This post talks about our A-Z Listing Plugin, which is available on WordPress.org. How did we get here?After a long battle with a very considerate person in the WordPress.org forums where I repeatedly failed to get them working with various attempts at writing code they could drop into their site, I decided I needed to write it up and explain how to do this once and for all. The scenario You have a series of posts with Proper Nouns (people’s names) as their title You want to index them on their Family Name (sometimes called the “Last Name”) The concept is fairly simple, in that you need to hook into the filter that I’ve provided and return the right result with the index letter changed.

In a request for help sent to the Polymer web components mailing list, a user wondered about lists specifically based on the example provided in the Shop Demo that the Polymer team created. This user wanted to understand how to change the list so that it may use a different markup to the one provided for in the original example. As I thought about and researched this problem I encountered a stack overflow post that talks about a parent providing the markup for a dom-repeat template inside a child’s shadow root.

This post is inspired by an advert that I saw on youtube that highlights the damage that can happen to a young woman’s psyche with simple behaviour patterns such as telling the woman that she needs to be pretty or even just telling her she is pretty. https://www.youtube.com/embed/XP3cyRRAfX0 I thoroughly agree with the sentiment that many of our brightest female engineers, mathematicians and developers are being discouraged before they even know that they have an interest or aptitude for technical subjects.

You have probably heard about the effort lead by Scott Clark with guidance from Helen Hou-Sandi to develop a WordPress Feature Plugin mysteriously entitled “WordPress Fields API”. So what is it, what does it do, and why should you care? Feature PluginsFirst-up we need to understand what a Feature Plugin is in relation to WordPress Core: When the WordPress community decided that we needed a major rewrite of the Administration screens it was realised that such an invasive change would be difficult to develop within Core’s source-code repository.

The Make WordPress blog has finally signalled the end of a disastrous piece of software that made many WordPress sites insecure. TimThumb is/was supposed to allow embedding of images at any dimensions without requiring WordPress to previously have created the variant. The project has been used by many, many, themes available on commercial sites such as ThemeForest and also quite a few that have been published in WordPress.org’s repositories. TimThumb EOL

Sigh. Unfortunately it would seem that the Apple and Adobe war is getting more heated. Recently Apple released in beta form their latest version of the iPhone Software Developer’s Kit, which has been a requirement for developing for the iPhone thus far. Just two days prior to this SDK release Adobe launched their Creative Suite 5 applications which includes the facility to use Adobe Flash to create native iPhone applications without the SDK, even on Windows platforms.