This week Audit WP launched a new SEO consultancy, headed up by SEO strategist Jacob King. The firm’s first order of business after launching was to publish a post to expose what King perceives to be important SEO and privacy concerns for customers of managed WordPress host WP Engine. Audit WP uncovered more than 1.5…
WordPress.com made a big move to branch out into hosted e-commerce this week. For $299/year, Business users get unlimited access to premium themes, unlimited storage, live chat and email support, custom domains, no ads and the newest feature: “hassle-free” e-commerce. The company opted to offer its new online stores via partnerships with three hosted e-commerce…
WordPress has been approved to participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization for 2014. GSoC is a global program that offers promising students an opportunity to contribute code to open source projects with a stipend provided by Google. Last year 1,192 students were part of the program. The 2014 program…
When WordPress theme shops build typography options into their themes, they almost universally opt for integrating Google Fonts. It’s no wonder, given that Google fonts are free, easy to browse and generally fast-loading. The Theme Foundry is one of the first to step outside the box to integrate commercial fonts into their themes, via a…
Jetpack 2.9 was released today with the long-awaited Related Posts module, which was introduced on WordPress.com in early November 2013. Server resource-intensive features such as stats tracking and related posts are very difficult to accomplish in an efficient way. Jetpack’s new Related Posts module uses WordPress.com resources to do this instead, which is undoubtedly a…
WordPress.org profiles are set to get a revamp in the very near future. Jen Mylo posted yeseterday, asking for thoughts and ideas about what to incorporate into the new profiles. She will be working with Mel Choyce to design a new UI for the profile data. Mylo also initiated an effort to get speaker information…
WP Contributor Day is a new WordPress event that is coming up this weekend. It will be held Saturday, March 1st, 2014, in Manchester, England from 10:00 – 18:00. The goal is to have eight solid hours of contributors working together to improve WordPress. Jenny Wong, the organizer of the event, regularly attends the WordPress…
Did you know that WordPress has built-in support for subscript and superscript characters? This information is not easy to find, as it’s tucked away under the Editing Help page in the codex. Although the WordPress editor doesn’t show subscript and superscript buttons, you can add these characters anytime using the sub or sup tags. For…
The latest trend in WordPress blogging themes is to put post formats on center stage with a colorful palette selected to highlight the variety of content. Hexa is a beautiful new example of this trend in action. The theme launched last week on WordPress.com and hit WordPress.org over the weekend. Named for the geometric shapes…
BuddyPress 2.0, due sometime in mid-April, officially kicked off development a couple weeks ago. This release will include some exciting, visible new features, including the ability to edit BuddyPress profiles in the WordPress admin. But there are also some major improvements happening under the hood that will help BuddyPress to scale better in the near…
WordPress doesn’t send out too many emails. They’re usually only generated for an important notice, or when an action is required on your part. However, there are a few different circumstances under which you may not want WordPress to send any emails. For example, when working on a development site, or even a production site,…
Recently we explored the question of whether or not a clear path for WordPress.org plugin adoption could help to lower the rate of abandonment. Some have suggested that having a standard (unofficial) adoption tag might help to bring more exposure to plugins that need a new owner. “Adopt-Me” was suggested as one possible tag for…
The Titan Framework is a new WordPress options framework that was released on WordPress.org this week. This set of tools was created to make it easy for WordPress theme and plugin developers to add options to their projects. This first release contains more than 20 options, including meta boxes, Google font selector, a media uploader,…
In the old days, WordPress theme developers used to build loads of specific functionality into their themes, i.e. recipes, portfolios, testimonials, analytics, fundraising capabilities, custom post types etc. Commercial theme providers competed fiercely with one another to see who could pack the most functionality into their offerings. Many companies sought to become a one-stop-shop for…
Postcard is a new free social sharing app for iOS that landed in the app store today. The app makes it easy for you to share content from your phone to multiple social networks at once. The golden feature of this app is its “Custom Network” capability, which allows you to share to your own…