The traditional use of widgets in WordPress is to set it and forget it. After placing and configuring a widget, it stays in the widgetized area until manually removed. Many plugins have extended widgets to add visibility settings that are based on the page or post where the widget appears. But what if you could…
Emil Uzelac’s new WordPress Theme Review service is the first of its kind. As a four-year veteran of the WordPress.org Theme Review Team, he is uniquely qualified to operate a service that focuses on theme standards and quality control. Uzelac plans to assist developers with theme reviews for client projects, commercial themes, and free themes…
This year the WordPress plugin directory crossed 35,000 plugin listings and is rapidly approaching one billion total downloads. WordPress 4.0 added custom icons to the plugin installer in the admin, which helps developers to differentiate their plugins in this massive sea of extensions. Plugin branding is useful for standing out in the initial results of…
WordPress’ sticky posts feature was introduced six years ago in the 2.7 release. It was added to enable users to stick important posts to the front page so that they won’t disappear in a blog’s steady stream of chronologically ordered content. By default, a sticky post is sticky indefinitely and requires you to manually uncheck…
Maintaining a library of code snippets can save you time when coding similar tasks in the future. Although there are countless sites online where you can host code snippets, it’s more convenient to have them at your fingertips when writing a blog that includes code. Plugin developer Justin Sternberg recently released Code Snippets CPT, a…
Looking back on the theme landscape of 2014, a clear design trend emerged that highlights WordPress’ roots as a blogging platform. Minimalist, content-centric themes took center stage in the official WordPress Themes Directory, outpacing their more visually-bloated commercial counterparts. This past year saw a major renaissance in themes for the personal blogger, particularly designs that…
Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.2.0 was released last week after nine months in development. As of VVV 1.2.0, new instances of VVV will have the database entirely contained inside the virtual machine, as opposed to previous versions where it was mapped to a persistent local location. VVV project leader Jeremy Felt recommends a full vagrant destroy…
Have you ever wondered what WordPress looked like back in the early days, before it was used by millions of website around the web? Ryan Hellyer has created a series of static representations of the very early versions of WordPress. The Historic WordPress project aims to showcase both the frontend and backend of the software…
The WordPress project is charging full steam ahead with improvements to the customizer. The most recent release featured the addition of dynamic and contextual controls, sections, and panels. As WordPress 4.2 is kicking off development, core contributors are looking to add menus to the customizer for easy management from the frontend. More WordPress theme developers…
WordSesh 3 took the WordPress world by storm over the weekend. With more than 3,000 unique viewers, the event attracted roughly three times the number of people who attended WordCamp Europe 2014. This makes WordSesh one of the largest WordPress events of the year. WordSesh is essentially an online WordCamp where viewers don’t have to…
Nulis is one of the most unique designs to land in the WordPress Themes Directory this year. At first glance, you might think the theme is rather plain. The screenshot on the theme’s description page doesn’t indicate anything interesting going on under the hood, but something about it intrigued me enough to put it up…
Postmatic is currently offering free concierge installation, configuration, and user migration for its new comments subscription plugin which is now in beta. The plugin allows users to subscribe to new posts/comments via email and leave a comment by simply hitting reply. Postmatic beta 6 introduced 1-click migration of subscribers from Jetpack, in order to make…
WordPress 4.1 was released just yesterday, but core contributors are already planning and working towards 4.2. The Menu Customizer feature plugin is back in development and contributors are hoping to have it ready for inclusion in 4.2. Nick Halsey, who originally started the Menu Customizer work as part of his Google Summer of Code project,…
Git just announced version 2.2.1, a maintenance release that includes a security fix for a critical vulnerability that affects those using Windows and Mac OS X Git clients. This update also includes new releases with the same security fix for older Git versions. GitHub confirmed that GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac are both…
Jekyll fans are fond of the Ruby-powered static blogging software due to its ease of use and support for Markdown and the Liquid templating engine. With no database to maintain and no comments to moderate, Jekyll radically simplifies blogging. It’s also the software that powers blogging on Github Pages. Moving content from WordPress to Jekyll…