WordPress
Introducing: We The People WordPress Plugin
This weekend we released the We The People WordPress plugin from the grounds of the White House in Washington, D.C. The plugin enables WordPress site owners to easily embed petitions from We The People using shortcodes and widgets. It’s targeted towards activists, interest groups, and campaigns but made to be simple enough for any user who cares about an issue to embed that content in a WordPress site.
Buckeye Interactive at the National Day of Civic Hacking at the White House
This weekend I was among the lucky few in attendance at the National Day of Civic Hacking at the White House. About two months ago Brad forwarded an email from the White House announcing the impending release of an API for its We The People petition site. Brad encouraged the Buckeye developers to apply so I submitted a pitch for a WordPress plugin that would allow users to easily embed petitions from We The People into their sites. On the first of May, the day of the API’s release, I received an email inviting me to participate in the second-ever hackathon at the White House.
9 Highly Useful WordPress Plugins
One of the great things about WordPress is the wide range of plugins available to be installed to add, modify, or remove core functionality. There are over 25,000 plugins freely available in the WordPress.org repository and thousands more premium plugins. There are plugins for SEO, discussion, social media, integration with third party services, and almost anything else you can think of. Not all plugins are built equally, though; some live at the perfect intersection of form and functionality that make them a pleasure to use. Other plugins are kludgy heaps [...]
Introducing: Gravity Forms Duplicate Prevention Plugin
Recently we had an interesting client support issue: the client was getting an unruly number of duplicate entries on their Gravity Forms (a popular WordPress form plugin) -based surveys. Typically a duplicate here or there doesn’t really matter but this particular client was using the surveys in classrooms full of impatient, click-hungry kids. Our client was seeing exact duplicate submissions from the same classroom at the same time, sometimes inflating the number of submissions from a class well over the number of survey respondents.
We were able to purge the existing duplicate survey results but the client needed a way to prevent duplicates from cropping up again. Google searches for “Gravity Forms duplicate prevention” yielded nothing useful (the surveys don’t collect things like email addresses that we could use to simply prevent duplicates based on a given field), so we had to think outside the box. The team, full of people who use and love open source software, also decided that we would package up and release our solution back to the WordPress community. As a result, Buckeye Interactive developed its first (public) WordPress plugin, Gravity Forms Duplicate Prevention.
What Getting Hacked Means for Your Brand
Hacking has become a more realistic problem as the number of companies victim to hacking attempts has spiked within the last year. Earlier this week, America got to witness first-hand two less serious and more entertaining hacks on the company Twitter accounts of Burger King and Jeep. Although these hacks do not seem directly harmful to the success and well-being of these huge companies, it does affect their brands. Both the Burger King and Jeep Twitter accounts gained several thousand followers as word spread quickly about the ridiculous tweets being [...]
Proprietary vs. Open Source: Meritocracy and Innovation
“The next generation of computing is being led by users, rather than vendors.” —Jim Whitehurst at OSBC 2011 (via Matthew Aslett) Tech and business media outlets, from Business Insider to Information Week to Computer Weekly‘s Open Source Insider, have lately been trumpeting Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurt‘s clarion call to open source. Red Hat is a profitable self-described “meritocracy” that thrives by providing paid support and service packages for their popular Linux distribution, a business model that’s becoming increasingly popular in the industry. While many fans of open source wax [...]
WordPress vs. Drupal Recap.
Did you miss todays event? No worries, below is the recap! What is a CMS? A software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. Why You Need a CMS You can update your own website if it is built on a CMS! Low Cost to build, host and maintain Easy Customization via settings, plugins and themes Thorough Documentation from the user and developer communities Ease [...]
5 High Quality Free Portfolio WordPress Themes
With WordPress development being such a large community of people there is a flood of free themes available to everyone to use and download. It can be hard to weed out the bad from the good so I have compiled a list of five high quality WordPress that are 100% free to use for your own portfolio. Thalliumity A theme from Padd Solutions this is a high detailed business orientated portfolio theme. A very clean and slick overall look this is an easy theme to incorporate for your small [...]
We Packed the House with our first Workshop!
On May 25, our team took on a whole new challenge - teaching a room of 17 to build a WordPress site in 2.5 hours! The experience was great one and we have already planned our next one for July 6. Check what one of the attendees left with after the workshop!