes, or don't really care where do money come from. After all,… Continue Reading
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1000+ Downloads of DX Plugin Base

Almost 2 years ago I built the DX Plugin Base plugin as a skeleton for my own plugins - to copy-paste snippets that I regularly use like: adding custom post types, metaboxes, implementing the Settings API and so forth. Few days ago it hit the 1000 downloads mark and I'm pretty happy that other people find that useful. Recently I saw a plugin published on WordPress.org by another author (I kinda inherited that since the author left my contributor name in the readme too) completely built on the top of the Plugin Base. As a reminder, I welcome all contributions as… Continue Reading
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Let’s Talk Business and Cash at WordCamp Sofia 2016

Bulgaria is hosting yet another WordCamp this coming Saturday and I'm happy to join the speaker forces (despite having to wake up at abnormal hours on a Saturday) 💤 DevriX will be present at WordCamp Sofia 2016 and our team would be around over the weekend for any questions regarding WordPress development, business growth, remote working or building SaaS solutions. Additionally, we're sponsoring the event and presenting with 3 team members of ours - talking management, sales, and WordPress business market overview. I would cover a sensitive topic for developers who are struggling with finding market opportunities for selling their services. We'll talk about the… Continue Reading
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DX Plugin Base – Ongoing Updates

I built DX Plugin Base several years ago as a general plugin framework that we could use internally, and something that could serve as a code repository for most of our projects. I'm really happy that some folks got the plugin and built their own reusing most of our code, such as the Metwit Weather Widget. Since we hired a few more folks helping with both client work and internal projects, over the last couple of weeks we have been brainstorming on what could be added to our existing code base in order to improve our plugins - new features, enhancements, and… Continue Reading
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The Challenges Of Building a Site For a Friend

I often receive referrals or friends asking me to set up a WordPress website for them. It's usually something fairly small - such as a 5-page business website or a simple magazine website. They are close friends of mine or have been recommended through my network. They have received some offers, but are looking for a reliable solution instead of a shady freelancer or a random website building company. [caption id="attachment_12623" align="aligncenter" width="821"] Costs vs. Value[/caption] Generally speaking, I usually price services based on one of these two approaches: Free help for friends and family for trivial tasks and general guidance.… Continue Reading
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Code Quality And Free Plugins

Update Apr 29, 2015: My friend Emil from ThemeReview.co announced their Plugin Review service which I highly recommend for all plugin authors, business owners and clients - high quality means higher security, better performance and compatibility for your project. We have these regular discussions on Open Source, the future of WordPress and such. I've been discussing the global community aspect and the challenges with the self-made development titles, so let's take a closer look at the community. Growing WordPress As I've said before, I'm all in when it comes to having an Open Source platform for everyone to use and play it. It's… Continue Reading
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Into 2015

2015 is here again, and everyone is recovering from the New Year's Eve parties around the globe. I would like to wish everyone a happy healthy and successful new year. My TODO list so far is endless, so prioritizing and getting the most out of it would be one of my main targets (priorities!). Also, the reason for this post is mostly Brad's post: https://twitter.com/williamsba/status/550374082462883840 Since that's what I plan to do here as soon as I outline the main topics I would like to blog about. 2014 was entirely outside of my comfort zone work-wise, since I dealt with… Continue Reading
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WordPress Products and Demos

Last year at WordCamp Sofia I gave a talk named "Choosing the right WordPress theme". Contrary to the first guesses title-wise, since I'm not a designer at all, my topic was focused on the different sources to find a theme, based on a given set of requirements. [slideshare id=36183038&doc=choosing-a-wordpress-theme-140623021748-phpapp01] Few of my slides were referring to the product piracy - the humongous number of products being pirated. Or probably the high percentage of users using illegal products. I know of thousands of people using non-licensed operating systems or other cracked products. It's a painful experience really, and it's hard for a product company to… Continue Reading
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Plugins Scalability

Recently, I've been thinking about the state of plugins. In my previous post I've mentioned the free and premium plugins, and additionally I could split them in other categories, such as: small and large, self-contained and extensible, user-oriented and developer-related, optimized and non-optimized. I could go further with secure/insecure and everything, but that's another story. I'd also like to cover the aspect of user-oriented plugins vs. developer helpers, which is a separate topic. Scalability According to Wikipedia: In electronics (including hardware, communication and software), scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work in… Continue Reading
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DX Share Selection – Fork

I have that habit of selecting text snippets while I read (like adding breakpoints every few lines), but still I find it quite helpful when I can share a given snippet in an article by selecting it and sharing it through a popup. I found the WP Selected Text Sharer in the repo and it looks pretty close to what I need, however it hasn't been maintained for a while (more than 3 years). I have contacted the plugin author and he mentioned that he'd like to rewrite it one day, so I forked it into a simplified version with few… Continue Reading