W-Shadow.com

I’ve made a site that shows actions and filters executed during different WordPress requests. Why? When I’m writing a plugin, I sometimes need to know not just what a hook does, but also when it runs in relation to other hooks. The official WordPress documentation has a list of common actions, but it’s out of […]

After a long delay, a new version of my PluginUpdateChecker library is finally ready for release. Read on to find out what’s new, or go straight to the download page. For those of you not familiar with this library, here’s a short summary: You can use it to add automatic update support to any WordPress plugin. Especially […]

I had some free time this weekend, so I built an automatically updated list of Top 100 WordPress plugin developers. The rankings are based on the number of times each developers’ plugins have been downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin directory. A short PHP script updates the list several times per day. Check it out. Bonus: Compare […]

A few days ago, I happened upon an interesting post on the ManageWP blog discussing ways to improve the WordPress plugin repository. One of the suggestions was to add a “related plugins” feature: Both Lester Chan, with over 7 million plugin downloads to his name, and Duane Storey, a co-founder of Brave New Code, suggested […]

Update 2017-06-20: This library has been deprecated. Please use PUC instead. It’s more current and it supports both themes and plugins. This is a PHP library that lets you add automatic update notifications and single-click updates to any WordPress theme. It’s purpose is to be easy to integrate for developers and to provide a familiar […]

Last updated on June 26, 2015. Since time immemorial, only plugins hosted in the official WordPress.org plugin directory have supported automatic updates. Now, I’ve written a PHP library that you can use to add automatic update capabilities to any plugin. Public, private and commercial plugins alike – all can now enjoy the benefits of automatic […]

A few months ago, WordPress.org introduced a new feature available to plugins hosted in the Plugin Directory – changelogs. Having an easily accessible changelog is certainly a usability plus, but I felt it created unnecessary work for plugin developers. Personally, I usually provide meaningful log messages (example) when uploading a new version of a plugin […]

WordPress.org has an Ideas section where users can post their suggestions for new WordPress features and comment on ideas posted by other users. If you’re a plugin developer or just someone who blogs about WP, this page is a good place to look for new… well, ideas. It doesn’t have an RSS feed though, so […]