• Add an Expiration Date to WordPress Sticky Posts

    Add an Expiration Date to WordPress Sticky Posts

    WordPress’ sticky posts feature was introduced six years ago in the 2.7 release. It was added to enable users to stick important posts to the front page so that they won’t disappear in a blog’s steady stream of chronologically ordered content. By default, a sticky post is sticky indefinitely and requires you to manually uncheck…

  • WordPress Community Pulls Together to Help a Member in Need

    WordPress Community Pulls Together to Help a Member in Need

    Dan Griffiths, who is known on Twitter as Ghost1227 and one of the creators of WP Tally, recently found himself in an emergency situation. Due to personal reasons, details of the situation have been withheld but it required Griffiths to come up with $2,500 within a 24 hour time span. Griffiths is a military Veteran…

  • A Look Back at WordPress News in 2014, Part 1 of 2

    A Look Back at WordPress News in 2014, Part 1 of 2

    In the course of a year, a lot of things happen in the WordPress ecosystem and in 2014, the Tavern published over 900 posts. I’ve created a list of headlines from the first-half of 2014 where you can see the progression of stories, businesses, and products at a glance. The list indicates it was a…

  • Manage Code Snippets in WordPress with the Code Snippets Custom Post Type Plugin

    Manage Code Snippets in WordPress with the Code Snippets Custom Post Type Plugin

    Maintaining a library of code snippets can save you time when coding similar tasks in the future. Although there are countless sites online where you can host code snippets, it’s more convenient to have them at your fingertips when writing a blog that includes code. Plugin developer Justin Sternberg recently released Code Snippets CPT, a…

  • Top 15 Free WordPress Themes Released in 2014

    Top 15 Free WordPress Themes Released in 2014

    Looking back on the theme landscape of 2014, a clear design trend emerged that highlights WordPress’ roots as a blogging platform. Minimalist, content-centric themes took center stage in the official WordPress Themes Directory, outpacing their more visually-bloated commercial counterparts. This past year saw a major renaissance in themes for the personal blogger, particularly designs that…

  • Typography Project Beautifully Illustrates Complimentary Google Web Fonts

    Typography Project Beautifully Illustrates Complimentary Google Web Fonts

    The Google web fonts library has over 650 fonts and without a keen eye for design, it can be difficult to find complimentary fonts. After we highlighted how you can customize Twenty Fifteen with over 650 free fonts, some readers questioned whether customizing fonts should be left up to designers. Typography Project Beautifully Illustrates Complimentary…

  • Without Notifying Customers, GoDaddy and MediaTemple Auto Activate SIDEKICK

    Without Notifying Customers, GoDaddy and MediaTemple Auto Activate SIDEKICK

    Those who use a Managed WordPress hosting plan from either GoDaddy or MediaTemple might have noticed a new addition to the WordPress Dashboard. If you saw a bright orange button with the text Help Me, it wasn’t a hack, but is part of the SIDEKICK plugin. However, at least one customer thought it was a…

  • Varying Vagrant Vagrants Adopts Open Source MIT License

    Varying Vagrant Vagrants Adopts Open Source MIT License

    Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.2.0 was released last week after nine months in development. As of VVV 1.2.0, new instances of VVV will have the database entirely contained inside the virtual machine, as opposed to previous versions where it was mapped to a persistent local location. VVV project leader Jeremy Felt recommends a full vagrant destroy…

  • Historic WordPress Project Seeks Contributors

    Historic WordPress Project Seeks Contributors

    Have you ever wondered what WordPress looked like back in the early days, before it was used by millions of website around the web? Ryan Hellyer has created a series of static representations of the very early versions of WordPress. The Historic WordPress project aims to showcase both the frontend and backend of the software…

  • Customize Twenty Fifteen With More Than 650 Fonts With Typecase

    Customize Twenty Fifteen With More Than 650 Fonts With Typecase

    The new WordPress default theme, Twenty Fifteen, looks great and provides a lot of flexibility, but one thing it lacks is the option to customize fonts. A free plugin called Typecase, by UpThemes, solves this problem by giving users easy access to over 650 different fonts. Typecase uses the Google webfonts library, which has slowly…

  • WordPress 4.1 Includes More Than 20 New Dashicons

    WordPress 4.1 Includes More Than 20 New Dashicons

    Dashicons is an icon font that first shipped with WordPress 3.8. Since then, the core development team has routinely added new icons as necessary. WordPress 4.1 includes more than 20 new icons, specifically for the built-in media player and inline image editing tools. There’s also a few miscellaneous icons including, a palm tree, tickets, a…

  • New WordPress Customizer Import/Export Plugin Migrates Theme and Plugin Settings

    New WordPress Customizer Import/Export Plugin Migrates Theme and Plugin Settings

    The WordPress project is charging full steam ahead with improvements to the customizer. The most recent release featured the addition of dynamic and contextual controls, sections, and panels. As WordPress 4.2 is kicking off development, core contributors are looking to add menus to the customizer for easy management from the frontend. More WordPress theme developers…

  • WordSesh 3 Attracts 3,000 Unique Viewers From 89 Countries

    WordSesh 3 Attracts 3,000 Unique Viewers From 89 Countries

    WordSesh 3 took the WordPress world by storm over the weekend. With more than 3,000 unique viewers, the event attracted roughly three times the number of people who attended WordCamp Europe 2014. This makes WordSesh one of the largest WordPress events of the year. WordSesh is essentially an online WordCamp where viewers don’t have to…

  • What’s Your First Impression of Distraction-free Writing in WordPress 4.1?

    What’s Your First Impression of Distraction-free Writing in WordPress 4.1?

    With the release of WordPress 4.1 just a few days ago, millions of people have had the opportunity to use the improved Distraction-free Writing Mode. I rarely use this mode, but I’ve used it to write every post since updating to 4.1 and it’s growing on me. The improved mode works great on my Macbook…

  • Nulis: A Free Minimalist WordPress Theme with a Unique Twist

    Nulis: A Free Minimalist WordPress Theme with a Unique Twist

    Nulis is one of the most unique designs to land in the WordPress Themes Directory this year. At first glance, you might think the theme is rather plain. The screenshot on the theme’s description page doesn’t indicate anything interesting going on under the hood, but something about it intrigued me enough to put it up…