It’s so hard to find good advanced WordPress materials nowadays. However, there are still authors and sites that continually publish solid quality articles on WordPress development. As a result, Follow Friday is a new category on WordPress Hardcore where I will share with you one WordPress site or author that you should follow on Twitter or subscribe to RSS. This week’s author is Ben Gillbanks from Binary Moon.

Since Roles and Capabilities are introduced in WordPress 2.0, the User Level approach has been declared deprecated. However, it’s disappointing that most plugins and themes out there still use user levels to control access to admin option pages and other functionalities. This guide shows you how to properly use Roles and Capabilities in your plugins and themes.

Disclaimer: This article is a long one, therefore you should probably bookmark it so that you can always come back later for reference.

Since WordPress 2.5, Shortcode has proven to be one of the most powerful features that allows lots of room for flexibility and customization. However, as anything that has the word “code” in it, shortcodes are not very user friendly. For people who are used to using WYSIWYG, shortcode usage can be confusing sometimes. This article shows you how to make shortcodes in your themes and plugins more accessible and user friendly.