Clear Tranquil is one of the cleanest, most elegant blogging themes to hit WordPress.org in recent days. The theme was created by Woo Themes designer James Koster as a child theme for his responsive Highwind parent theme. Clear Tranquil lives up to its name, inspiring a light, peaceful reading experience that is clutter-free. The design…
Everybody knows that animals need homes. There are far more pets available for adoption than there are people lining up to adopt them. Call your local animal shelter and they’ll probably tell you that they’re at or over capacity. That’s where foster homes can help to provide quality care for animals in the interim, until…
We’ve been following the evolution of the WPCore plugin management app, which recently added favoriting, update notifications, and the ability to add plugins that aren’t hosted on WordPress.org. Today, the app’s developer, Stuart Starr, announced what is perhaps the most convenient feature to date. With WPCore Plugin Manager installed, users can now export all of…
If you regularly blog code snippets, adding a syntax highlighter plugin can help make your code more readable and easier to copy. Many plugins use language-specific shortcodes to surround embedded code, but this generally requires you to remember the right way to form the shortcode. The new WordPress Rainbow Hilite plugin uses a different method…
If you’re on the hunt for a new design to showcase your work, WordPress.com’s beautiful Espied theme is now available for use on self-hosted sites. This striking minimalist portfolio theme was created with designers, photographers, and artists in mind. Espied utilizes WordPress.com’s portfolio feature, which was recently added to Jetpack. With this custom content type…
Broken Lizard’s 2001 comedy “Super Troopers” introduced millions of viewers to the “cat game.” In the scene, a highway patrolman pulls Jim Gaffigan over and then tries to insert the word “meow” casually into the conversation as many times as possible. You remember that scene, right? If not, check it out here: Am I Saying…
Sprout Apps will soon be launching a suite of business apps targeted at WordPress freelancers and small businesses. WordPress developer Daniel Cameron is behind the project, which is centered around creating plugins that help business owners work more efficiently with WordPress. Sprout Apps aims to bring tasks like invoicing, estimates, and client tracking into the…
Comments are an important aspect of your content and can serve as a vehicle for building community. WordPress site admins put in a hefty amount of work moderating comments and combating spam, just to keep the conversation going with comments open. With all that work invested, admins are looking for new ways to make comment…
Underscores community project contributors announced today that the theme now includes support for Sass. The popular WordPress starter theme is an open source project maintained by Automattic, and many of its users requested Sass support, according to contributor Tammie Lister. “The community firstly asked for Sass. As Sass is in core, this makes sense. It…
The cdnjs service is used by hundreds of thousands of websites to offload static files for performance. It’s an open source community-driven project that hosts a variety of different file types, including JavaScript, CSS, SWF, and images, thanks to help from sponsors UserApp and CloudFlare. WP cdnjs is a new plugin that allows users to…
Over the past few months, WordPress developers have been experimenting with speeding up PHP execution with HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) and have achieved some amazingly fast load times. HHVM compatibility with WordPress is gradually improving and more hosting companies are moving to adopt it, as many believe that HHVM will soon revolutionize PHP. Changes in…
Earlier this year, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion dollars. With 450+ million users per month and 70% of them active per day, Facebook is betting on the the app’s massive user base and continued growth. Although WhatsApp is enormously popular, very few WordPress sharing plugins have prioritized adding the service to the list of…
Automatically changing the background color of a post based on its images is a fancy effect that you may have noticed on WordPress.com’s Ryu theme. It’s currently WordPress.com’s 7th most popular theme and is also available for self-hosted sites with the same intuitive background changing feature built in. Jetpack developer Jeremy Herve just released an…
WPCore launched less than a month ago and has already gone through several rounds of improvement. The app allows WordPress users to create plugin collections and install them in one click. Most recently, WPCore added favoriting and the ability to include custom plugins hosted outside of WordPress.org. Today, WPCore creator Stuart Starr announced a new…
Over the past year, WordPress plugin developers have created some unique implementations of the post editor that add Markdown editing with a side-by-side preview. Both the Gust and Splitdown plugins were inspired by the Ghost editor and attempt to recreate that experience in WordPress. MarkPress is the newest to join the ranks of Markdown-powered editors.…