May 22, 2013 by Matt | Posted in WordPress
It’s no secret that the WordPress codebase is a mess. It seems that not a week goes by without some blogger publishing a post criticizing it. Unfortunately, fixing it is no simple matter.
One of the goals the WordPress project holds is to maintain compatibility with older plugins and themes that may not have been updated to work with the latest version, which means, well, not changing things that would break old plugins. Or adding new functions and leaving the older, redundant ones behind to maintain compatibility. It’s that methodology that led the developers to bake the infamous Magic Quotes functionality into WordPress itself, when it has been deprecated and removed from newer versions of PHP, so as to not break plugins expecting that behavior. (Which means plugin developers have to unescape strings before passing them to prepared statements, like they should be doing.)
That’s just one example of something I find vexing about WordPress, and not really indicative of the deeper structural issues that others complain about.
Continue reading →
May 15
It’s been ten years since CSS Zen Garden launched with its goal to excite and inspire people to build creative designs with the much more limited tools CSS offered at the time. A decade later, it’s back. Given how the CSS landscape has changed…
May 8
At the Adobe MAX conference this week, Adobe announced that they will be discontinuing their Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) in favor of their subscription-based “Creative Cloud” service. Instead of purchasing the software outright, and upgrading at your leisure, the new system involves…
May 1
If you type a few letters into the search field over at the Internet Movie Database, you might notice how fast it is. That’s because they’re not served dynamically from their primary servers. IMDB, instead, serves the JSON data for search suggestions from a…
Apr 24
There has been news lately of a distributed attack against WordPress sites. A growing botnet has been running dictionary attacks against sites powered by WordPress, in effort to gain access to the the admin panel and infect the server. As is usually the case…
Apr 17
The popular options for VPS hosting for the past few years have been the venerable Linode, VPS.net (my provider of choice since 2009), the late SliceHost, Rackspace and Amazon EC2. A new name has been cropping up more and more lately, though: DigitalOcean. After…
Apr 10
Here’s some great news from the WordPress development blog: WordPress 3.6 is going to have built-in support for audio/video playback. You will be able to upload a media file, and WordPress will handle playback with the MediaElement.js. Shortcodes will be available, as well as…
Apr 3
I recently unearthed a review copy of a book that somehow got lost in the shuffle a couple of years ago, HTML5 and CSS3: Develop with Tomorrow’s Standards Today by Brian P. Hogan, which is too bad, since it’s one of the better books…
Mar 20
If you’ve ever made a dropdown menu, you’re probably familiar with the “hover delay problem,” where a user tries to diagonally move the mouse from a submenu trigger to the menu that pops out, which causes the menu to snap closed when it loses…