Every month, WDS releases a bunch of goodies over on Github (and occasionally WordPress.org and elsewhere). While we typically share the links on our social media, we know that it’s easy for things to get lost in the noise, so we will be bringing you our top five(-ish) releases of every month from now on. While the vast majority are on Github (and for this month, they ALL are), we’ll sometimes also be featuring non-Github releases as well.
February was a busy month! We had a lot going on, and released some really exciting stuff!
Here are the top five releases from WebDevStudios:
Version 2.0.2 of CMB2
You may have seen the brilliant Justin Sternberg’s recent blog post on the CMB2 WordPress Plugin (and if you haven’t, go read it now!). Version 2.0.2 of CMB uses new APIs for adding metaboxes and fields demonstrated in example-functions.php.
In keeping with backwards-compatibility, the cmb2_meta_boxes filter method will still work, but is not recommended. New API includes new_cmb2_box helper function to generate a new metabox, and returns a $cmb object to add new fields (via the CMB2::add_field() and CMB2::add_group_field() methods).
Bonus: After reading “How a Crowdsourced Code Snippet Library Can Boost Your Open Source Project,” by WPTavern’s Sarah Gooding, we were inspired and created the CMB2 Snippet Library as well.
WDS RSS Post Aggregator
This nifty little tool allows you to selectively import posts from RSS Feeds to your WordPress installation and save them as a sort of automated blogroll. With this plugin, you can pull up a list of posts from an RSS feed, then click one, and it will automatically import the link to your site. Plus, the permalink to that “post” will actually send the user to the original resource. Lastly, it will pull the first image in the content, and save it as the featured image for that link post.
This one was originally built for the Microsoft News Center, and hasn’t been released on WordPress.org just yet.
WDS Widget Boilerplate
Do you need a starting point for creating new widgets? WDS Widget Boilerplate provides a good working point for creating widgets, plus it gives you a shortcode for free. It’s a great way to way to quickly create a widget with standard WDS code.
WDS Required Plugins
Okay, okay, so this plugin isn’t exactly new, but it was updated recently.
WDS Required Plugins will allow you to pick plugins that you’re using and set them to never deactivate. This is particularly cool for building projects that require functionality in plugins, especially if you don’t want your client randomly disabling it!
WDS Change Comment Author
This plugin allows admins to update and edit authors of existing comments from wp-admin. It also creates a drop down menu of users that admins can select to comment as. This is especially useful for office/commercial blogs that have one person managing comments; if your boss or colleague needs you to shoot a quick comment out on their behalf, this plugin makes it simple.
A little extra…
Another favorite from this month that we wanted to throw in real quick: The Etsy Importer plugin, by Corey Collins, allows you to do exactly what it says–import products from Etsy with ease. Check it out!
Did any of you out there use any of these this month? Did you see other Github releases that tickled your fancy? Link us up in the comments!