Author Siobhan McKeown

November 4, 2022 — Transparency is part of the fabric of many remote businesses. It doesn’t, however, come naturally to everyone, especially if you’ve only recently become remote. In this article, Siobhan takes you through some of the practical ways that you can build transparency within your organization. Read more…

May 10, 2013 — WordPress is built by volunteers. People from all over the world collaborate to create the core software, to write the documentation, to provide support, to translate WordPress, to organise events, and to generally keep the project running. Individuals work on WordPress in their free time and companies ask their employees to get involved. Read more…

March 20, 2013 — Recently I shared with you some advice from the WordPress community to beginners. But what about if starting out is already a dim and distant memory? What if you’re already so immersed in the world of WordPress that you dream of trac and bore your partner with talk of the latest thing you’ve achieved with custom post types? Read more…

February 21, 2013 — There is so much to learn about WordPress theme development. The Internet is home to hundreds of articles about building WordPress themes, to countless theme frameworks that will help you get started, and to endless WordPress themes, some of which are beautiful and professional but not a few of which are (to be honest) a bit crappy. Read more…

February 1, 2013 — We’ve all been total newbies. In fact, I spend most of my time still feeling like one. So researching this article was a great opportunity for me to do some more learning, and to share all of that good stuff with you. I reached out to people from across the WordPress community to ask what advice they would give to people just starting their WordPress journey. Read more…

December 5, 2012 — “First, let’s set a few things straight: becoming a top WordPress [developer professional] is hard work — very hard work. It’s going to take a lot of time, energy and determination. If you’re looking for an easy checklist or some “fast pass” to the top, you’re going to waste your time. Being one of the best is hard, and statistically speaking, the odds are stacked against you.” Read more…

October 10, 2012 — WordPress security is serious business. Exploits of vulnerabilities in WordPress’ architecture have led to mass compromises of servers through cross-site contamination. WordPress’ extensibility increases its vulnerability; plugins and themes house flawed logic, loopholes, Easter eggs, backdoors and a slew of other issues. Firing up your computer to find that you’re supporting a random cause or selling Viagra can be devastating. Read more…

September 26, 2012 — BuddyPress is social networking in a box, the loveable plugin that has people around the world getting social. But using BuddyPress isn’t all about waking up one morning and being struck by the amazing idea of creating the next Facebook. BuddyPress is a tool for creating communities. In fact, if you look at successful implementations of BuddyPress, you’ll see they aren’t Facebook clones, but rather niche groups that have put BuddyPress to work in growing their community. Read more…

September 12, 2012 — We all know that WordPress is awesome - but being awesome isn’t always enough. Does it perform well under pressure? Can it deal with traffic from millions of visitors every month? There’s no question that WordPress can be used for your or my blog, but what about multi-authored blogs with thousands of comments? How do developers make it scale and perform? Read more…

July 4, 2012 — In this article, we’ll look at writing documentation for a WordPress plugin, theme or product. Most of the information can be applied to documentation for other software types, but we’ll look at some WordPress-specific aspects. In my experience, the quality of documentation in WordPress plugins and themes varies widely. Read more…

June 21, 2012 — WordPress businesses are springing up all of the time. Some of them succeed, some of them fail, and some of them go global. Last month, I wrote a post on Smashing Magazine about the thriving WordPress economy. Read more…

May 11, 2012 — All over the world people are getting together to talk about WordPress. Developers, designers, bloggers, writers, small-business owners, software engineers, system admins, mobile developers, BuddyPress developers, SEO experts, consultants, people ranging from absolute beginners to WordPress ninjas, and everyone in between. Read more…

April 12, 2012 — In a post on her blog last year, WordPress designer, business woman and author, Lisa Sabin Wilson, talked about how thankful she is to be part of the WordPress economy. It’s an economy that thousands of people, the world over, are benefiting from (including me!). It is an economy built on free, open source software. Read more…

April 12, 2012 — In a post on her blog last year, WordPress designer, business woman and author Lisa Sabin Wilson talked about how thankful she is to be part of the WordPress economy. Read more…

February 8, 2012 — Read more…

February 8, 2012 — Read more…

February 8, 2012 — 2011 was a great year for WordPress, with some excellent new updates that saw the introduction of a drag-and-drop uploader, distraction-free writing, the HTML5 Twenty Eleven theme, and movement towards a fully responsive dashboard. As well as changes to WordPress core, theme development continued to evolve, as whispers of responsive design spread like wildfire across the WordPress community. Read more…

January 13, 2012 — A few weeks ago I wrote about how you can put together a great readme.txt for the WordPress plugin directory. In addition to using a WordPress readme as a tool to help out your users, you can use it to promote your commercial products and services. Read more…

November 23, 2011 — If you’re a plugin developer and you just love to write code, then writing a readme.txt file for a plugin in WordPress’ repository might be your idea of hell. When you’ve written all of that lovely code, why must you spend time writing about how to use it? Read more…