Here are some very exciting news from the WordPress fronts: WordPress 5 will feature the built-in Gutenberg project. Gutenberg is a complete rebuilt of the WordPress administration and content publishing experience, with much faster and cleaner user interface and a whole array of new features, such as “page builder” functionality.
Here are a couple of links with more information on how to get yourself ready in time:
WordPress 4.9 is just around the corner (scheduled for release tomorrow, November 14th). This version brings an impressive number of new features and improvements. The stats so far are:
Roughly 400 bugs, 181 enhancements, 7 feature requests, and 42 blessed tasks have been marked as closed in WordPress 4.9.
Figuring out all these changes and how they affect you is an effort in itself. But don’t you worry! Here’s the WordPress 4.9 Field Guide, which showcases all the main changes and provides plenty of additional resources to follow up.
Wow! WordPress 4.9 packs quit a punch!
As described in “Introducing WP Image Processing Queue – On‑the‑Fly Image Processing Done Right“, Image Processing Queue plugin tries to solve several issues with On-The-Fly Image Processing (OTFIP) in WordPress. Some of the things that it improves are:
This is a very useful direction and I hope all the necessary bits will make it into the WordPress core. But even for those who don’t use WordPress, the whole discussion and implementation are a handy reference.
Charles is a web debugging proxy application for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Here’s a quick description from the project’s website:
Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).
And here are some key features:
- SSL Proxying – view SSL requests and responses in plain text
- Bandwidth Throttling to simulate slower Internet connections including latency
- AJAX debugging – view XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or as text
- AMF – view the contents of Flash Remoting / Flex Remoting messages as a tree
- Repeat requests to test back-end changes
- Edit requests to test different inputs
- Breakpoints to intercept and edit requests or responses
- Validate recorded HTML, CSS and RSS/atom responses using the W3C validator
Pretty much every browser these days comes with developer tools (like Google Chrome, for example).
But these are mostly useful for requests made by the browser itself. Often, like depicted in “PHP and cURL: How WordPress makes HTTP requests” blog post from which I learned about Charles, one needs to examine requests made by the application itself – like WordPress in this particular case.
The developer tools of the browser won’t be very useful, but a proxy application like Charles would. Setting up a proxy will send all requests through it, allowing for easy inspection and debugging.
When talking about what else WordPress could be used for except blogs, classified ads directories come up high on the list. It’s one of those examples which illustrate the scenario nicely and doesn’t require a lot of work.
So, how can WordPress be used to build a classified ads directory? Here is a list of a few ways you might go:
In this post, I’ll focus only on the third option.
Continue reading Building a classified ads directory with WordPress