Anders Norén has released Chaplin, his 20th free WordPress theme, designed specifically for use with the block editor. Chaplin could be loosely described as an agency or business style theme but the capabilities of the block editor enable users to create advanced page layouts that would suit many different types of websites. The layout for…
Two weeks ago, Justin Tadlock published a proposal on behalf of the Theme Review Team to create a set of standardized packages that theme authors can drop-into their themes. This week, the team has released two feature packages that illustrate what the project is trying to accomplish. The first is an Autoloader that provides the…
The Theme Review Team has been discussing ideas in Slack on how to solve the problem of themes in the review queue suffering from common theme issues. Just Tadlock has proposed a idea he calls Theme Feature Repositories. The idea is to create standardized packages on the Theme Review Team GitHub repo that authors could…
Elementor launched its Hello theme on WordPress.org this week. After just a few days in the directory, the theme already has more than 10,000 active installations. It is essentially a blank starter theme that offers 100% compatibility with Elementor. Page builders with a large user base are in a unique position to influence the WordPress…
The WordPress Theme Review team has implemented a controversial change to its Trusted Authors Program that puts a hard requirement on participants to join the theme review team and perform a minimum number of reviews in order to continue having their own themes fast tracked through the review process. “As we can’t figure out a…
Gatsby WordPress Themes, a project launched earlier this year by a group of collaborators, has just released its second free theme. The team is led by Gatsby and GraphQL aficionados Zac Gordon, Jason Bahl, Muhammad Muhsin, Hussain Thajutheen, and Alexandra Spalato. Inspired by the scalability, speed, and security that the React-based static site generator can…
GoDaddy has acquired CoBlocks, ThemeBeans, Block Gallery and Block Unit Tests, one of the leading Gutenberg product lines in the WordPress ecosystem. Founder Rich Tabor is joining GoDaddy as Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience and will lead a team dedicated to understanding users’ needs and expanding the company’s Gutenberg-related products. Tabor’s fellow CoBlocks founders…
In the wake of last week’s Pipdidg scandal, the WordPress blogger and developer communities have been working together to help the company’s customers get on new themes and ensure the safety of their websites. Pipdig has been reported to various UK and internet authorities and is currently under investigation. Pipdig’s hosting provider has proactively disabled…
Over the weekend, Pipdig, a small commercial theme company, has been at the center of a scandal after multiple reports exposed a litany of unethical code additions to its Pipdig Power Pack (P3) plugin. On Friday, March 29, Wordfence threat analyst Mikey Veenstra published a report with code examples of the backdoors Pipdig built into…
WordPress contributor teams have shipped several new tools for theme developers in the past couple weeks, which have the potential to raise the quality of new themes coming into the ecosystem. The Theme Sniffer plugin is a new effort from the Theme Review team that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer to test a theme against…
Gatsby WordPress Themes is a new collaborative project led by Zac Gordon with help from Jason Bahl, Rich Tabor, Muhammad Muhsin, and Alexandra Spalato. The group is working together to port popular themes for use with Gatsby, the React-based static site generator that uses GraphQL for its data layer. Known for its performance and ease…
If your site is hosted on WordPress.com and you are trying out the new Gutenberg editor, there are currently 24 themes with full Gutenberg support available and more on the way. In response to questions about how to find Gutenberg themes on WordPress.com, Automattic’s Theme Team has given an update about the status of the…
Astra, a free theme that has steadily been growing in popularity, is now fully compatible with Gutenberg. The theme was first released in May 2017 and has more than 100,000 active installations. It was downloaded approximately 2,000 – 4,500 times per day over the past month and currently maintains a 5-star average rating on WordPress.org…
Allan Cole, a WordPress Theme Imagineer at Automattic has published the first glimpses of the Twenty Nineteen default theme slated to ship with WordPress 5.0. Cole is leading the theme while Kjell Regstad who does Product and Editorial Design at Automattic will be a design coach. The theme takes a minimalist approach that’s a good…
Version 5.0 of Hybrid Core, one of the longest-running WordPress theme frameworks, is now available. Justin Tadlock celebrated 10 years with his Theme Hybrid community last month and released his new Mythic starter theme into beta. Mythic was built on top of Hybrid Core and developed in tandem with version 5.0. The framework has been…