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 been released to the community.…
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 commercial themes business on ThemePatio.com…
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 simple design at its core,…
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 to offer commercial themes via…
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 update on Underscores, the company…
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 five years. In this post,…
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 new store has been a…
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 patched its theme. Although the…
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 a business or e-commerce website.…
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 and marked not approved between…
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 content loads. The theme was…
The WordPress Theme Review team (TRT) has turned a corner and is approaching a major milestone of getting the review queue under 100 themes. As of today, 189 themes are lined up in what was previously a 1,000+ backlog. Key reviewers are confident that number will be closer to zero in the near future. Emil…
Today Jetpack announced that its users now have access to a collection of 165 free themes from WordPress.com. Jetpack users can browse, preview, and activate themes by visiting the WordPress.com Theme Showcase. WordPress.com has also added the ability for Jetpack users to upload a theme from its interface as well, a feature that targets those…
In October 2016, Zerif Lite was suspended from the WordPress Themes Directory after failure to comply with the Theme Review Team’s guidelines. The suspension left 300,000 users (including those using Zerif Lite child themes) without maintenance and security updates. After five months of fixes and several rounds of review, Zerif Lite has returned to the…
Bradley Kirby released version 1.0 of his Wallace WordPress theme today. The theme is built using the WP REST API and Angular 2. Kirby has been working on Wallace for the past two years and has rewritten it several times in order to keep pace with changes in the REST API and Angular. If you…