WordPress 3.9 brought a huge improvement to the WordPress theme browsing experience. By default, the new browser shows large preview images of themes with indicators for the ones you already have installed. It also allows for better filtering and exploring of featured and popular items. These updates to the theme browser make it far more…
Iain Poulson recently published a post that asks an important but easy question to answer. Will WordPress be a Plugin Business Killer? The post is based on the idea that features from a commercial plugin added to WordPress could kill the business based on that plugin. The short answer to Poulson’s question is no. Here’s…
When Google Reader was shut down on July 2nd, 2013, those who use RSS searched far and wide for suitable replacements. I’ve settled on using Feedly for my needs. However, there is a plugin available that adds an RSS reader to WordPress so you can create blog posts as you read RSS feeds from within…
Akismet is one of those quiet utility plugins that works in the background of your WordPress site without a lot of fanfare. When it’s doing it’s job, your blog comments stay spam-free and you never think twice about it. Forgetting to activate Akismet on a new site will quickly remind you of just how much…
Many WordPress developers opt to use the Less CSS preprocessor to speed up theme development. Its availability of variables, mixins, and functions allows you to do more with CSS and to do it more efficiently. It also makes it easy to compile and minify files for production use. However, the initial setup for adding Less…
Have you ever wanted to combine two images to show a before and after? You can’t do that with WordPress out of the box but it’s possible if you use the TwentyTwenty plugin by Corey Martin. The plugin takes advantage of the clip property within CSS by stacking two identical sized images on top of…
Although WordPress 3.9 has refined the media editing experience, it did so at the cost of removing a feature users appreciated. In WordPress 3.8, users could easily add a border, vertical, and horizontal padding to images. WordPress 3.9 removed this from the advanced image settings screen. It’s not just those who use the self-hosted version…
Readers may not always identify with the title that you’ve chosen for your posts but they may find a gem within your article that is more “quotable” and worth sharing. Quotable is a new WordPress plugin that capitalizes on this, allowing readers to highlight any text within your content to quote the article on Twitter.…
One of the improvements in WordPress 3.8 was the responsive dashboard. Thanks to this improvement, the option to select the number of columns to display dashboard widgets was removed. The dashboard now shows the appropriate number of columns using the available screen real estate. Unfortunately, for those using wide-screen monitors, this usually means 4-5 skinny…
Social networks come and go but your blog lives forever. The advent of social media brought a revolution in how people communicate, but it has also chained us to data silos that house many of our important thoughts, writings and memories. That is, unless you have your own blog or website as your home for…
WordPress sites that publish academic or scholarly articles often need to provide information to help readers know how to cite articles correctly. Cite is a new plugin that tackles this requirement using dynamic tags to generate the date, site name, post title and permalink. Post authors can easily post citation instructions by using the [cite]…
Jonathan Atkinson has been selling WordPress themes on Themeforest for the past five years. Through hard work and customer support, he’s learned how to make a living on Themeforest without having to pack hundreds of options into his products. Over the past year, Atkinson and his team at Cr3ativ.com have made an effort to convert…
Despite the fact that Gravatar is the default avatar service built into WordPress, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There are times when you may want to use a different avatar on a specific site but don’t want to change your Gravatar image. In some instances WordPress site admins choose to disable the service for…
Akismet 3.0 is currently in development and the official release will likely coincide with WordPress 3.9 on April 16th. The upcoming 3.0 release represents a major rewrite of the plugin and the Akismet team is inviting everyone to help test the release candidate. This version will introduce a few new features and will remove much…
For the past four years, BuddyPress developer Brajesh Singh has maintained a popular tutorial for allowing BuddyPress activity as a wire. This was the default behavior for activity during the early 1.x era of BuddyPress, which allowed users to “write on each other’s walls” without having to use @mentions. Singh’s updated tutorial shows you how…