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.

Ben Gillbanks is a WordPress ninja who’s behind Pro Theme Design and WPVote. He’s also the developer in charge of TimThumb, which is one of the most popular thumbnail generator script for WordPress themes. His blog – Binary Moon – which usually was dominated by movie reviews, recently is stocked with lots of hardcore WordPress tutorials and tricks of the trade along with great advices for WordPress developers. Follow him on Twitter and Subscribe to his updates via RSS if you haven’t done so already (which I doubt). Below is 5 of his articles that I hand picked for you to bookmark, seriously quality stuff:

Using the Yahoo Weather API (in your WordPress themes)

While you won’t be using this trick a lot, it still serves as an excellent example on how to use WordPress Http class to work with external API. You can extend this example to interact with other web services, like fetching recent tweets from twitter or loading a text file from a remote server.

10 WordPress query_posts tips you probably don’t know

Some of these tricks I don’t know myself. Reading WordPress’ official documentation on query_posts() is a must, but this article serves as an excellent supplement. I like how concise yet easy to understand his code examples are. By the way, If you’re turned on by really really hardcore stuff, play around with WP_Query object and filter hook parse_query.

Creating Your Own WordPress Permalink Structure For Custom Content

Like I said, stuff involving WP_Query and parse_query is pretty hardcore. I wanted to write something about this, but found out Ben covered it nicely with his article. My approach might be a little bit different, but you should really read Ben’s way, you’ll know how WPVote works behind the scene.

WordPress Caching, Part 1: The Basics

This article is basically an introduction to a series of articles about Caching and WordPress. Judging on the premise, I believe this will be a very informative and useful series. If I were you, I’d subscribe to his RSS in a blink to make sure I won’t miss anything in the future.

Building WPVote Part 7: Almost Done

As you all probably know, WPVote was launched recently and I believe it’s a huge success. Ben even documented each step of his project in a series of 7 blog posts, and I found some of these articles really gave me good ideas about how to plan, design and implement a WordPress project from start to finish.

Enjoy your Friday!