Keep reading for the latest in WebDevStudios company news.

CPTUI Nears Another Milestone

While our most popular plugin isn’t quite there yet, we’re too excited to wait to share this amazing company news. Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) is nearing 10,000,000 all-time downloads.

You read that right—ten million downloads!

It was just last May that WebDevStudios (WDS) celebrated CPTUI achieving 1,000,000 active installations. Soon, we’ll have another milestone to commemorate. When we reach it, we will announce it here.

WebDevStudios Goes Headless

It’s time to drink our own champagne.

Our WordPress agency can’t stop talking about headless technology. We’ve blogged about it. We presented a webinar on Headless WordPress in October. And now, the WebDevStudios website is going headless, too.

WDS Co-Founders, Brad Williams and Lisa Sabin-Wilson, announced last week that WebDevStudios.com will be relaunched with a new look and as a fully decoupled setup.

Stay tuned for more on this piece of extraordinary company news.

Upcoming Events

Yup. Events are still happening. Nowadays, we’ve become accustomed to them happening virtually, but WordPress events still continue to be a great source of information and inspiration.

WordFest Live

First, it’s one of our favorites—WordFest Live. This festival of WordPress is happening March 4, 2022.

Sessions and speakers have been announced. Among them is WDS Website Specialist, Christina Workman, whose talk is titled “Colouring for Relaxation (Yes, You Can!).”

Christina’s session will occur at 7:15 p.m. UTC. Register at WordFest Live’s website.

Post Status Twitter Conference

Post Status just announced their first-ever Twitter conference. Taking place May 24, 2022 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. EST, the event is now accepting applications from presenters.

It’s too soon to tell if WDS will have any team members presenting at the event, but we know for sure some of us will be in attendance. We’re saving the date. You should, too.

WordCamp Asia

Consider this a tease. WDS Senior Frontend Engineer, JC Palmes, is one of the lead organizers for WordCamp Asia. According to her, team members for WordCamp Asia are being recruited.

A call for additional volunteers will go out soon. Dates for the event have not been announced.

WebDevStudios Is Hiring!

Did you know when you work for WDS, you can work from anywhere in the world? That’s because we operate as a 100% distributed team.

WDS is currently recruiting for:

• Lead Engineer
• Business Development Associate
• UX Designer
• Frontend Engineer

We’re also searching for Backend Engineers to join our team. WDS is looking to fulfill such a role with a preferred schedule of 3pm-11pm ET (8pm-4am UTC) or 11pm-7am ET (4am-12pm UTC).

Please browse our Careers page to see all of our job listings. Apply online today.

The post Company News – January appeared first on WebDevStudios.

What is a CPT?

At the time, WordPress shipped with Posts and Pages for all of your content. There was no way to customize or add new content types, so every piece of content was either a Post or a Page. Thus, the idea of Custom Post Types was born, allowing site admins the ability to register any types of content in WordPress.

This was a huge step towards WordPress becoming a full-fledged content management system, but there was one catch. The only way to register a CPT was directly in the codebase. I immediately saw this as an opportunity to build a simple user interface (UI) to register, and deregister, CPTs directly in the WordPress Dashboard. The final challenge was coming up with a really unique name that would make it crystal clear what the plugin did… Custom Post Type UI!

CPTUI

The first version of Custom Post Type UI was released on February 26th, 2010, almost four months before CPT support was released in WordPress 3.0. Fast forward to today, and CPTUI officially has over 8 million downloads and 1 million active installs, making it the 59th plugin on all of the WordPress.org Plugin Directory to achieve this prestige! The momentum of the growth in popularity of CPTUI doesn’t seem to be wavering, as it’s common to have the plugin and its useful mentioned in tutorials, presentations, and nominated yearly in Plugin Madness.

Evolution of CPTUI

Over the years, we’ve invested thousands of hours building and supporting the plugin, with our Plugin Czar, Michael Beckwith, taking the lead. In 2016 we released our first premium add-on called Custom Post Type UI Extended, which allows anyone to easily display their CPT content on their website. We have also continued to grow the base feature set of the plugin including registering custom taxonomies, generating the PHP code needed to register your CPTs/taxonomies, and even custom labels for all of your content. Additionally, we just developed CPTUI to support WPGraphQL, which comes in especially handy for Headless WordPress projects.

Open-Source Opportunities

The beautiful thing about open source software is that it is created in the open! By observing dev discussions and realizing the opportunity CPTs had before their release, I was able to create an extremely valuable plugin for the community that has not only helped millions of users, but also helped promote our company as we grew into one of the top WordPress agencies in the world.

Opportunities are everywhere if you look for them.

The post Custom Post Type UI Hits 1 Million Active Installations 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.

CPTUI News

WDS’ WordPress plugin, Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) remains a favorite among WordPress developers and users. That’s not just a boisterous statement. We have just been informed that CPTUI is about to hit a milestone with 1,000,000 active installations.

You read that right. This is a big deal. When we do hit that magic number, we’ll be sure to tweet it from both the WDS Twitter account and Pluginize, too. Be sure you’re following us.

But, the CPTUI news doesn’t end there. Late last month, WDS took official ownership over GraphQL integration. This news is important, too, because Headless WordPress has emerged as a viable solution for many needs, and WPGraphQL has been one of the leaders in helping spearhead those efforts.

“With WebDevStudios emerging as the agency to go to for any business’ Headless WordPress needs, it felt only right that we also bring in ownership of the WPGraphQL integration with our popular Custom Post Type UI plugin,” explains Michael Beckwith, Support Engineer and the developer in charge of maintaining and developing CPTUI. “If you’re wanting to explore Headless WordPress and are already using Custom Post Type UI, you no longer need to install an extra plugin from WPGraphQL to integrate with CPTUI. It’s all built in now. If you are not needing WPGraphQL integration, then Custom Post Type UI remains the same solid plugin you’ve grown to love and rely on.”

Chats, Podcasts, and Vlogs

EXPAND 2021 Twitter Chat

As part of its two-day virtual event, EXPAND 2021, which is happening today and tomorrow, GoDaddy Pro hosted a Twitter chat on April 14th, with various web designers and developers offering words of wisdom.

Participants included our own Support Technician, Christina Workman, who offered a multitude of tips and insights, such as, “Having and sticking to well established processes at every stage of a project minimizes a variety of risks. Automate tasks like document templates, canned emails, automatically triggered invoices, etc., so you can spend more time on the more fulfilling work.”

Sounds like great advice!

WooCommerce Builder Community Events

Director of Business Development, Jodie Fiorenza, took part of a helpful discussion on how to connect product builders with developers and agencies for a WooCommerce Builder Community Event on BobWP’s “Do the Woo.” A trio of pros discussed partnership creation, how to write an email pitch that captures the attention of a developer or agency, and how staying on top of a hot topic, such as Headless WordPress, can make all the difference between a builder who is ignored and one who is relevant.

If you missed this podcast episode, you can watch it below.

Underrepresented in Tech

Marketing Specialist, Laura Coronado (yes, that’s me), joined the vlog, “Underrepresented in Tech,” to talk about how to be a podcast guest, especially for those who are among the underrepresented. If you have some technical insight and experience to share on podcasts, but don’t know how to go about earning a spot as a guest, watch this vlog episode now for some clear guidance from seasoned podcast hosts.

Join Our Team!

We have some fantastic career opportunities for you to consider, including:

• Business Development Associate
• Support Engineer
• Lead Engineer
• Backend Engineer
• Frontend Engineer

Check out these job openings today and submit your online application ASAP.

The post Company News – April appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, let’s move on.

In 2010, WebDevStudios released the first version of the Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) plugin to the WordPress plugin directory. At the time, Custom Post Types were brand new to WordPress and creating your own post types required (and still does, really) a complicated chunk of code. With CPTUI, the hard part was done for you. CPTUI quickly became popular with developers as a time-saving tool. So much so, that in July of 2015, 5 years after it’s initial release, the plugin passed the one million downloads mark.

I asked Brad Williams, our CEO and original developer of CPTUI if he had any idea the plugin would be so popular. He said,

Believe it or not, I absolutely knew CPTUI would be this popular. When Custom Post Types was introduced during the core development of WordPress 3.0, I immediately knew the impact it would have on the entire platform. I also knew, since the only way to register custom post types was via code, that most users would struggle with this so the idea of a UI for custom post types registration was born. We released the initial plugin before 3.0 was released and when the final version was announced, our plugin exploded overnight!

Growth, Change, and Reach

2016 has been an exciting year for CPTUI. In February, I was hired as Director of Products for WebDevStudios, and one of my first projects was helping to clean up the UI for CPTUI. We’ve focused on bringing it more in line with the standard WordPress dashboard aesthetic.

A couple months later, we released a paid add-on plugin called CPTUI Extended making it easy for non-developers to display their CPT data in pages and posts without writing a single line of code!

At the beginning of summer, the plugin hit another exciting milestone when the active install count jumped to 300,000. This is a gigantic number and places CPTUI easily in the top 100 plugins in the WordPress directory, which currently has 47,000+ plugins! All the while keeping a 4.6 average user rating.

This summer the plugin was also accepted into the GoDaddy WordPress Plugin Partner Program, and is consistently listed in the GoDaddy Hot 100 plugins list.

Wait. How many??

I said it before, 2016 has been pretty exciting. Today, specifically, even more so as we’re thrilled to announce that Custom Post Type UI has just passed the 2 million download mark!

It took 5+ years to reach the one million download mark and only 15 short months to double it. So, yeah, we’re pretty excited!

The success and growth of the plugin is largely due to WordPress itself becoming more popular and growing from a simple blog platform into a full-fledged content management system. CPT UI is ever evolving to stay current with everything that can be done with Custom Post Types. It’s exciting to think where the plugin will be by this time next year. You can follow along with the development (or submit a pull request) on Github, or download the current release from WordPress.org.

The post CPTUI Celebrates 2 million downloads! appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Pluginize was created to share, sell, and educate on the latest products we’re releasing. After realizing how many plugins and extensions we were building for our incredible clients, we realized that, well…we should probably start sharing!

All of the products will be built, maintained, and supported by us, and will be delivering the same high quality you’ve come to expect of us, both in the projects we create and our contributions to the WordPress community, over the years.

Along with this announcement, we’d like to take a moment to tell you a little bit more about our first release, CPTUI Extended. If you’ve been keeping track of our moves over the last year, you already know that Custom Post Type UI is our most popular plugin. In July of last year, it became our first plugin to hit over one million downloads, and has been continuing to serve non-devs and devs alike in their quest to create their own custom post types with ease. At 300,000+ active installs, its utility cannot be ignored!

If you aren’t familiar with CPTUI, here’s a breakdown on what it does from Michael, one of our superstar devs that has worked with this plugin extensively:

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.

While CPTUI helps solve the problem of creating custom post types, displaying the data gleaned from them can be a whole new challenge–which is why we decided to take it one step further and create CPTUI Extended.

We’ve made it simple to add data from your custom post types directly inside your pages and posts by creating a new shortcode builder. This doesn’t just work with post types you create–data from any post type on your site can be displayed using the shortcode builder. For example, you can use the shortcode to display products from popular ecommerce plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, making building out your store and advertising your wares super simple.

This is especially great for the non-developers out there (like myself!) who need a little assistance when it comes to setting up their WordPress site the way that they want. This isn’t just for those folks, though; we made sure to build CPTUI Extended in a way that makes it unbelievably easy for developers to create custom templates for individual post types. We’ve even included detailed instructions on how to do it!

Naturally, because we’re us, we didn’t stop there. For those of you running a Multisite Network, we’ve made it simple to create network-wide custom post types and taxonomies. You no longer need to import your post types, one by one, into site after site; all you have to do is create it once and you’re done!

Even CPTUI version 1.3.0 was inspired by the creation of CPTUI Extended: Michael drew from his nearly three years of answering requests on the support forums and used it to create documentation on how to use CPTUI effectively, as well as provide a go-to location to answer all of the questions we frequently receive and  tutorials on how to achieve various modifications and customizations. You can find all of the documentation for both plugins at Pluginize Docs.

Keep an eye on Pluginize for future announcements, updates, and more incredible WebDevStudios products! You can keep track of news by following us @Pluginize and liking Pluginize on Facebook. 

We invite you to check out the new site, try out CPTUI Extended, and tell us what you think!

The post WebDevStudios Products Reach the Next Level with Pluginize.com 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.

Since then, I’ve been slowly but steadily working on the next major version. Today, I am happy to announce the release of version 1.2.0. A mix of 21 new features, bug fixes, and updates have gone into this version. We will go over some highlights today.

Notable new features

Individual post type and taxonomy output for the “Get Code” area

In version 1.1.x and earlier, the “Get Code” feature allowed you to move your registered types and taxonomies to external locations. This output provided a paste-ready block of code for use in custom plugins or your theme’s functions.php. The only drawback was that it was always all or nothing. In version 1.2.0, there is now output for individual post types and taxonomies as well.

Support for adding post types and taxonomies to the WordPress REST API

In WordPress 4.4, the core developers added the REST API infrastructure. In Custom Post Type UI 1.2.0, we added the ability to add REST API support to your post types and taxonomies. If you are unfamiliar with the WP REST API, or need a refresher, check out Ryan‘s WP REST API Overview once done here.

Template hierarchy references in the Registered Post Types and Taxonomies area

When you are reviewing your registered post types and taxonomies, you will now see a new column. Here you will see common template file names you can use to better target your post types and taxonomies. With those, you can further customize the frontend of your website. These are not special names from Custom Post Type UI. They come right from WordPress’ template stack.

Accessibility and usability improvements around the plugin

Last year one of our design leads, Greg, talked about The Basics of Developing Accessible Websites, and I knew I wanted to increase the accessibility of Custom Post Type UI. With that, I worked and revised the labels used on various forms used in Custom Post Type UI. I also updated the headings to match accessibility changes made in WordPress core. I plan to continue reviewing and improving accessibility in future versions as well. It is a job that is truly never done.

“Debug info” tab with debugging information  on the support forums

While I try to keep Custom Post Type UI as user-friendly and simple as possible, it is just not always the case. Sometimes, you just need some help figuring out how to do something. When that time comes, you hop over to the Custom Post Type UI support forum and post your questions. If you have ever had to do that, you have no doubt seen me show up. Depending on the situation, I may need more information to help debug the issue. This is where the new “debug info” tab will come into play. It will provide me with the needed extra information. This information will include:

• Site URL
• WordPress version
• permalink structure
• active theme
• active plugins
• registered post types from both Custom Post Type UI and elsewhere
• Custom Post Type UI posts types and taxonomies settings
• many other details.

If you are hesitant to share this information to the public, please let me know. I will provide a way to send the data in private.

Other quick notes

We have bumped the minimum version to WordPress 4.2. We also migrated the textdomain to match the slug we have on WordPress.org. If you would like to help translate Custom Post Type UI, let us know and we will point you in the right direction.

All in all, I am quite happy with how Custom Post Type UI version 1.2.0 turned out. I hope a lot of the new features help our users and address issues they were having.

The post Custom Post Type UI Version 1.2.0 Now Available! 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.