WordPress 4.0 brought plugin icons and info cards to the installer, offering developers more incentive to brand their extensions for a better appearance in the admin. Plugin branding has made exploring the 34,000+ items in the official Plugin Directory a more friendly and colorful experience for users. Building on top of the new plugin identity…
Jetpack 3.2 was released last week, featuring a new site logo feature for theme authors, bug fixes, and performance improvements. Today the Jetpack team officially announced the release, along with a new feature that wasn’t mentioned in the changelog. Centralized Posting from WordPress.com Self-hosted WordPress sites connected via Jetpack can now publish posts using the…
WordPress for Android 3.3 was released last week. A majority of the improvements found in this release center around enhancing WordPress.com’s built-in Reader. Android users will find a few changes in the app but nothing that would effect the normal publishing workflow: The post and the comment views are now split up in the Reader.…
The folks behind AppPresser, the first mobile app development framework for WordPress, generated some buzz at WordCamp San Francisco with live demos of their upcoming Reactor product. When AppPresser was launched in January, it was groundbreaking in terms of demonstrating the power of WordPress as an application platform. However, it was not as user-friendly as…
Jetpack 3.2 was quietly released yesterday with a host of new enhancements for self-hosted WordPress sites. Following up on 3.1’s total re-branding of the plugin, 3.2 comes with speed improvements and better caching for related posts. This release introduces the new ‘Site Logo’ feature that was added to WordPress.com themes in late July. The goal…
Today Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word address at WordCamp San Francisco, with roughly 1,000 WordPress enthusiasts and contributors in attendance and hundreds more watching via livestream. Before jumping into the results of the survey, Mullenweg announced that this would be the last event held at Mission Bay conference center. Touch the…
For a long time, BuddyPress has been sorely in need of better support for media, as images, video, and audio play a major part in connecting people on social networks. BuddyPress core has adopted the features-as-plugin development model to help facilitate the development of a new media component called BP Attachments. This new Attachments API,…
In a strategic effort to make academic journals more relevant to your average reader, JSTOR has launched an online daily magazine. The digital academic library offers full-text searches of 2,000+ journals, e-books, and primary sources. JSTOR Daily will serve to bring more context to current events by connecting readers to relevant scholarly publications found within…
Unsplash, the free stock photo site, quickly became popular with designers, due to its tasteful curating of images. All of the high resolution images on the site are carefully selected, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a bad photo among them. Unsplash gradually grows its collection by adding 10 new photos every 10 days, all…
BuddyPress lead developer Paul Gibbs committed support for Composer to BuddyPress core this week. Developers who want to check it out can find the json file at: trunk/src/composer.json. If you’re not yet familiar with Composer, it’s essentially a tool for dependency management in PHP. It is designed to manage packages on a per-project basis by…
The original Monster Widget plugin is a handy tool created by Automattic to assist theme developers with testing. Essentially, it allows you to quickly drop all core widgets into your sidebar at once, saving you the trouble of having to add them individually. Now you can get the same for bbPress and BuddyPress, thanks to…
The life of a frontend developer has changed a great deal over the past few years, with the introduction of new technologies for authoring CSS and automating tasks. We’re starting to see that trickle down into every new WordPress starter theme. These days you’ve got to npm install allthiscrazystuff just to get started on a…
Jason Schuller, the original founder of the Press75 theme company, has been off the radar for a few years as he pursued experiments with alternative publishing platforms. He officially exited the commercial WordPress theme business earlier this year when Press75 was acquired by Westwerk, following a sharp decline in the shop’s monthly revenue. Prior to…
Some Like it Neat is a new starter theme for WordPress, based on the popular ultra-minimal Underscores theme. It also incorporates Bourbon, a lightweight mixin library for Sass. On top of that it adds Neat, which applies a semantic grid framework for Sass and Bourbon, enabling you to build any responsive layout that you can…
Version 1.0 of the Themosis development framework is now available. Belgium-based application developer Julien Lambé created Themosis in order to accelerate object-oriented development with WordPress. It offers a routing system for managing WordPress behavior on an application level and also includes a Laravel-esque templating engine for view files. Last week Lambé announced that the framework…