That stems from our team. WebDevStudios (WDS) wouldn’t be a top-tier website design and development agency without them. That’s why we love to brag about what our staff is up to when they’re not strategizing, managing, designing, and coding. We invite you to take a look at our latest company news.

WooSesh

Have you heard of WooSesh? It is a live, virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders.

Each event is specifically curated to provide attendees with the absolute best possible education. Every presenter is specially hand-picked, and it’s an honor to be among them.

WooSesh 2022 took place October 10th-12th. Both Brad Williams, WDS CEO, and Lax Mariappan, WDS Backend Engineer, were involved.

Party & Recap Session

On Day One of WooSesh, Brad participated in the Party & Recap end-of-day session with “Do the Woo” producer, Bob Dunn. Other WordPress experts were part of the panel, too, including Courtney Robertson, Kim Coleman, Jonathan Wold, and Paul Maiorana.

UX Tips Session

On the final day of WooSesh, Lax opened the event by presenting his talk, “5 UX Tips to Improve Product Variations.” A lot of online stores don’t show available product variations clearly, which makes it difficult for users to decide what they want and make a purchase.

In his talk, Lax explained why product variations should be clearer. He also showed various ways a WooCommerce store owner can achieve that.

If you registered for WooSesh but missed out on some sessions, you can watch the recordings on the WooSesh website.

HeroPress Feature

Not all heroes wear capes, but someone please hand WDS Senior Frontend Engineer, Alfredo Navas, one. Not only are clients and coworkers continually singing his praises, but Alfredo was also recently featured on HeroPress in an article titled, “Making The World A Better Place One Line Of Code At A Time.”

In this piece, Alfredo talks about his personal and professional WordPress journey. Here’s a quote that particularly stands out:

Community what was that? I had spent so many years working on my own that I didn’t know that it even existed, my concept of Open Source was simply something free.

Roberto convinced me that same year to go to WordCamp Miami, it was my first camp, meeting the community behind WP was something that impressed me a lot, the talks, the desire to teach and learn from all the participants, and above all to collaborate with the community, wow everything changed for me.

Celebrate Women in Business

If you’re looking for consistent and strategic content for your business, then Content Journey is the place for you. Recently, this female-owned company published an article about the importance of supporting women in business and listed WDS COO, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, as a woman business owner to support. Read the full article on the Content Journey blog.

Custom Post Type UI Hits Another Milestone

Once again, Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) is making history. This time, CPTUI has surpassed the 12 million all-time downloads mark.

It’s no wonder CPTUI is one of the most popular plugins in the world. See for yourself why that is.

WordPress Friday Continues

Brad and Victor Ramirez continue the WordPress conversation every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern on Twitter Spaces. Anyone can join.

Follow Brad on Twitter to access his space. Use the hashtag #WPFriday to submit a question or suggest a topic. Listen to the most recent WordPress Friday event on Twitter.

The post Company News – October appeared first on WebDevStudios.

At that time, it included a number of major new features, such as a new default theme called Twenty Ten (Kubrick was the default for years prior to this). Also featured was the merging of WordPress MU and WordPress. This ultimately led to WordPress Multisite. Plus, WordPress 3.0 included the ability to create custom menus.

Those features alone would make an amazing release for WordPress, but it doesn’t stop there. WordPress 3.0 also introduced custom post types (CPTs) and custom taxonomies. These two new features helped WordPress grow to a full fledged content management system (CMS). They also eventually inspired the creation of the WordPress plugin Custom Post Type UI.

See, CPTs allow you to easily register unique content types within WordPress. Doing so helps you organize your content beyond the default Post and Page post types.

Custom taxonomies work the same way, giving you the ability to register unique taxonomies for content organization. It’s easy to see how powerful these new features would be in WordPress, but there was one small problem.

The only way to register custom post types and taxonomies was via code. There was no dashboard user interface for administrators to manage CPTs and taxonomies.

Enter light bulb moment…

I immediately saw an opportunity to build a simple plugin to help register and manage CPTs and taxonomies directly in the WordPress dashboard. I worked on the first version of Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) over a few days. It was released on February 25, 2010, which was approximately four months before WordPress 3.0 was even released.

One of the most exciting things about open source software is it is largely planned and created in the open. At the time, I was actively joining the WordPress developer chats and learning what was coming to WordPress before official announcements were made. I saw the opportunity coming to CPTUI and wanted to make sure my plugin was released and ready when 3.0 dropped.

Fast forward to today, 12 years later, and Custom Post Type UI is one of the most popular WordPress plugins in the world. With over 1 million active installations and over 10 million all-time downloads, it’s safe to say that CPTUI is a hit and will continue to be an important and widely-used plugin for WordPress development!

The post The History of Custom Post Type UI appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Take a look below for a glimpse at what’s been going on in our virtual hallways. With this much excitement, we’re looking forward to seeing what happens in March.

CPTUI Downloaded Over 10,000,000 Times

It happened again. The WebDevStudios WordPress plugin, Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI), has reached another landmark. Since its initial release, CPTUI has been downloaded over 10,000,000 times.

This WebDevStudios company news is huge, as very few plugins have achieved such a milestone. Be on the lookout for an upcoming blog post from CEO, Brad Williams, with more information detailing the backstory of CPTUI and what it takes to be one of the most downloaded plugins in the WordPress repository.

Learn more about CPTUI and why you should be among its base of loyal users at WordPress.org. Show your support for CPTUI by nominating it for the plugin competition bracket-style competition, Plugin Madness.

Video Interviews and Podcasts

WDS chief executives, directors, and other team members love to participate in webinars, video interviews, and podcasts. If you’re interested in featuring someone from WebDevStudios in yours, contact Marketing Strategist, Laura Coronado, at laura@webdevstudios.com.

Why WP Agencies Should Use CI/CD

WDS Director of Engineering, Greg Rickaby, along with Engineering Manager, Justin Foell, took time out of their workday to talk with Maciek Palmowski of Buddy about how WebDevStudios uses CI/CD and why other WordPress agencies should consider doing the same.

You can watch this video interview below.

Do the Woo

Armed with a passionate, growing knowledge of Blockchain and NFTs, Brad joined BobWP for a “Do the Woo” podcast episode featuring Christopher Carfi, from Unlock Protocol. In Bob’s synopsis of the episode, he says Christopher “…explains blockchain and NFTs in a way that I haven’t heard anyone explain them before.”

It’s an interesting lesson. Listen in at DoTheWoo.com.

The Brad & Matt Show

At the most random times, Brad gets together with WordPress podcaster, Matt Medeiros, to host a talk show. This time around, WDS COO, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, joins Matt (sans Brad) for a discussion about yoga, football, and WordPress. Listen below.

Five for the Future in Action

We love when we see WebDevStudios team members receive recognition for their Five for the Future (5FTF) contributions. Recently, WP Tavern caught wind of the Block X-ray Attributes plugin, which was developed by WDS Principal Engineer, Sal Ferrarello, during his WDS-sponsored 5FTF days.

Read more about Sal’s plugin and discover how it can benefit your WordPress website by heading over to WPTavern.com.

Upcoming Events

WordPress Montclair Meetup

There’s still time for you to register to attend WordPress Montclair’s next virtual meetup event on February 28th. This is a joint meetup group between Montclair, Morris County, Central Jersey, Bergen County, and South Jersey WordPress meetups.

At their next event, the mixed group will look over newsletter solutions. Both Lax Mariappan, Backend Developer, and Laura Byrne, Digital Strategist, will be presenting. Register at MeetUp.com.

WordCamp Montclair

When Laura isn’t busy strategizing at WDS or presenting at the WordPress Montclair Meetup, she is organizing WordCamp Montclair, which is happening June 25th. The call for speakers is now open, and you have until April 15th to submit your talk.

WordPress Fridays

Join Brad and Victor Ramirez on Twitter Spaces every Friday for WordPress Fridays. During these audio events, they and other listeners talk about WordPress, technology, and other fun stuff.

The best way to join the conversation is via mobile, so you can access the mic and request to speak. Submit suggested topics, questions, and/or comments by using the hashtag #WordPressFriday.

We’re Hiring!

WebDevStudious is recruiting engineers, a Business Development Associate, and a UX Designer. Please check out our Careers page and take a look at our various openings. We’d love to hear from you.

The post Company News – February appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Thanks to some well-placed WordPress hooks, we have technically had WPGraphQL support for a long while now, but never formally as part of the plugin itself. Jason Bahl, the creator and maintainer of WPGraphQL was also maintaining a Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) extension that provided the UI fields to set and save WPGraphQL integration within the settings for post types and taxonomies registered with CPTUI.

Going into our March Five for the Future day, Greg informed me that Jason reached out about getting official integration for the two pieces, and after a touch of consideration, I agreed that it was time to merge them into one. Utilizing that day’s time, I set out to adapt and pull in Jason’s work into our primary plugin. If you are not using WPGraphQL at all with your site, or are perhaps not even sure what it is, you have nothing to worry about. We made sure to load the related changes only if the WPGraphQL plugin is available. If it is not, then you will only see the other 1.9.0 changes.

To help with transitions, we set up an admin notice for those with the now legacy CPTUI integration, letting the users know that they no longer need that original extension and can remove it without any loss of data. It should switch over seamlessly.

We are excited about the future of Headless WordPress and the types of creations developers around the world can produce with it. We are even more excited that users of Custom Post Type UI who are wanting to explore and try out Headless WordPress can now do so without having to leave us behind.

So what are you waiting for? Download or upgrade to Custom Post Type UI 1.9.0 and share with us what you are thinking about making in the comments below.

The post Custom Post Type UI Supports WPGraphQL appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Here are some of the awesome updates you can find in 1.3.0:

Visible changes

UI update

The most notable change is that we have continued evolving the UI for the post type and taxonomy editor screens. We have moved to a single column view with more separation of sections. These sections include required fields, optional labels, and optional settings. We hope this design is more intuitive and less burdensome for both current and new users.

Slug helpers

We have also added some enhancements for the post type and taxonomy slug fields that are meant to help ensure the slugs are as they should be. We felt it was best to take a proactive approach with this to help our users be up and running more quickly and with less support requests around slug issues. On top of that, we also work to provide better prevention of duplicate slugs between WordPress core and other third party plugins.

WDS Promotion spots

Lastly the biggest thing users will notice is on the post type and taxonomy add/edit screens, with the placement of promotion spots from WebDevStudios.

A few things I want to drive home:

1. We are not going to use this for any third party ads. The only thing you should see in these spots are for WebDevStudios products and services. Nothing else.
2. The links on those product promotions do have some tracking on them, but this is simply for our own analytics so we can see what sort of traffic we are getting. In the future, there will be ways to remove these as well.

Under the hood changes

Localization

One big thing that came with the release of version 1.3.0 is that we have moved all localization of the plugin to the WordPress.org language packs. This is intended to both help distribute the necessary files for Custom Post Type UI in your language, as well as make it easier for people wanting to contribute back and help provide the plugin in their native tongue.

Hooks everywhere

Along with the UI evolution mentioned above, we also worked to continually add new hooks in useful places for others to interact with and modify content being manipulated to fit their needs. If you are a developer wanting to extend Custom Post Type UI, there’s never been a better time than now.

Contributor changes

GitHub branches

With the start of the post-1.3.0 development cycle, we are moving to a more proper “Gitflow” workflow. For the longest time we had left the GitHub repo master branch at a matching state with WordPress.org’s copy. However, this often provided unneeded confusion and even made my own workflow a bit cumbersome at times. So from here on out, the master branch on GitHub is a development branch, and all features should and will be done on other branches. When we are ready for a new release, whether bug fix or major, we will tag appropriately and push the tagged version up to WordPress.org.

Conclusion

We are very excited about the present state of Custom Post Type UI and are looking forward to the future, both with the still free plugin as well as potential new and evolving premium extensions. We hope you are too! If you have any feedback or ideas you would like to share, send ’em our way!

The post Welcome Custom Post Type UI Version 1.3.0 appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Custom Post Type UI is one of our many plugins, and undoubtedly our most popular one. So popular, that it is the first WebDevStudio plugin that has reached one million downloads with an active install count above 200,000. Not only that, but it maintains a 4.6 out of 5 stars rating with an impressive 87 5-stars at the time of this writing. This is quite an impressive feat to achieve since Brad Williams first tagged version 0.1.0 five years ago.

What Exactly Is Custom Post Type UI?

In case you are not familiar with what Custom Post Type UI does, it provides a user interface that someone can use to easily provide settings and labels to be used for registering custom post types and custom taxonomies for their install. The plugin then takes those values and does the actual registration, allowing users to start using them right away. Other features as of the 1.1.0 release include import, export, “get code”, and settings listing functionality. The import and export area helps port the plugin’s settings between installs. The “get code” facilitates moving where the post type and taxonomy registration occurs, while the settings listing acts as a quick view of all your settings with our plugin.

It really takes the pain out of having to type out all the necessary code to register post types or taxonomies and helps non-coders to get a start with extending their sites content. It’s the ease of use and aid to which I attribute its success.

Evolution

Much of the development of the plugin in the early years was the gradual addition of features and fields for associated parameters available to post types and taxonomies. This allowed for more flexibility with the settings for users. By the time I first stepped into maintaining the plugin, we were at the 0.8.0 release, and that was the first release I pushed up to the WordPress.org repository.

During this time, the seeds of the first major shift were planted. I wanted to make it easier to develop the plugin and add new features, but the codebase at the time had slowly become an unintentionally complex. I also felt that the actual UI was not keeping up with the times of the WordPress Dashboard, and also mixed the settings for post types and taxonomies too much.

Because of this, I set out to do the first major update to Custom Post Type UI. This planned update included both a completely redone UI for the users, as well as a much easier to use codebase for myself and others to develop with. In the winter of 2013, I branched off from our GitHub copy and got to work…then development stopped. It wasn’t for any specific reason that things came to a halt, other than just being busy with other work. It wouldn’t be till winter of 2014/2015 when the initial rewrite would be completed and what I thought would be release ready.

Tremulous Times

No matter how much testing you do, or how solid you believe the code to be, massive codebase overhauls are always going to be difficult and rarely go off without a hitch. This is definitely true with Custom Post Type UI in early 2015. Not enough testing went into the changes for Custom Post Type UI 0.9.0, and I will not point blame at any specific aspect of update testing for plugins. It just is what it is. Very shortly after the first attempt at the 0.9.0 release, the forums lit up citing various issues that became evident as users clicked the update button. Live sites were encountering issues and broken links, and it was related to the new release.

I got a very nice tip from the WordPress Plugin Moderation team about doing another release that simply re-installs the last working version. This idea, coupled with the fact that I preserved the original settings and was simply converting the saved settings into a new option row honestly saved myself more headache than I likely realize. I was able to instruct users that they could upgrade to 0.9.5 which would take them back to the previous stable codebase and regain all their original settings while I worked out the missed bugs.

As I started getting bugs taken care of, I started pushing them out, but it was still a long process. One consolation is that I got to get the version as 1.0.x. I feel it is a more fitting version number for such a massive release. It was not until the 1.0.8 release that everything appeared to finally die down and upgrade hickups stopped for users who stuck with it. It is those who stuck with me and worked with me to get their sites back in proper working order that I personally thank the most.

Change Is Hard

Outside of the undetected bugs was the user-facing side of things–the UI for the plugin. The user experience of the new version got mixed reviews from users, especially those who had been using the plugin for a long time already. While some loved it or did not mind the change enough to raise concern, others found it to be harder to use and involved too many clicks to achieve the same results. I did not ignore that feedback, but did put much of it on the backburner for later review. It was my intent to get the functionality back at square one first. While working on the last couple point releases for the 1.0.x line, I was also working on the 1.1.x release. At that point, I started really reviewing the feedback and doing what I could to aid the users there. A lot of focus was put into reducing the amount of clicking needed to get things done, and also getting some new or returning features into the plugin.

Thankfully the 1.1.x release has been notably less rocky and I do not believe there have been any issues reported related to the changes it provided. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that majority of the changes were not related to the setting values. Instead the release was primarily cosmetic and related to display of the user settings.

Looking Beyond One Million

It is hard for me to say what exactly is in store for Custom Post Type UI in the future. At the time of this writing, there are ten open enhancement issues tagged for 1.2. However, I would not call any of them critical to get in as soon as possible. I would love more to get more people up-to-date on the current version and let it be the stable version for awhile. Looking at our stats page, we still have reported active installs using as far back as version 0.6. While I can sit here scratching my head as to why, I also have to consider that that version is stable enough and still meeting the needs of 0.6% of our users. If it is not breaking for them, and there is no security concerns, then it is not all bad that they are still marching on. There is also the minimum version requirement to keep in mind. There are still WordPress installs active and out in the wild that are not running WordPress 3.8 or higher. Until they are, those users are not going to be notified that there is even an update available.

What One Million Downloads Represents

I believe this milestone represents the fact that making features usable and more user-friendly to the “average Joe” can take you a long ways. Custom Post Type UI made it easier for more people to tap into the power and customization ability that custom post types and taxonomies offer to a WordPress powered website. Because of that ease of use, many have added it to their toolbox for every website they have or work on, and recommend it to their friends. All of those points have lead us to where we are today, and where we will continue to go in years to come.

If you have not given Custom Post Type UI a shot, and are interested, you can install it via your Plugin Install screen, or by downloading from the Custom Post Type UI WordPress.org page. We’re super excited about hitting this major milestone, but there’s still work to be done! We would love to hear from you and receive your feedback.

The post The Custom Post Type UI Million Download Celebration appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Since its initial release, it has largely maintained the same user interface and has only had minor tweaks through its evolution. However, that consistency meant it hasn’t kept up with the evolution of the WordPress admin since the days of WordPress 3.0, including the huge change from WordPress 3.8.

As a result, I wanted to give the the plugin a UI overhaul for the next major release, and I hope the new version provides a better, more easy to use user experience for our existing and future users. I also used it as a chance to refactor the existing code and make it more maintainable and customizable by 3rd parties. Everyone wins!

However, I need beta testers to make sure the upgrade goes smoothly and no settings are lost in the transition from 0.8.5 to 0.9.0. I also need new users to make sure it’s usable and not confusing.

That’s where YOU come in!

Things I need tested by both current and new users include:

• Seemless migration from 0.8.x to 0.9.0. No behavior lost. The migration will be automatic, but making sure the provided settings match in the new UI needs to be checked.
• If you have existing post types or taxonomies registered by CPTUI 0.8.x, check that their behavior remains as it was before.
• Importing and exporting between sites using 0.9.0. This will be one of the new menu items available, and all of the data should be provided for you automatically–you just need to have a post type or taxonomy set up on one site, and not on another before clicking import.
• Get code functionality. This one should be familiar to you already from the previous versions, but we need it to provide all of the expected values when set, and not empty values when not set.
• General usability of the new UI. Is it more clear how to do things? Worse?
• If you have multisite, that needs a really good tire kick that I will be doing myself as well soon.
• Any bugs you find.
• Translation updates, if you’re fluent in more than one language.

How to beta test the new version

A dev site copy of an existing site or a localhost setup would be ideal for this. Version 0.9.0 preserves the original settings in the options table, so it will be possible to downgrade if necessary, but it’s still better to not test on production if everything is critical.

To acquire a copy of the beta version, you can download a zip of the dev branch from GitHub and upload or save it to your plugins folder on the intended site.

If you have 0.8.x already and want to retain those files, just make sure the beta copy has a different folder name. After that, deactivate the current version before activating the new version. It will show up as a “duplicate” listing in your plugins admin screen.

If you are not upgrading from a previous version, simply put the folder in your plugins directory and activate like usual.

How to submit feedback

Once you’re ready to submit feedback, you can do it in a couple of ways:

The first way will be through the Custom Post Type UI support forum. Simply start a forum topic and preface the thread that it’s a feedback post for 0.9.0. I monitor the forum regularly, so your feedback won’t go missed!

The second way, if you prefer, would be to simply email the feedback to me at michael@webdevstudios.com.

Any feedback from you, our plugin users, would be much appreciated!

The post Call for Beta Testers: Custom Post Type UI 0.9.0 Beta 1 appeared first on WebDevStudios.