We use HipChat to stay in touch with each other at the office, from home, and on the go. Here’s what we’ve been tossing around over the last five days:
On the blog: The first of our plugin review series!
This week we started looking at plugins that add schema.org support to WordPress. The first plugin was All In One Schema.org, which we liked, followed by Schema Creator by Raven, which we didn’t like as much.
In the hopper for next week: Add Meta Tags, Microdata Manager, and itemprop WP.
WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 is now available for testing.
While 3.7 was largely behind-the-scenes, 3.8 is much more of a user-facing update. The administrator backend, dashboard, and theme browser have been redesigned. You can see the current status of features-as-plugins here.
3.8 will also ship with Twenty Fourteen, an opinionated magazine-style theme that’s already available on WordPress.com.
See what’s in the pipeline for WordPress Core.
The Features As Plugins page on Make WordPress Core outlines the different proposed features and the development status that they’re in.
Automattic protects free speech, fights against bogus DMCA takedowns.
“The mission of WordPress.com is to democratize publishing […] Until there are some teeth to the copyright laws, it’s up to us – websites and users, together – to stand up to DMCA fraud and protect freedom of expression.”
You can read the blog post on WordPress.com and TechDirt for more details.
Take WordPress to the command line, and other useful tools.
- WP-CLI is a command line interface for WordPress.
- SMACSS helps you organize the chaos that is your CSS stylesheet.
- Turn WordPress into a more powerful CMS with the Pods framework.
- Keep WordPress under version control with Git.
- And lastly, modernize your WordPress development environment with Composer.
Web accessibility on the mind.
Accessible and inclusive design makes the web a better experience for everyone, regardless of their physical or cognitive conditions.
How can we do more? Here’s a list of resources from the a11y project, and Dive Into Accessibility is a great site for learning why all of this matters.
Get involved with the Make WordPress Accessible group. (I just joined this week!) The WCAG checklist from WebAIM can help you get an understanding of what the W3C WCAG standards.
That’s it for this week. Have a fantastic weekend!
