Many a time I’ve been involved in building a custom WordPress theme, which relied or benefited from some plugins being installed and activated. Â I’ve always had an ad hoc solution to the problem, with my own installation scripts, WP-CLI mockery, etc. “Packaging third-party plugins with your WordPress theme using TGM Plugin Activation library” covers a much more elegant solution. Â I haven’t tried it yet, but it does look very promising for my next WordPress project.
I came across this list of 11 highly underrated plugins for WordPress. Â I wouldn’t go as far as call of them highly underrated, as some of them are rather highly rated. Â But that’s not the point. Â I wanted to share the list especially for these three:
I’ve just discovered some sad sad news.  Alex King, one of the bigger people in the WordPress community for years, is fighting a stage 4 cancer battle.  Alex is well known for a few things, most notably for his design of the Share icon, his contributions to WordPress core, and his work as a founder of Crowd Favorite.
I’ve never met Alex or spoke to him directly, but his work is a constant inspiration. Â From the early days, when I was promoting WordPress as a flexible platform for web application development, I used his work for powerful examples. Â I’ve also built projects using Carrington Core framework. Â This blog ran both Carrington Blog and FavePersonal themes for quite some time. Â I’ve used Capsule for a while to manage my code snippets and project notes, and I’m sure I’ll use it again. Â I’ve used (and still using) quite a few plugins that he was involved with – Social, Twitter Tools, Old Post Alert, Delink Comment Author, and others. Â I’ve been an occasional reader of his blog. Â And, of course, like anyone else using WordPress, I’ve benefited from his work.
The time has come to return a favor. Â Alex is compiling some information about his work and career for his 6 year old daughter to learn more about him. Â So if you met Alex, communicated with him, or benefited from his work – take a couple of minutes to share your experience. Â He well deserves that.
To Alex: thank you for all your work. Â It’s inspirational and educational. Â Stay strong!
I’m running Google AdSense on this website to help me get a few cents for the hosting bill (it’s literally cents, not millions of dollars, like some of you apparently think).  Google now in compliance with EU Cookie Law requires publishers to have the cookie warning.
Please ensure that you comply with this policy as soon as possible, and not later than 30th September 2015.
If your site or app does not have a compliant consent mechanism, you should implement one now. To make this process easier for you, we have compiled some helpful resources at cookiechoices.org.
Usually, I don’t care about these things, or avoid them all together. Â But since we are facing similar issues at work, I decided to run with it and see how it works and if it has any affect at all.
Gladly, I didn’t have to do any work at all. Â The good folks have already implemented the Cookie Law Info plugin for WordPress, so that’s what I have now. Â You have the choice to either accept the cookies, or leave the site. Â I’m not going to fish out each cookie one by one and explain what it does. Â Nobody cares. And if you do, you are probably here by mistake anyway.
WP Instagram Digest out. DsgnWrks Instagram Importer in. The old plugin was working more or less fine, but it lacked a bit in customization and in support of the somewhat newer WordPress features.  After stumbling upon this blog post, I decided it was time to try something new.
Some of the reasons for the replacement: