Sarah Gooding

  • WordPress Version Stats Updated: More Than 1/3 of Sites are Running WordPress 4.1

    WordPress Version Stats Updated: More Than 1/3 of Sites are Running WordPress 4.1

    Over the weekend, WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin announced a major update to WordPress version stats for PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. While the stats page looks much the same as before, more sophisticated methods of collecting and processing the data have been put in place, thanks to the efforts of WordPress.org contributor Dion Hulse. The…

  • Clean Up WordPress with the New WP-Sweep Plugin

    Clean Up WordPress with the New WP-Sweep Plugin

    After years of creating new content, changing themes, and adding and removing plugins, a WordPress installation can become littered with unused, orphaned, and duplicated data. Not every plugin properly extricates itself and its data from your site when you uninstall. Lester Chan‘s new WP Sweep plugin was designed to perform housekeeping on WordPress installations. Chan…

  • WordPress Theme Review Handbook Updated to Include Design Recommendations

    WordPress Theme Review Handbook Updated to Include Design Recommendations

    The new design of the WordPress Theme Directory is a welcome change on WordPress.org. Faster browsing and filtering means users can more easily sort through the thousands of available options. While the directory includes many beautiful, high quality themes, it often requires sifting through hundreds to find that diamond in the rough. One of the…

  • WordPress Theme Directory Launches New Design

    WordPress Theme Directory Launches New Design

    The new design for the official WordPress Theme Directory is live today. Contributors on the WordPress Meta team released a preview of the design in early January and worked quickly over the past month to resolve any outstanding issues related to the new plugin that powers the directory. In addition to an updated design, the…

  • Add Infinite Scroll to the WordPress Admin

    Add Infinite Scroll to the WordPress Admin

    The WordPress admin list tables can get quite lengthy to browse if you’re relying on regular pagination, especially when you need to perform bulk actions. As of WordPress 4.0, the grid view of the media library has beautiful support for infinite scrolling, but list tables for posts and users still rely on old-fashioned pagination. Setting…

  • Twitter’s New Official WordPress Plugin Prioritizes Extensibility

    Twitter’s New Official WordPress Plugin Prioritizes Extensibility

    It’s easy to get overwhelmed when visiting the WordPress.org plugin directory in search of a Twitter plugin, as you’ll turn up more than 3,000 Twitter-related extensions. Unless you’re running on recommendations or personal experience, it may not be easy to narrow down a quality plugin that keeps pace with changes to the Twitter API. This…

  • Roots WordPress Starter Theme Rebrands as Sage with 8.0 Release

    Roots WordPress Starter Theme Rebrands as Sage with 8.0 Release

    The Roots starter theme for WordPress has rebranded as “Sage” with its 8.0.0 release today. Roots project creator Ben Word announced last year that he planned to change the theme to be framework agnostic in 2015. This release is the first step towards that goal. Fans of the starter theme appreciate its cleaner HTML, cleaner…

  • Envato Continues to Rake in the Cash from WordPress Themes Packaged as Complete Website Solutions

    Envato Continues to Rake in the Cash from WordPress Themes Packaged as Complete Website Solutions

    This week Envato published stats on how WordPress product sellers are doing within its economy. Theme authors make up the bulk of WordPress-based earnings on its marketplace and continue to dominate sales. Inspired by his interaction with the WordPress business community at Pressnomics, Ben Chan, director of Growth and Revenue at Envato, penned an insider…

  • WordCamp Miami Gears Up for 6th Year with New Tracks and Workshops Planned

    WordCamp Miami Gears Up for 6th Year with New Tracks and Workshops Planned

    WordCamp Miami is one of the largest and longest-running annual WordPress events, thanks to its dedicated organizers and volunteers. Last year, the event attracted 770 WordPress enthusiasts from around the world. Co-organizer David Bisset expects that attendees will be in the range of 800 this year for its 6th edition. The event has sold out…

  • Aventurine: A Free WordPress Theme Featuring Bold Typography and Bright Colors

    Aventurine: A Free WordPress Theme Featuring Bold Typography and Bright Colors

    Last year, WordPress saw a renaissance in personal blogging themes. The official WordPress.org directory received a deluge of high quality themes that served to raise the bar for commercial developers when it comes to design and simplicity. In particular, the trend of flat, minimalist blogging themes is still running strong. Last month, theme design and…

  • WPGlobus Plugin Adds a Language Switcher to WordPress

    WPGlobus Plugin Adds a Language Switcher to WordPress

    Last week WPGlobus 1.0 beta was released on WordPress.org. The plugin offers an interesting new attempt at providing multi-language support for WordPress sites. WPGlobus allows you to configure a set of available languages and adds a dropdown language switcher to the frontend via a custom menu. The development team behind WPGlobus is led by WordPress…

  • New Plugin Detects Shared Terms in WordPress Ahead of Taxonomy Term Splitting in 4.2

    New Plugin Detects Shared Terms in WordPress Ahead of Taxonomy Term Splitting in 4.2

    Taxonomy term splitting in WordPress 4.2 addresses a seven-year-old bug that occasionally posed a nuisance to developers. In the past, WordPress allowed terms to be shared between multiple taxonomies. This caused a problem where updating a shared term would change the others unintentionally. Boone Gorges’ progress on this ticket marks a major milestone on the…

  • GravityView is Now Public on GitHub

    GravityView is Now Public on GitHub

    Six months ago, Zack Katz and Luis Godinho launched GravityView, an app based on the popular Gravity Forms plugin. It uses the Gravity Forms API to display unique views of form data and entries on the frontend of WordPress. The main GravityView plugin is now public on GitHub for anyone to access for free. The…

  • BuddyPress Breaks One-Day Download Record with 2.2.1 Release

    BuddyPress Breaks One-Day Download Record with 2.2.1 Release

    The 2015 BuddyPress Survey is out on the heels of the 2.2.1 maintenance release. Yesterday, the plugin broke its one-day download record with more than 10,000 downloads in 24 hours. The #BuddyPress 2.2.1 release (just) set our record one-day download record of ~10,107. — Paul Wong-Gibbs (@pgibbs) February 19, 2015 Over the past seven years,…

  • Customizer Theme Switcher Approved for Merge Into WordPress 4.2

    Customizer Theme Switcher Approved for Merge Into WordPress 4.2

    The Customizer Theme Switcher feature plugin was approved for merge today during the regularly scheduled WordPress core development meeting. Lead developers and contributors in attendance agreed that there are no major blocking issues. The Customizer Theme Switcher in WordPress 4.2 will make it possible for users to browse through themes that have already been installed…