Sarah Gooding

  • BuddyPress 2.0 To Add Signups Administration Screen

    BuddyPress 2.0 To Add Signups Administration Screen

    BuddyPress 2.0 will include a new “Manage Signups” screen in the WordPress admin for tracking the status of pending accounts. This enhancement helps community administrators moderate registrations and help facilitate the signup process for new users who are experiencing difficulty. BuddyPress requires new users to confirm their accounts by email before activation, but sometimes these…

  • JustWrite: A Free WordPress Magazine Theme With a Bold Design

    JustWrite: A Free WordPress Magazine Theme With a Bold Design

    Most of the free WordPress themes out there are geared toward single-author blogs. It’s rare to find a decent option for magazines, because these types of themes take a little more effort to design and build, given the massive amount of content typically included on the homepage. JustWrite is a new magazine theme on WordPress.org…

  • Spotlight On GavickPro: Unique BuddyPress Themes With Support For Third-Party Plugins

    Spotlight On GavickPro: Unique BuddyPress Themes With Support For Third-Party Plugins

    BuddyPress themes are still few and far between, despite the popularity of the social networking plugin for WordPress. After theme compatibility was introduced, effectively making BuddyPress able to work with nearly any WordPress theme, the market slowed its production of new products tailored specifically for BuddyPress. When you see a theme that highlights BuddyPress features…

  • WordPress.com Developer Site Gets a Fresh Look and Updated Documentation

    WordPress.com Developer Site Gets a Fresh Look and Updated Documentation

    WordPress.com has relaunched its Developer Site with a new focus on making information easier to find for third-party developers. The site is now sporting a modernized design with a call to action that goes straight to the newly updated documentation, outlining how to get started creating apps for WordPress.com. I spoke with Automattic employee Joey…

  • How To Bulk Install All Your Favorite WordPress Plugins

    How To Bulk Install All Your Favorite WordPress Plugins

    Not every WordPress website is the same. But if you build with WordPress often enough, you might find that you prefer using the same set of plugins to provide basic functionality like contact forms, sharing buttons, SEO, caching, etc. It’s handy to have a set list of plugins that you can bulk-install whenever necessary. A…

  • Treehouse Expands WordPress Education to Include BuddyPress Beginners Course

    Treehouse Expands WordPress Education to Include BuddyPress Beginners Course

    Just one month after launching its WordPress beginner’s course, Treehouse has added BuddyPress education to its collection of interactive learning resources. The “Learn BuddyPress” course is geared toward BuddyPress beginners and covers all the basics of setup, user management, and core social components. After reviewing the course, I was impressed by how quickly Gordon is…

  • How to Restrict a WordPress Author to Posting in One Category

    How to Restrict a WordPress Author to Posting in One Category

    Multi-author WordPress blogs often have many authors working together to push out content, but not every author needs access to post to all categories on the site. In fact, there may be times when you want to limit an author to posting in just one assigned category for contributions. Restrict Author Posting is a new…

  • WordPress Tip: How to Load Google Fonts Over SSL and Non-SSL

    WordPress Tip: How to Load Google Fonts Over SSL and Non-SSL

    Here’s a quick tip for when you load Google fonts in WordPress. If you want the fonts to work over both SSL and non-SSL, you need to use the protocol relative link. For example, if you’re loading Google fonts from your theme’s functions.php file, you might do it like this: [php light=”true”]function mytheme_enqueue_styles() { wp_register_style(‘googleFonts’,…

  • 13 Sources For Free Public Domain and CC0-Licensed Images

    13 Sources For Free Public Domain and CC0-Licensed Images

    Yesterday, we featured WP Inject, a plugin that makes it easy to insert Creative Commons licensed images into WordPress content. High quality CC-licensed images are incredibly easy to find these days. The vast majority of the collections include images that fall under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license. While these images are fine for blogging,…

  • Aesop Story Engine Launches Commercial WordPress Themes

    Aesop Story Engine Launches Commercial WordPress Themes

    Shortly after New Year’s, Nick Haskins caught the eye of WordPress publishers with his open source story telling plugin. The prospect of building feature-rich, interactive stories within WordPress, without having to touch any code, was so promising that the project’s Crowdhoster campaign was fully-funded by the end of January. The buzz around the Aesop plugin…

  • What Theme: A New Website Theme Detector Powered By WordPress

    What Theme: A New Website Theme Detector Powered By WordPress

    In an era where many website designs are powered by popular themes, it’s become common for folks passing by to want to snoop under the hood to find out which theme a site is using. If the visitor is not capable of inspecting the code with his browser, he might resort to a service built…

  • WP Inject Makes It Easy to Add Free Creative Commons Images to WordPress Posts

    WP Inject Makes It Easy to Add Free Creative Commons Images to WordPress Posts

    Last week, Getty Images announced its new open-embed program, which removes the watermark from many of the images in its library for non-commercial use. In exchange, Getty’s iframed images are plastered with its logo and force a row of large, unattractive social sharing buttons on each embed. Getty reserves the right to remove content from…

  • WordPress Beta Testers, Start Your Engines: 3.9 Beta 1 Released

    WordPress Beta Testers, Start Your Engines: 3.9 Beta 1 Released

    If it’s true that the best gifts come in small packages, then WordPress 3.9 is set to be a stellar release. It’s full of tiny improvements that improve the publishing experience, especially when it comes to editing content. You can now check it out first-hand, since 3.9 Beta 1 was released today. The official release…

  • BuddyPress Theme Development: Get Started Building Your Own Themes

    BuddyPress Theme Development: Get Started Building Your Own Themes

    The BuddyPress Theme Development book hit the shelves late last year and I had the chance to review it for our readers. This book is a much-needed resource for the BuddyPress community and could not have come at a better time. BuddyPress theming has evolved over the years but it has always had a steep…