Jason Coleman, creator of the popular Paid Memberships Pro plugin, launched his new SchoolPress app in beta this week. SchoolPress is an open source WordPress-powered web app designed for educators who want to incorporate a virtual component into their online or offline classes. The app is a demo that was created to showcase ideas from…
The WordPress REST API is currently slated for inclusion in WordPress 4.1 and the API team is busy working towards that goal. Project contributors Ryan McCue and Rachel Baker have been on the road giving presentations to introduce developers to the API. They presented at WordCamp Milwaukee and WordCamp NYC, demonstrating how developers can use…
While many WordPress theme designers are exploring the stark landscape of minimalist design, the folks at VPThemes have embraced color and animation with their latest free business theme. Firmness is a bright sunflower in a field of trendy white and grey themes, featuring yellow accents and bold typography. The theme’s homepage has support for two…
Earlier this year, the Piklist rapid development framework for WordPress rebranded with its 0.9.0 release and the team announced plans to launch commercial products. The framework is used by many developers to speed up tasks such as creating fields for settings pages, registering custom post types and custom taxonomies, adding post-to-post relationships and much more.…
The WordPress toolbar is shown by default to all users, but administration screen links aren’t always useful for everyone. For example, on most sites the subscriber user role is very limited and doesn’t require access to the backend. Disable Toolbar is a new plugin that gives administrators the ability to turn the toolbar off on…
TechCrunch is one of the largest sites publishing with WordPress and its developers are always looking to improve performance to maximize engagement and ad revenue. This week the team open sourced its WP Async Task Library, which was created to offload time-consuming tasks into background tasks. Alex Khadiwala and Nico Vincent introduced the library at…
Designer and developer Anders Norén has been making a name for himself with his beautifully minimalist WordPress themes. Norén strives for simplicity on the page and in his code, and his five free themes collectively have nearly 130,000 downloads on WordPress.org. Radcliffe is the newest of his creations, designed specifically for writers. Ordinarily, themes for…
We’ve entered the future, folks. With the help of the LaunchKey plugin, you can now log into your WordPress site using your phone’s biometric facial and fingerprint scanning capabilities. The LaunchKey mobile authentication platform has been pioneering multi-factor authentication for WordPress sites via its official plugin since 2013. The plugin has received glowing five-star reviews…
Jetpack is sporting a new logo in the 3.1 release announced today as part of a re-branding inspired by its growth. “Jetpack is ever-evolving and is a major part of Automattic and WordPress. It’s grown a lot since its introduction in 2011, and its branding should grow too. Something better, faster, stronger,” Enej Bajgoric explained…
Developers who are new to BuddyPress sometimes find BP templates confusing to work with. Common questions include: Why are there so many? Where do I place the files? How can I override the templates in my project? BP Project Framework is a plugin from the folks at WebDevStudios that provides a boilerplate for new custom…
When you have a question about a WordPress theme, where do you look for more information? Theme developers make use of a myriad of documentation methods, from bundling docs to linking to external resources. If you’ve already created a theme and taken the time to document it, then your next challenge is to make its…
Vietnam is getting its first WordCamp on September 6th, 2014. WordCamp Hanoi was born out of the Hanoi WordPress Group, an active local meetup with nearly 300 members. The group connects WordPress enthusiasts in the area for relaxed chats and presentations. As of last month, WordPress is now 100% translated into Vietnamese, and some of…
Many Google Maps plugins have a convoluted admin workflow for creating locations in WordPress. Some of the clunkier solutions actually require you to look up longitude and latitude coordinates to manually input for pinpointing. Very few maps plugins utilize custom post types to provide a user-friendly input. Stellar Places is a new plugin designed to…
While there are many excellent plugins that make migrations easier for developers, WordPress migration as a service hasn’t been widely marketed. MigrateWP is a new business dedicated solely to providing smooth, painless migrations for people who don’t have the skills or time move a site from one host to another. Pricing starts at $200 and…
A WordPress community initiative is underway to standardize content types used by plugin developers. Justin Tadlock is spearheading an initiative to create WordPress community-curated standards for common post types, taxonomies, and metadata. WordPress developers are invited to join the discussion taking place in the Content Type Standards repo on Github where Tadlock outlined the objective:…