WordPress magazine themes are notorious for being packed to the gills with content, widgets, post meta, and advertising. Many have a chaotic feel as a byproduct of trying to pack as much content as possible into the homepage. Semicolon is a shining exception among free WordPress magazine themes in that it features a super minimalist…
Today Automattic joins Google, Mozilla, Twitter, Reddit, and other companies across the web in announcing its support for Reset the Net campaign against mass surveillance, which takes place on the internet today. Because the NSA continues to exploit weak links in internet security in order to spy on the world, the only way for companies…
This month marks a big milestone for WordPress in Vietnamese. It is now 100% translated, thanks in large part to the folks at foobla who volunteered a great deal of time and effort on the final push to finish translating the software into Vietnamese. New WordPress translations don’t magically happen – they actually take quite…
WordPress.com VIP announced Documattic today, a new GitHub repository to house presentations and resources shared with the community. The VIP team is regularly engaged in the task of educating new clients on the strengths and features of the WordPress platform. Sara Rosso explained in the announcement why they decided to share the relevant documents: We…
Once in awhile a WordPress site gets left to the wolves and becomes overrun by spam comments. Perhaps you set up an installation and forgot to install Akismet or some other spam-blocking plugin. If you neglected your site for a significant length of time, it’s likely that you’ll return to hundreds, if not thousands, of…
Press75, established by Jason Schuller in 2008, is one of the longest running successful WordPress theme shops. Schuller carved out his own niche creating video-centric WordPress themes and created a strong, well-respected brand. He gradually became more involved with creating Dropplets, an alternative publishing platform, and experimenting with Leeflets, and his Cinematico project. In April,…
The customizer is a powerful tool that allows users to make changes to WordPress themes and preview them live. Because it is native to WordPress, many theme authors are starting to employ the customizer exclusively, instead of creating their own option panels. Although the customizer is a frontend tool, it slides into view with a…
Many native English speakers take WordPress’ famous 5-minute installation process for granted. Have you every wondered how much of a hurdle it might be to try to install the software when English is not your first language? Andrew Nacin recently published an extensive plan to tackle this problem and a host of others with internationalization…
WordPress is excellent for writing posts privately by yourself and can be extended to allow collaborative writing with other registered authors. But what if you could open up your posts and revisions to even more contributors without requiring them to register to your site or even use WordPress? WordPress GitHub Sync is a new plugin…
May was an excellent month for free WordPress themes landing in the official Themes Directory. Several dozen were approved and added to the directory last week in one sweep. We’ve hand-picked some of the best themes released in the month of May, all of which have undergone the rigorous review process conducted by the Theme…
Tracks is a new free theme in the WordPress Themes Directory with a unique design that utilizes panoramic featured images. The homepage displays recent posts and a short excerpt for each, with big, bold images alternating down the page. If you’re looking for a simple theme with very few options to configure, then Tracks is…
Editorially closed its doors for good today, and with it goes all of the writing collaboration tools its users came to love. Unfortunately, some legal issues are currently preventing them from open sourcing the code for the application, but it’s under consideration. In the meantime, a newcomer has stepped in to provide some of the…
Query Recorder is a new tool that allows developers to record queries while working in the WordPress admin. The plugin was created by Brad Touesnard, author of the popular WP Migrate DB plugin. Touesnard introduced Query Recorder earlier this month at WordCamp Miami during his presentation on database deployment strategy. Once installed, the plugin allows…
WP-CFM is a new free tool for WordPress created by Matt Gibbs, author of the popular Custom Field Suite plugin. It provides configuration management for WordPress database changes, similar to Drupal’s Features module. WP-CFM lets you create and store bundles, which are essentially a group of one or more configuration options. The first step after…
WordPress core contributors came to a consensus today during the development meeting regarding the immediate future of the JSON REST API project. Ryan McCue and his team released version 1.0 over the weekend and have been pushing hard for it to be ready for the upcoming 4.0 release. When I spoke with McCue yesterday about…