CategoryCommunity

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 21, 2012 — In this article I’d like to discuss the changes happening on the Web and argue that its future is not as problematic and endangered as a lot of people make it out to be. The article is based on the talk I’ve presented at the Smashing Conference a couple of days ago, and you can also see the slides and watch the screencast. I have been developing websites professionally for the greater part of the last 15 years, and written quite a few books and a lot of articles. Yet when I look around right now, I do feel incredibly… stupid and wonder if I should hang up my coat and do something else. Almost daily we see new tools, new best practices and systems to use, and a lot of them are very far removed from the original Web development technologies that are defined by the standards bodies. Read more…

August 8, 2012 — This is a personal request from your user, a rallying cry from a compatriot. I personally love WordPress. I make my living from it. The average user, though, couldn’t care less about it. 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…

March 30, 2012 — I don’t think anyone can deny that the Web has changed the way people teach, learn, and do research. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything we read online is true and accurate—far from it. Read more…

January 22, 2012 — At Smashing Magazine, we are big proponents of diversity and sharing. We encourage designers and developers worldwide to step up and use Smashing Magazine as a platform to share their opinions, ideas or techniques. Read more…

December 27, 2011 — A few days ago, a tutorial on how to Create A Christmas Wish List With PHP was published on Smashing Magazine’s Coding section that frustrated me. It frustrated me as it was incredibly easy to predict the comment reactions it caused. It also frustrated me as it was a classic example of a tutorial resulting in very happy readers who will go out and cause a lot of terrible things on the Web unless they understand that this was meant as a “beginner tutorial”. A lot of the bad feedback was about security — something we shouldn’t take lightly. Read more…

November 30, 2011 — Many of us rely on open source tools, technologies and standards to help improve the work we do on a daily basis. None of this would however be possible without the hard work, commitment and dedication that others, just like you, have invested in giving back to the Web community over the past two decades. Read more…