Monthly Archives: October 2009

Support Freeware Developers With #DonateFriday

If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time, you’ve likely run into the phenomenon known as “Follow Friday,” where people tweet a list of users worth following, along with a #followfriday hashtag.

In the past few months something new and interesting started up: Donate Friday. The idea is you’re probably using several free WordPress plugins that take someone’s time and effort to develop. So on Donate Friday you pick one, donate any sum of money, however much you think the plugin is worth to you, and then you tweet about it with the #donatefriday hashtag.

The original post about Donate Friday suggested doing this not only for plugin developers, but theme creators, or anyone else contributing to the WordPress community.

Why not take it a little further? WordPress isn’t the only conglomeration of freeware developers. You probably use some free software (GPL or otherwise) every day that you find essential. Why not give them a little too? You could send a few dollars along to the people behind CyberDuck, Ubuntu, whatever software you like. Pick one every week or two and send them a (non-Starbucks) coffee.

Programmatically Checking if a WordPress Plugin is Installed

When writing a WordPress plugin, it can sometimes be helpful to tell if another plugin is active or not, whether to prevent conflicts or to extend another plugin that you require as a dependency. Fortunately, there’s a conditional function built into WordPress for just…

Poll: What is Your Take on Commercial WP Plugins?

Gravity Forms has had some good success selling their (GPL) plugin in recent weeks, and the Shopp plugin has been going for awhile, too. I, myself, have plans to “go commercial” sometime in the coming months as well. I’d like your opinion on the…

Coming Soon From Atebits: Tweetie 2.0

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, Atebits’ Tweetie for Mac is my favorite desktop Twitter client. (And many people also enjoy the $2.99 Tweetie iPhone application from the same developer.) What has developer Loren Brichter been doing in the wake of the applications’…

BlogBuzz October 3, 2009

SimplePie Ceases Development

The developers behind the SimplePie RSS parser (the de facto standard for PHP RSS parsing) have announced that they are ending their work developing the project. …effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing…

Design Spotlight: Envato Marketplace Redesign

Envato launched the redesigns for their marketplace sites last Sunday. They all look pretty much the same, save for some color and logo differences, so I’ll just focus on ThemeForest here.