2013-10-20

Like any piece of self-respecting software or online service, WordPress and its ecosystem are constantly changing and improving. Between core updates, new plugins, and useful tutorials released by the community, it can be hard to keep track of it all.

As an agency that provides WordPress services, we of course must constantly stay up-to-date on what’s going on. I follow many sources and read them daily, but there are a few that really stand out, and they are listed below. These resources are updated on a consistent and constant basis, and manage to truly pick the most important and useful news out there for you to consume.

So if you also want to stay abreast of what’s going on in WordPress-land, you may find these resources useful too:

wpMail



wpMail is curated by Cristian Antohe from Cozmoslabs. The content is always focused and useful, and presented in an appealing format.

What I really like about wpMail is that its end-goal is to be a good email newsletter. You can’t actually find the content online, it just arrives in your inbox every few weeks. I love a good e-newsletter, and this is one of those. I really think that if you read this, you’ve got yourself covered in terms of the most important WordPress news. And its got pretty branding. I like.

Post Status



Post Status is a blog curated and editorialized by Brian Krogsgard. Brian stays on top of the best and most important WordPress news and shares it on his site, but what’s nice is that he contributes to the link-sharing by also writing original content sharing his perspective on things.

His blog is the opposite of email-targeted content – he offers a newsletter, which I signed up for but I don’t recall ever having received. Plus, the newsletter isn’t meant to share everything he posts on the site; the site says that the newsletter is “a periodic, personally written newsletter from the editor. It’s the opposite of spam, or annoying.” Well, it’s certainly not annoying, since I never got it.

And since that description doesn’t sound like it includes EVERYTHING he posts on his site, and I don’t want to miss anything (I’ve got WordPress FOMO, people), I set up an IFTTT recipe to email me all new posts published in his RSS feed. I’ve shared the recipe so y’all can use it too:

IFTTT recipe: Email me new posts from the PostStatus blog

The Smashing Newsletter



Smashing Magazine is an amazing site covering pretty much everything related to digital creation, whether it’s web design, CSS, Javascript, and of course WordPress. If you are working with WordPress, then it’s best if you keep on top of everything happening related to website design and development in general along with WordPress specifically, and Smashing Magazine can help you do that.

The Smashing Newsletter is published two to three times per month and I read it religiously. Highly recommended.

ManageWP.org

ManageWP.org is the new kid on the WordPress-curation block, brought to you by the folks behind ManageWP. (ManageWP is one of the dashboard solutions for managing multiple WordPress sites from one location.) ManageWP.org is meant to be more of a community-curated site, whereby users can submit content to be shared on the site, and then other users can vote up articles they like, in a Digg-like format. Content is viewable according to Hottest, Latest, and Greatest, and by category (Articles, Plugins, Themes, etc.). The functionality on the site is smart and useful, with a form for submitting articles and starting discussions (you need to login and then get accepted to start sharing! Not so friendly), and other resources including share buttons you can add to your site and a browser bookmarklet. They really thought of everything. Almost.

But here’s the thing: not only does it not offer any newsletter subscription functionality, it doesn’t even have any RSS feeds that I could IFTTT-ify, or you could RSS-feed-ify, if you are so inclined. So I’d have to remember to visit this site on a regular basis, and with all due respect to ManageWP.org, I already visit 356 sites a day, and I don’t have room for even one more website visit in my daily regimen.

Also, it appears that the site is not built on WordPress. It’s too bad if that’s the case, since this could have been an interesting use-case for WordPress.

If you read all of the above, I think that you could rest assured that you are up-to-date on the most important happenings in the world of WordPress. Happy WordPress reading!

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