Despite a global decrease in public funding for space programs, humans are still reaching for the last frontier through film, music, and even design. Automattic’s latest free theme release on WordPress.org is a bold new take on the space motif. Intergalactic features strong typography with post titles overlaying full-width featured images. The one-column layout is…
The Atlanta metro area will soon be getting a new type of WordPress meetup, targeted towards programmers and designers. Local organizers Mike Schinkel and Micah Wood announced the Atlanta WordPress Coders Guild on Meetup.com and have already attracted 55 members who identify themselves as coders. Due to the group’s unique requirements, it is not affiliated…
VVV-Dashboard is a new tool that provides an interface for managing your Varying Vagrant Vagrants installations. Inspired by Variable VVV, a script that makes it easy to create and delete sites, Leo Gopal made VVV-Dashboard to complement it. Gopal is a WordPress developer from Cape Town, South Africa. “I installed my first WordPress site seven…
Throughout the first half of this month, the WordPress Accessibility team has been working together with the Theme Review Team to discuss the possibility of requiring the accessibility-ready tag for themes hosted on WordPress.org. The team will need to create an official proposal to submit to the Theme Review Team in order to make this…
Jetpack 3.3 is now available. The highlight of this release is the new centralized site dashboard feature that allows users to manage multiple Jetpack-connected WordPress sites and WordPress.com sites from one location in WordPress.com. The new dashboard is mobile friendly and includes the centralized posting feature that was introduced in Jetpack 3.2. It also allows…
Over the weekend, the security team at Sucuri discovered that more than 100,000 WordPress sites have been hit with the SoakSoak.ru malware campaign. This campaign has resulted in more than 11,000 domains being blacklisted by Google. SoakSoak modifies the wp-includes/template-loader.php file in order to inject Javascript, which contains the malware, into every page on compromised…
When Pippin Williamson launched Easy Digital Downloads in early 2012, he could not have predicted the success that the open source project is experiencing today. The core plugin is approaching half a million downloads and recently passed 100 contributors on GitHub. It provides the foundation for a profitable commercial marketplace of more than 190 extensions…
John James Jacoby’s crowd-funding campaign for development on WordPress’ sister projects is now closed and fully funded at $51,500. For the first six months of 2015, he will be working full-time to push the BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress projects forward. Jacoby is essentially pioneering a new way of working as an open source developer funded…
Brad Parbs and his colleagues at WebDevStudios have created a new tool for the thousands of developers out there who utilize Varying Vagrant Vagrants for WordPress development. As Vagrant development environments are a daily staple of work life at WDS, the team needed a faster way for setting up new WordPress sites with VVV. Variable…
One of the oldest and simplest ways of accessing public opinion is through an up/down voting system. When offered in a controlled setting where everyone has the chance to vote, the system causes the best ideas to float to the top. Idea Factory is a plugin designed to make it easy for WordPress administrators to…
WordPress made great strides in 2014 towards improving internationalization for the global community. WordPress 4.0 streamlined language management in the admin and brought language selection to the installation process. In the State of the Word address this year, Matt Mullenweg highlighted the importance of internationalization to the project when he said, “If WordPress is going…
When WordPress 3.0 introduced the ability for developers to register their own custom post types, the software became far more flexible for use as a content management system. This was a major turning point for WordPress, as it gave developers a standard way to structure custom content with core-supported features. Four years later, custom post…
BuddyPress 2.2 is shaping up to be an exciting release, packed full of new features for developers. Support for Composer will be included in 2.2, as well as a basic member type API, which will allow developers to create different user types. The upcoming 2.2 release will also introduce the ability for new activity items…
Several plugins are starting to spring up in the WordPress Plugin Directory to bring Google’s new No Captcha reCAPTCHA to WordPress forms. With public hatred for CAPTCHAs at an all-time high, Google finally put its efforts into redesigning the experience, replacing the distorted text with a simple checkbox. WordPress developers have been quick to take…
WP Stagecoach has been in beta for the past few months and the team behind it is busy planning for an official launch in early 2015. The startup, created by Jonathan Kay, came in second, behind WP Curve, in the first round of Matt Report’s WordPress Startup Challenge. The new service aims to create the…