Sarah Gooding

  • Justin Tadlock Joins the WordPress Theme Review Team

    Justin Tadlock Joins the WordPress Theme Review Team

    The WordPress Theme Review team is welcoming Justin Tadlock as an admin. Justin is signing on to help with the final audits of new themes that have been approved during the review process. Creator of Theme Hybrid and co-author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development, Tadlock knows WordPress theming inside and out. His expertise will be…

  • China Blocks Gravatar and WordPress.com: How to Adjust WordPress Settings

    China Blocks Gravatar and WordPress.com: How to Adjust WordPress Settings

    Automattic is making waves today in the fight against censorship, filing two lawsuits against those who are abusing the DMCA by misrepresenting copyright infringement. The company is taking a stand against the fraudulent misuse of copyright law in order to protect WordPress.com users from censorship. Meanwhile, the other dark side of censorship – the one…

  • Busted: A WordPress Plugin to Force Cache Busting

    “Have you emptied your cache?” If you’re a developer, you’ve probably asked your clients this question hundreds of times. It’s not easy to determine if your client has actually cleared his cache. Trying to troubleshoot this issue can eat up a lot of time, especially if you’re going back and forth via email. Busted is…

  • WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 Released: Break It If You Can

    WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 was released tonight right on schedule. The release haiku pays tribute to the new features-as-plugins approach to core development: Alphabet soup of Plugins as features galore The future is here In stark contrast to 3.7, where many of the greatest improvements were under the hood, WordPress 3.8 incorporates a number of…

  • WordPress Twenty Fourteen Theme Is Out in the Wild

    WordPress Twenty Fourteen Theme Is Out in the Wild

    Twenty Fourteen is making its debut on WordPress.com today, a full 22 days ahead of the WordPress 3.8 target release date. The theme is now available for free to millions of WordPress.com users. Twenty Fourteen, designed by Takashi Irie, started out as the Further theme. Through contribution from many in the WordPress community, it is…

  • WordPress.com Adds Support For Markdown: Is TinyMCE On Its Way Out?

    Today WordPress.com announced that the platform now supports Markdown, the plain text to HTML conversion tool. The syntax was created to be easy to read and easy to write and is rapidly gaining momentum among online publishers. Support for Markdown has also been added to WordPress mobile apps, which will make it much easier to…

  • 7 Free WordPress Themes Based on Twenty Thirteen

    7 Free WordPress Themes Based on Twenty Thirteen

    WordPress 3.8 development is marching forward and we should see a beta very soon. Included in this upcoming release is Twenty Fourteen, a new WordPress default theme. Twenty Fourteen is a magazine / blogging style theme. As it is somewhat niche, there will still be room for Twenty Thirteen and others. Before we add a…

  • Query Monitor: A Remarkably Comprehensive Debugging Plugin for WordPress

    Yesterday John Blackbourn publicly released Query Monitor, a brand new debugging plugin for WordPress. Query Monitor gives developers an easy way to monitor database queries, hooks, conditionals, HTTP requests, query vars, environment, redirects, and more. The repository is trending on github today as more WordPress developers are discovering it. There are many excellent debugging tools…

  • 10up Sponsors Helen Hou-Sandi to Work Full-Time on WordPress Core

    WordPress development company 10up announced today that it will be sponsoring a full-time contributor to the WordPress core. The company will be contributing the efforts of Helen Hou-Sandi, a 10up employee and guest committer to WordPress. Hou-Sandi is a leader in the community and has contributed heavily to the UI improvements in the past several…

  • How to Find Hacked WordPress Files and Protect Against Intrusions

    Tamper-evident seals are common in the marketplace for physical goods. They instantly boost consumer confidence, because nobody wants to buy the peanut butter that has already been sniffed and tasted by a total stranger. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an equally easy way to tell if WordPress files had been tampered with or…

  • BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 1 Released and Ready For Testing

    BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 1 was released over the weekend. You know what that means: some very exciting improvements to BuddyPress are right around the corner after a short period of testing. BuddyPress users are encouraged to fire up their development environments to start testing the beta. So far there are 84 closed tickets for the…

  • How to Prevent BuddyPress From Changing Comment Author URLs

    Did you know that BuddyPress changes the URL for comment authors to point to the user’s BuddyPress profile? It does this by filtering the ‘comments_array’ in the bp-core-filters.php file to insert BuddyPress URLs for blog post comments: add_filter( ‘comments_array’, ‘bp_core_filter_comments’, 10, 2 ); For most BuddyPress sites this is a good thing, since it emphasizes…

  • A New Website For Test Driving BuddyPress

    The official BuddyPress Test Drive site, located at testbp.org, had been around since the early days of BuddyPress before it was taken down. Testbp.org was always running the latest version of BuddyPress and served as a place where users could try out the plugin in a live environment. Three years ago, when BuddyPress 1.2 was…

  • WordPress Core Adopts Sass CSS Preprocessor

    Nearly a year ago, Chris Wallace proposed that the WordPress core adopt a CSS Preprocessor to help move admin UI CSS into the future. Including a CSS preprocessor allows developers to speed up tasks with the use of variables in stylesheets. Variables will make tasks like reskinning the WordPress admin a breeze. Wallace argued strongly…

  • RIP BuddyPress Default Theme: Finally Laid to Rest in 1.9

    The BuddyPress Default Theme passed away at his home in the BuddyPress trunk on November 13, 2013, surrounded by family. BP Default is predeceased by his parents and relatives, the 1.1 themes, the wire, and the status components. Born on February 16th, 2010, during the golden era of BuddyPress 1.2, the BP Default theme was…