Mike Jolley

WTBFB

  • The Blogging for Benjamin contest concludes

    This is the final day of Daniel Espinoza’s Blogging for Benjamin contest and I’m happy to say I managed to post every day in december – a great achievement. I covered a variety of topics including: 9 topics on WooCommerce 11 topics on plugin development in general 2 workflow related posts 3 posts on WordPress…

  • The WooCommerce 2.1 notice API

    If you’ve built a plugin for WooCommerce before you may have come across the ‘message’ functionality which let you add messages (or errors) to the frontend using: $woocommerce->add_message( ‘Hi there’ ) $woocommerce->add_error( ‘You bafoon’ ); Part of the development of WooCommerce 2.1 was refactoring the main WooCommerce class which involved moving out unrelated methods (such…

  • 6 ways to polish a plugin before release

    Before you release your plugin on WordPress.org it’s always good to spend a little time polishing the final product; not only does this make your job easier in the long run (so you don’t have to fix it later), it gives a better first impression to new users.

  • Resolutions for 2014

    With 2013 drawing to an end, it’s time to start thinking about the upcoming year and what I hope to accomplish. I didn’t set any resolutions for 2013, but this year I want to set myself some goals so I have something to work towards. Here are my four new year resolutions.

  • All I want for Xmas is a decent Markdown editor; MarkDrop vs iA Writer vs Byword

    This month I’ve been blogging like a champ, every day. Not from WordPress admin though – I’m a markdown lover and I prefer dedicated apps. I’ve been experiementing with 3 apps in particular this month; Byword, MarkDrop, and the one I’ve used the longest; iAWriter. In this post I’ll review each and give my verdict…

  • Using post status transitions to send custom alerts (in WP Job Manager)

    Something I get asked a fair bit with regards to my plugins is how to send an alert during an event, for example, “when a job expires in WP Job Manager, how can I notify the user?” Plugins which use custom post types, like WP Job Manager, are likely to use custom/standard post statuses too…

  • Plugin development and the fear of change

    Yesterday I was taken off guard with a comment/concern from an anonymous WooCommerce developer named “Jonathan”. Jonathan was annoyed at upcoming changes in the core WC plugin: Mike, one thing that strikes me about WC as compared to WP is stability of maintstay features and code structures. Notice that WP rarely breaks a site. He…

  • 2013 (almost) complete

    As we approach the end of 2013, I’d like to reflect a little on the past year’s events and my achievements. My highlights for this year included releasing WooCommerce 2.0 and hitting both 1 and 2 million download milestones, releasing my jobs plugin, and the WooTrip to Leiden and WordCamp EU.

  • Why we changed the dashboard widgets in WC 2.1

    WooCommerce 2.1 has a new dashboard widget which replaces the previous version’s “Right now”, sales, and recent order widgets. Some users will like this change, others may ‘miss’ the old widgets. In this post I’ll explain the reasoning behind the changes.