For The Aspiring Professional WordPress Developer is a collection of good advices for those wanting to be a WordPress pro.

Recently I had the task of cloning a WordPress site both to my local server and to another development server that I host. The Duplicator plugin has been a massive help for me, makes cloning really simple and fast. Highly recommended.

“The WordPress Settings API” is a comprehensive, clear guide by Konstantin Kovshenin. This should be the go-to page for my Settings API learning in the future.

Cliff Seal shares his WordPress development process.

“Key Differences Between Validation and Sanitization” is a good development article, too. I’m more surprised that it’s published on the WordPress.com VIP blog, there’s one new feed to subscribe to for me.

“Utilizing User Roles In WordPress” is a Smashing Magazine article, so there’s a good chance that you’ve heard about it already. Instead of, you know, reading about it just now from a small WordPress blog. But anyway. Have a look.

Pete Schuster shares his WordPress CSS setup. It seems to become a trend to not use style.css as the main place to store a theme’s styling. Instead, enqueue function is used to load various styles for better modularity.

Tom McFarlin writes his strategy to use LESS in WordPress.

“Client Oriented WordPress Development” ebook launches.

“How to Scan Your WordPress Site for Potentially Malicious Code” by WPBeginner.

Over at Smashing Magazine, Siobhan McKeown writes a massive post about common WordPress malware infections.

In “Welcome to the Post-CMS World“, Benjamin Balter shares his experience and findings after converting his site from WordPress to Jekyll.

“How to do damn near anything with WordPress” is a massive, bookmark-worthy resource list by Stephanie Leary.

Tom McFarlin writes his about development practices and coding standards in “Going Above and Beyond the WordPress Coding Standards“. There’s bound to be an idea or two you can use there.

Finally, WordPress 3.5 beta 2 is available.

“WordPress Themes: XSS Vulnerabilities and Secure Coding Practices” by Tony Perez of Sucuri.

“Using LESS with WordPress” by Noel Tock of happytables fame.

A bookmark-worthy “Migrating WordPress Websites” workflow by Bill Erickson. Even the first step is smart.

“What WordPress Theme Developers Can Learn from Twenty Twelve” by Konstantin Kovshenin. An in-depth write up about the features inside WordPress’s default theme of the year from a developer perspective.

“Building the WordPress plugin“, by Matt Kelly, a Facebook Engineer who develops the Facebook for WordPress plugin.

Finally, Tom McFarlin has been writing great WordPress articles, have a look. A few sampler: “Writing WordPress Code – Clean but Not Clever“, ”

How I Organize My Files When Developing WordPress Themes“, and “Five Suggestions For Writing Better JavaScript in WordPress“.

“Why I’m Against Placing Custom Hooks in WordPress Themes“: Tom McFarlin disagrees with the practice where themes create their own custom template hooks API. The comment section reveals in interesting movement called the “Theme Hooks Alliance“, an effort to standardize how developers add hooks to their themes.

“My WordPress Theming Inspiration“: Ian Stewart loves really old Blogger templates. ;)

“WordPress Workflow Tips: Using Subversion Externals for Plugins, Themes and Core“: Konstantin Kovshenin writes a tutorial where we can use WordPress-hosted theme/plugin Subversion repositories in our projects.

“More Internationalization Fun“: Otto’s sequel to his great internationalization article, “Internationalization: You’re probably doing it wrong“.

Brian Krogsgard’s “Mac and Web based tools for WordPress Theme Development” is a nice peek to his development process.

“Filtering the Options API in WordPress.” Could be useful.

Lastly, a tutorial on displaying a different menu for different user roles and capabilities.

Bonus: if you’re in the mood for some drama, head over to this ThemeForest forum thread, where Justin Tadlock, Carl Hancock and Pippins Williamson (among others) talk about the lack of WordPress best practice usages among some of the sellers there.

Here’s an article on Forbes about the history of WordPress and Automattic. I always find Automattic to be a company that does the right thing, for the most part. Seems to be a great working place, too. Matt Mullenweg wrote his thought about that article as well.

“Making of: BillErickson.net Redesign“. Bill Erickson wrote some of the best WordPress tutorials out there, and the website recently got a redesign from well-known designer Rafal Tomal. The article reveals a detailed look into his redesign process.

“The Ecology of WordPress Plugin Development” is a well-written article about making your code ecosystem-friendly. The lessons should apply both for plugin and theme development.

“5 Common WordPress Issues and How to Fix Them” is a quick read, good to know the solution for each of these.

“Problems with themes on ThemeForest, are problems with themes“. Japh Thomson, WordPress Evangelist at Envato, addresses the problem us developers often find when working with themes bought from ThemeForest. The discussion in the comment section is especially worth reading.

“Ultimate WordPress Custom Post Type Tricks Roundup“. Title says all.

A nice guide about using WordPress for creating web apps. Clever hacks involved. (via @kovshenin)

“The Plugins I Run”

Pippins Williamson went through the collection of plugins he have installed in his site, Pippin’s Plugins. His site is a rather advanced WordPress site with memberships, restricted contents, as well as offering various plugin downloads, so it’s worth taking a look what plugins help running it.

WordPress themes in top 1 million websites

An analysis on what themes are used by the most popular WordPress sites. Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven top the list, a testimony of how capable the default themes are to support some of the biggest sites on the Web. (via @nomadone)

How To Add WordPress Themes Hooks and Actions to Your Existing WordPress Theme

If you develop a theme with modification and child theming in mind, adding hooks to common areas in the theme’s layout is a must. Here’s a neat tutorial to help you do just that.

WordCamp San Francisco 2012 Group Notes

State of the Word 2012

Preserved HTML Editor Markup plugin.

Gridster.js

Media Wireframes