The WordPress Theme Review Team published an action plan today, summarizing the team’s consensus on moving forward to address bottlenecks in the review process. The queue is currently backed up with hundreds of themes waiting to be approved. “The Theme Review Team is aware that we currently have problems,” Tammie Lister said before introducing the…
There is nothing worse than visiting a restaurant website and having to download a PDF in order to view the menu, especially when browsing on mobile. This is one of the most clunky, inconvenient experiences on the web. Unfortunately, when visitors encounter a PDF menu, it’s often because restaurant owners don’t have websites that are…
Child themes have been in use in WordPress for more than seven years and the concept of using them to extend a parent theme is now an established best practice in theme development. The idea is that modifications made in a child theme will not be overwritten when an update is available for the parent…
UpThemes co-founder Chris Wallace announced this week that the theme company has been acquired by Andy Wilkerson of Parallelus, a successful Themeforest author. The two met at PressNomics and worked out a deal for the sale of everything related to UpThemes, including some unreleased themes and the managed hosting business the company launched last year.…
The WordPress Theme Directory will soon be rolling out new and updated tags for filtering the 3,800+ free themes hosted there. After a year of discussion and preparation of core and meta trac tickets, the Theme Review team finalized its proposal for overhauling the tags. Theme authors are now encouraged to update their themes to…
Gene Robinson, lead developer of the Thematic WordPress theme, has announced that the project will no longer be developed. Thematic was last updated in 2013 and is actively installed on more than 4K sites. Users are advised to migrate to a different theme as updates will no longer be released. As WordPress core evolves, sites…
Affinity is the latest addition to WordPress.com’s small collection of themes created specifically for weddings. This highly customizable, elegant theme was designed by Caroline Moore with weddings and family announcements in mind. Affinity is a one-page theme with support for five different panels. Each panel’s content can be assigned in the customizer under Theme Options…
Storefront, the official WooCommerce theme built to work seamlessly with the plugin, has just passed the 2.0 milestone. This release introduces a new “best sellers” section to the homepage and adds compatibility with the upcoming WooCommerce 2.6’s tabbed “My Account” section and the average rating widget. The most important update in Storefront 2.0 is the…
Last week the creators of Timber, the plugin that enables WordPress theme developers to write HTML using the Twig Template Engine, released version 1.0 on WordPress.org. The plugin is active on more than 10,000 websites where theme authors have elected to keep PHP files separate from HTML. Timber is built on DRY and MVC principles…
One of the main items on the agenda for the Theme Review Team this week was to finalize what type of upselling is allowed in themes hosted on WordPress.org. With the requirement of using the customizer for options, theme authors have gotten creative with upsells and will sometimes include panels and sections that are inoperable…
Array launched a redesign of its theme shop this week along with drastic price cuts for single theme and club purchases. After conducting a customer survey earlier this year, the company moved to act on feedback regarding its pricing structure. Previously, Array offered single theme purchases ranging in price from $49 to $89 and the…
The admin themes browser has been updated and modernized in recent years to make it easier to search through the 3,800+ themes available on WordPress.org. One aspect of the interface that has lagged behind, however, is the list of tags for filtering themes. The tags have gone untouched since back in the day when users…
After six months in the theme review queue, Silk Lite was approved for the WordPress.org directory and also passed the extra requirements to be counted among the accessibility-ready themes. This magazine theme was designed with fashion bloggers in mind and features a masonry style grid of posts on the homepage. The basic color scheme for…
Latte is a new parallax style WordPress portfolio theme created by Hardeep Asrani. The 19-year old developer from India already has 17 plugins and four themes to his credit on WordPress.org. We recently featured his work on the Advanced CSS Editor plugin, which allows users to write CSS in the customizer. Latte follows suit with…
The official plugin directory is arguably the best place to host a plugin if you’re looking for the widest distribution, but it’s also one of the most inhospitable for developers. A current meta team initiative is focused on improving search, including prioritizing translated plugins for international users, and streamlining plugin submission, among other improvements. This…