Easy Digital Downloads announced a major change to its themes marketplace today. All official EDD themes (those that are built by the EDD core team) are now 100% free. This includes half a dozen themes that are guaranteed to be fully compatible with EDD, including the new Vendd theme launching today. EDD support manager Sean…
WordCamp San Francisco has traditionally been one of the most important WordPress events of the year where Matt Mullenweg delivers his annual State of the Word address. Last year, he announced that the the event had outgrown the Mission Bay venue and that it would be expanding to become WordCamp US in 2015. Touch the…
BuddyPress 2.3 “Livio” was released today, named in honor of Chez Livio, a famous Italian restaurant and pizza joint in Paris. Development on the 2.3 release cycle began in March with contributors prioritizing work on new APIs alongside improvements to BuddyPress’ existing APIs. Here’s a quick overview of what’s new: BP Attachments API The highlight…
Contributors on the Menu Customizer feature plugin are proposing its inclusion in WordPress 4.3. Nick Halsey posted the Customizer Team’s proposal last night, beginning with a summary of the purpose of moving menu management into the customizer: In the process, we hope to offer an updated design with improved user flow, a mobile-first interface, improved…
The quest for the perfect WordPress admin search tool continues with yet another plugin designed to help you zip around the backend. Those who are familiar with Alfred for Mac will find many similarities in Aladdin, which was released today by Gerasimos Tsiamalos and the folks at CSSIgniter. Aladdin joins the ranks of Jarvis, WP…
WordPress.com announced major improvements to its Stats feature today. The new Insights tab gives users a bird’s eye view of posting activity and visitor trends. The Stats panel now displays all-time numbers for posts, views, visitors, and the day the site received the most number of views. Insights also calculates the most popular day of…
Sergej Müller is saying goodbye to WordPress after nine years and nearly three million downloads of his free plugins. Antispam Bee, his most popular contribution, is currently in use on more than 200,000 WordPress sites. Müller penned a farewell Gist on GitHub in his native German, which Caspar Hübinger was kind enough to translate into…
Three key provisions within the Patriot Act will expire at the stroke of midnight on Sunday. The Senate needs 60 votes in order to provide an extension or renew the provisions past June 1st. Section 215 of the measure is particularly controversial in that it allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect data from…
WordCamp Miami 2015 is taking place this weekend with a BuddyCamp kicking off today. The event sold out again this year and will have roughly 800 attendees, including a kids’ camp, convening at the Florida International University School of Business campus on Saturday and Sunday. If you weren’t able to make it to BuddyCamp, the…
Openname, the decentralized identity and naming system built on the blockchain, was recently renamed to Blockchain Name System (BNS). Founders Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea are pioneering decentralized identity with the long-term goal of creating decentralized authentication. Earlier this month, BNS debuted Passcard, a digital form of identity and access control combined. It’s essentially a…
Sucuri launched a new free performance tool today. The Global Website Performance Tester allows anyone to enter a URL and get a quick assessment of how fast the website is loading from 13 globally distributed testing stations. Results include three key metrics: connection time, time to first byte (TTFB) and total load time. At the…
During this week’s WordPress.org Theme Review Team meeting Chip Bennett opened the floor to discuss the “grey areas” of presentation vs. functionality distinctions in themes. The hotly debated topic concerns what is permissible in terms of “content creation” for themes that are hosted in the official directory. “We know that CPTs and custom taxonomies are…
Nothing makes a BuddyPress site seem more active or more colorful than when members upload their own unique avatars. Unfortunately, not all users have the motivation to follow through with adding a profile picture. You could use a plugin to add avatar upload to registration, or even force BuddyPress users to upload a profile photo…
Kyle Newsome, creator of Postcard, announced over the weekend that the project will be discontinued. The free social sharing app for iOS launched in February of 2014 with the aim to make it easy to share content from your phone to multiple social networks, including your own website. Postcard’s chief selling point was the idea…
If you’re looking to bring your blog’s design back to the bare bones of pure content without distractions, then the new Cover theme may be a good option. Cover brings blogging minimalism to a new level. After less than a month on WordPress.org, it has already been downloaded more than 2,500 times. Cover was created…