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…)
Theme Fusion’s Avada WordPress Theme, the highest selling theme on Themeforest for the past four years, has fixed stored XSS and CSRF vulnerabilities in its 5.1.5 release. The security issues were discovered by WP Hütte, a WordPress security blog, and the site published details of the vulnerabilities after Theme Fusion (more…)
Checathlon is new business theme on WordPress.org that was designed to seamlessly integrate with Easy Digital Downloads. The name is a combination of the words checkout and decathlon, according to its creator Sami Keijonen. Checathlon combines elegant typography with a bold, pink accent color to showcase products and services on (more…)
Last week, we highlighted the progress being made by the Theme Review Team in clearing out a 1K+ review backlog. In an effort to determine common problems with themes discovered by reviewers, Carolina Nymark, a member of the Theme Review Team, reviewed 100 tickets from 531 themes that were closed (more…)
Foxhound made its debut on WordPress.org yesterday. The React-based theme is the first in the directory to use the REST API endpoints included in WordPress 4.7. Foxhound sports a tasteful blog design with single-page app functionality that loads posts instantly. Check out the live demo to see how fast the (more…)