Link Category: Tools
Search the Whole WordPress.org Repository

Ever just wanted to be able to easily run a text search against literally every theme on plugin in the WordPress repository? Honestly, me neither. But isn’t it cool to know that you can?! WPdirectory is fun silly tool that I just like knowing exists. And like I said, it make if fairly easy for you to search every plugin and theme freely distributed on WordPress.org in a quick and effortless way.
The Complete Guide to Deep Work

A very good guide to the work philosophy I swear by.
Emulate Mobile Devices In-Browser with the Ripple Chrome Extension

This week, I had a client send me a bug that only appeared in iOS Safari. As much as I’d love to say “tell your visitors not to use iOS Safari,” it’s definitely a popular enough way to browse the web to merit fixing the bug.
SecurityCheckli.st

While yesterday’s story about security was just about common *WordPress* security issues, today I want to share a cool site that helps you more with overall personal security planning. It’s got one of those cutesy URLs: SecurityCheckli.st. But other than that, there’s a lot to recommend the site. Primarily: it lists all the tools you should know about if you’re trying to be holistically security conscious in all areas of your life. And they’re all presented in a clear context with a simple and elegant design.
See What Fonts an Image is Using with Font Squirrel Matcherator

It’s a funny time to be alive. We haven’t yet reached that part of the technology singularity where rogue nanorobot clouds disassemble us all into carbon dust (bad), or where we transfer our consciousness into massive sentient spaceships and colonize the stars (good?).
A GitHub Action to Deploy to the Plugin Repo

Deploying a WordPress plugin to the WordPress.org repository has been challenging for most developers for at least a few years. Why? Mostly because almost no one learns Subversion (the version control system that WordPress.org uses) anymore. So we’ve all cobbled together different versions of things that kind of work. And at least for me, I often forget what mine is, and how to use it. (For those real nerdy folks, what I have used a variation of Scribu’s scripts: http://scribu.net/blog/deploying-from-git-to-svn.html. It works for me, but I wouldn’t really recommend it as the perfect system. It’s just good enough that I’ve not sought an alternative.)
How to Build a Google Data Studio Dashboard

From an internet marketing firm called Data Driven Labs comes this outstanding introduction to Google Data Studio, a Google product I’d like to know a lot more about.
Immobilize Metaboxes in the Post Editor with the Metabox Glue Plugin

Metabox Glue is a very niche plugin: its page on the WordPress plugin repository says “30+ active installations,” and that sounds about right. When you need it, though, it fits the job exactly.
Sort Your Posts by Custom Fields with CodePress Admin Columns

One of the reasons I love WordPress is because there’s always something to learn. I’ve recently had two clients who, for different reasons, really need to sort their post content by custom field values within the posts themselves.
Announcing Newspack by WordPress.com — A New Publishing Solution for News Organizations

WordPress.com expands its news offering, with funding from Google.