Getting users to upload avatars can be a challenge for BuddyPress communities. Avatars aren’t like profile fields where you can require users to complete them. The problem is that a community without many real-user avatars can be somewhat uninviting. Member directories and widgets end up looking grey and white and uninspiring. Too many default “mystery…
When you post a video or include it in your content, chances are that you don’t want to have to hunt around for a featured image to accompany it. However, many WordPress themes look their best with featured images in the homepage, category, and archive templates. Without featured images, many image-dependent designs can break or…
Loco is a free service for managing and editing software translations. Many WordPress plugins and themes include language files that make it possible for users to translate the text strings. Loco offers a place to manage assets associated with translations and easily collaborate with translators: The service also offers a PO file editor that works…
January 2014 marked the first month that mobile traffic has overtaken PC traffic on the internet in the US, accounting for 55% of Internet usage. As mobile traffic is on the rise, designing in the browser has become more popular, as it offers better tools for testing sites against various devices. Responsible is a plugin…
WPCore landed in the WordPress plugin repository this week. The plugin extends WordPress to interact with the new WPCore service that allows you to create and manage plugin collections. The new WPCore plugin lets you bulk install all the plugins from any collection in just one click. The service was created by Stuart Starr, an…
Theme Hybrid released Hybrid Core 2.0 today after many months in development. The framework, created by Justin Tadlock, powers this site and many other WordPress sites on the web. Version 1.0 was first released in October 2010, built from the engine that made up the base of Tadlock’s popular Hybrid Theme. Since that time, Hybrid…
WP Quick Install is an interesting new tool from Julio Potier, Jonathan Buttigieg, and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier, the folks behind WP Rocket. As part of supporting their commercial caching plugin, the WP Rocket team works extensively with clients. WP Quick Install is a tool they use internally and decided to share with the community. Its creators…
Baskerville is a new masonry grid style WordPress theme available from designer Anders Norén. His popular Hemingway theme has received more than 60,000 downloads on WordPress.org and is also offered on WordPress.com. Baskerville was created to showcase many different types of content, hence its tagline: “A WordPress Theme for Hoarders.” The theme bears Norén’s trademark…
The Gust plugin aims to provide a Ghost-style publishing experience within the WordPress admin. It was released at the end of last year by developer Arūnas Liuiza. He was disappointed that Ghost didn’t end up being a fork of WordPress, so he decided to package its best publishing features into a plugin. Gust adds a…
If you’re looking for a clean, customizable business theme for WordPress, THBusiness just landed in the official Themes Directory. While most free themes are dedicated to blogging, THBusiness is focused on providing all of the basic elements you need to display featured content, services, testimonials, and more. It was designed by the folks at THEMEZHUT…
France is getting its second official WordCamp. The event is called WordCamp Nantes WP Tech and will be held in Nantes on Saturday, November 29, 2014. Unlike your traditional WordCamp, WP Tech will be devoted entirely to developers. “The idea is to share knowledge, ideas and best practices about WordPress development,” organizer Daniel Roch told…
Roots is a WordPress starter theme that makes use of HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, and Grunt. Over the years Roots has garnered somewhat of a cult following and is still going strong with the release of version 7.0.0 last week. This release moves some of the theme’s trademark features into a plugin called Soil and adds…
WordPress 4.0 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. This means that core developers are now onto the stage of bug fixes and inline documentation in preparation for the official release in August. Helen Hou-Sandí, the release lead, announced the beta with an outline of user-facing features that need testing. The list offers…
Admin pointers were first added in WordPress 3.3 for the purpose of helping users discover and navigate new features in major releases. For example, when widgets were added to the customizer, an admin pointer displayed to highlight live widget previews on the themes page. The friendly pointers, when used sparingly, can draw attention to important…
WordPress.tv added its first German language video today. Konstantin Obenland’s “Underscores: Ein Startertheme Für Alle” presentation from WordCamp Hamburg is, surprisingly, the only German video to make it to WordPress.tv so far. Obenland is a code wrangler at Automattic and has also worked extensively with the default WordPress themes. His presentation covers the history and…