Weekly WordPress News: Forked Products, WordCamp London, New Happy Tables & More.

WordCamp London happened last weekend at the London Metropolitan University, I couldn’t make this as we are due a baby (very!) soon so it was good to see a roundup of the event on WPTavern, looked like a great WordCamp.

I wrote a post this week about WordPress products which were forked from others, the post did well but I had a hard time researching it, check it out and please add to the comments if you have any other examples.

Brian wrote a good article on PostStatus about the new HappyTables – its a very impressive product built on top of WordPress, something we are going to be seeing more of soon.

Have a good weekend everyone, on with the news …

WordPress News and Articles

• Forked: A Tale of WordPress Products which Grew from Others – A collection of forked WordPress products and the history behind them.
• Happytables 3 is taking on Squarespace and Wix – Brian posts about the new HappyTables – it looks great.
• Confessions of a WordPress Developer – Cool personal post from Tom.
• WordCamp London 2015 Highlights the Energy in the UK WordPress Scene – About the recent WordCamp London.
• WordPress 4.2 Radically Improves The Plugin Install and Update Process – Highlighting the new plugin activattion and update process.
• WordPress SEO 2.0: focus on what matters – Yoast released version 2 of WordPress SEO with support for knowledge graph.
• We didn’t know that WooCommerce would flip our whole business on its head – Interview with Magnus Jepson from Woo.
• The importance of having a staging site for your e-commerce business – Advice from EDD about creating a staging site.
• Top 100 WordPress People to Follow on Twitter – Another roundup to build out your Twitter account.

Tutorials and How-Tos

• How to Start a Food Blog – Beginners Guide – How to setup a blog for food bloggers.
• Prefix all the things – Remember to prefix everything in your theme code to prevent conflicts.
• Getting Started With Advanced Custom Fields – ACF is a great and powerful plugin for creating custom websites within WordPress.
• Simple User Reviews With Gravity Forms and a Custom Post Type – Simple tutorial to collect review using Gravity Forms.
• Getting Started in WordPress Theme Development – Tips for starting theme development.

Resources & Freebies

• Improve Your Website Conversion Rates with Heat Maps: Free PTEngine Plugin – Joe looked at a free plugin and service for viewing heat maps on your WordPress site.
• How To: Increase Your Mailing List with Premium Opt-in WordPress Plugins – Updated roundup of the best opt in plugins for WordPress.
• How To: Check over 2500 Free WordPress Themes for Speed using WPSpeedster – I looked at a website and plugin which shows you the speeds of themes in the WordPress directory.