The AB Theme Framework
Author Buzz UK are working on a new WordPress Theme Framework specifically for authors. One of the things to come out from the work we have been doing for Author Buzz UK is that many themes only mostly fit the needs of writers. If you add in the need for …
New Plugin: AB Custom Post Meta
Author Buzz UK members can now get their hands on a new plugin – AB Custom Post Meta. For now, the plugin is exclusive to Author Buzz blogs. AB Custom Post Meta is a simple plugin that adds a new widget to display custom post data. When you write a …
Fighting Spam
Spam – I knew that it would happen sooner or later; I would just have rather spam happened later (or never). There are two significant areas of spam that we have to fight. User Registration Spam (and spam groups) Comment Spam The user registration spam is pretty much just a …
Importing content from other platforms
Today I set myself the task of finalising the import process for a number of large blogs waiting to move into the Author Buzz family. If only life was so simple. It turns out that the last time anyone tried to import from the platforms in question was several major …
5 things WordPress.org really needs to start doing
Today was nothing if not frustrating. I spent hours looking for ways to set up a simple user-badges system and got nowhere fast. Given the huge number of pre-existing plugins that cover this task, I thought (wrongly as it turns out) that I could simply install one of them and …
Oops
Everything should be working again but I managed to break everything quite badly today. First I installed a new plugin which ended up causes a network-wide server error. I then disabled all plugins which was a bit of a sledgehammer approach. After I removed the broken plugin, I had to …
Thank you, BuddyDev’s Brajesh Singh
We can finally announce some forward progress in the area of modifying member profiles to do what we need them to do. This is almost entirely down to one man who I have never met.
Faster site with cache
With a little luck, the site(s) should now be a little bit faster. For those of you who are interested let’s look at how we made Author Buzz a bit faster. Pretty much most of the speed improvements have come from installing W3 Total Cache. Despite my reservations, it seems …
Grumpy Dev on WordPress
It seems to me that everything about WordPress, BuddyPress and the like are written in such a way as to be so mind numbingly hard it might honestly be easier to get a vogon to write good poetry. Last time, in “The World’s Grumpiest Dev” I talked about how much …
WordPress Plugin Framework Creation
One of the challenges for Author Buzz was that we need a lot of different functions and features without polluting the plugin list with a large collection of things that blog users cannot directly access. Our ideal solution would be to wrap all the features into one plugin. However, we also …