The WordPress Theme Review team has implemented changes that simplify the process and places more responsibility onto theme authors. Theme reviewers now only need to check the following items to pass a theme. Licensing Malicious or egregious stuff Content Creation Security Although the bar to pass a theme is significantly (more…)
Envato has added unlimited WordPress theme and plugin downloads to its Elements digital assets subscription service. The company is including a curated collection of 210 WordPress themes and 100 plugins along with 400,000 other design assets already offered through the service. Envato is the largest WordPress theme marketplace on the (more…)
WooCommerce is retiring its Canvas Theme after seven years. Canvas was one of the most innovative themes on the market when it first launched in 2010, giving customers the ability to modify their sites’ design and layout through an extensive options panel. It sold for $99 before the product URL (more…)
ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor has open sourced WPThemeDoc, the template he uses for documenting his commercial WordPress themes. Tabor is also the creator of Merlin WP, a theme onboarding wizard that makes setup effortless for users. After applying his aesthetic talents to the documentation aspect of his business, he decided (more…)
ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor released Merlin WP on GitHub in public beta this week. The project provides a beautiful experience for installing and setting up WordPress themes with all of their plugin dependencies, Customizer settings, widgets, demo content, and more. “I was inspired by David Baker’s Envato Theme Setup Wizard (more…)
Over the past few months the WordPress Support Team has been brainstorming ways to improve support across various aspects of the community. One new idea they are pursuing is hosting workshops where WordPress.org theme and plugin authors can present how they approach supporting their free, open source products that have (more…)
While at WordCamp Europe I had the opportunity to meet Russian designer and developer Dmitry Mayorov, whose themes I had noticed earlier in the year in the WordPress Theme Directory. Mayorov’s design style is reminiscent of other niche theme developers like Anders Norén and Mike McAlister. He launched his own (more…)
Hamilton is a new portfolio theme released by Swedish designer and developer Anders Norén during his summer vacation. It was created for photographers, illustrators, designers, and image-heavy blogs. The theme displays portfolio items in a minimal, masonry-style grid with an optional tagline on the front page. “Hamilton has a pretty (more…)
Automattic has been teasing its plan to add commercial themes to Jetpack for several months after introducing theme installation for self-hosted users from WordPress.com. In March, the plugin opened up access to all of WordPress.com’s free themes via the Jetpack Manage interface. All signs pointed to Automattic developing the infrastructure (more…)
For the past several months we have received inquiries about Automattic’s open source Underscores starter theme. After six months of no commits to the GitHub repository and pull requests left unanswered, users and contributors were beginning to wonder whether the project was abandoned. After contacting Automattic to get a status (more…)
This post was contributed by Rebecca Gill. Rebecca is the founder of Web Savvy Marketing, a web development, design, maintenance, and SEO consulting company based in Michigan and host of the SEO Bits podcast. Rebecca recently sold her Genesis Theme store to 9seeds, a store she managed and maintained for (more…)
WooCommerce’s flagship Storefront theme released version 2.2.0 today. The release has been more than five months in the making since planning began in early December 2016. Storefront 2.2.0 focuses on improving the new user experience. Getting all of the right widgets and design settings in place to set up a (more…)