Zulip is yet another Open Source team chat solution (much like Rocket.Chat). It has a number of cool features, including Markdown support for messages and drag-n-drop uploads, numerous integrations, and can be used as a self-hosted solution or as a SaaS.
Mailtrain is a self-hosted Open Source alternative to MailChimp and other similar mass-mailing and newsletter services. Of course, being self-hosted, it can go only so far – you’ll still need to deal with mail delivery, SPAM filtering, and other modern days “benefits” of delivering mass mailings. But it looks pretty complete in terms of features, so if you want to have full control and don’t mind investing a bit of time in setting up, check it out – you might get a better or at least cheaper alternative.
My WordPress radar noticed a new website – wpplugincheck. This website provides in-depth reviews of WordPress plugins. I’ve checked a few of those and they seem solid – honest and to the point.
There’s a gadzillion of websites online that review WordPress plugins (occasionally including even my own blog), but most of those either get too commercial with sponsored posts, or turn into collections of “5 best of this” and “7 awesome of this”. I hope the site continues and gets into a routine of publishing reviews of the new and updated plugins, especially focusing on the areas where there are a lot of choices, or not enough.
WordPress is an excellent system for a whole lot of different projects and needs. It’s widely used, fast, and flexible. However it does show its age in many ways. One of the areas where things could be a lot better and simpler is the WordPress plugin development.
WordPress plugins are still non-trivial to develop. This is mostly because WordPress is behind the current technology in many ways: new features of PHP programming language, such as Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), namespaces, dependency management with composer, unit testing, etc.  There are good reasons for this, but those don’t help WordPress plugin developers.
What does help is, for example, this WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, which is a standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress plugins. Using it still requires a bit of effort and dumb find-replace changes. But it saves a tonne of time, as well as trial and error, especially for those people who are working on their first or second WordPress plugin.
“Parsing: a timeline” is a historical timeline of parsing, as done by computers and computer programming languages. It starts well before computers were actually invented, from the time where people started thinking about what is a language, what it consists of and how it works.
Even though this article is mostly aimed at technical people, I’m sure pretty much anyone will find interesting bits in there, as some of the names and works mentioned are well known outside of technical industries. For techies, you’ll find all your favorite names in there – Markov, Turing, Boehm, Chomsky, Knuth, Dijkstra, Wall, and more.