When the WordPress theme review team announced it would require theme authors to use the customizer to build theme options, many voiced their displeasure in the comments. Bruce Wampler, lead developer of the Weaver Xtreme WordPress theme, commented that his theme received a death sentence due to the requirement. Eight months later, Wampler has changed…
After three months in the WordPress.org theme review queue, Morten Rand-Hendriksen‘s new mobile-first theme is now live in the official theme directory. Popper is one of the few themes worthy of the “accessibility ready” tag, which requires the author to meet all of the WordPress Accessibility Guidelines. This includes features such as semantic markup and…
Back in October, we explained how to mark themes as favorites in the WordPress theme directory. Although users could install their favorite plugins in WordPress 4.3, they couldn’t install their favorite themes. I created a Trac ticket asking the WordPress development team to consider adding the ability to install themes marked as favorites. Thanks to…
Politics is a new free theme on WordPress.org designed to support politicians, campaigns, causes, and government agencies. The theme was created by Jami Gibbs, author of the Gateway theme and founder of Rescue Themes. After just three days on WordPress.org, it is already active on more than 700 sites. Politics features a homepage template with…
Since Matt Mullenweg gave the WordPress community a homework assignment to “Learn JavaScript, deeply,” links to tutorials and training courses have been flying around. Once you have grasped some of the basics, one of the best ways to learn is to start building a small project. If you’re looking to explore adding JavaScript to WordPress…
Earlier this year, the WordPress plugin directory was redesigned. As part of the redesign, download counts were replaced with the number of Active Installs to reflect more accurate data. The WordPress theme directory has finally followed suit by replacing download counts with the number of Active Installs. As you can see from the above screenshot,…
Within the last few weeks, we’ve received emails from readers wanting to know why it’s taking so long for new themes to be reviewed on WordPress.org. Some theme authors are having to wait two months or more for their first review. Ashley Evans submitted her theme in June and she’s yet to complete the review…
The popular themes page on the WordPress theme directory usually displays a mix of default themes and those that meet a certain criteria. While the criteria to reach the page is not publicly known, download counts are one form of measurement. Since September, the Swift theme has routinely shown up on the popular themes page.…
A year after WordPress 4.1 introduced a new way to display titles in themes, WordPress 4.4 will deprecate wp_title(). With the change, plugin authors will be able to check for theme support and use a few new filters to manipulate the title. The new filters are as follows: ‘pre_get_document_title’ short-circuits wp_get_document_title() if it returns anything…
When the WordPress theme directory was redesigned earlier this year, a common request from readers was the ability to favorite themes as you can with plugins. This feature was also suggested by Mario Pesehv two years ago. On July 22nd, Dion Hulse committed a change with little fanfare to the WordPress theme directory that allows…
Twenty Sixteen, the default theme scheduled to ship with WordPress 4.4, is available for download on GitHub and the WordPress theme directory. According to Tammie Lister, Twenty Sixteen will be developed as if it were a feature plugin and will merge into WordPress core later this year. As development takes place on GitHub, changes will…
WordPress 4.4 is the last scheduled major release of the year and with it will come a new default theme to replace Twenty Fifteen. On the Make WordPress Core site, Tammie Lister published an image gallery that shows off the design of Twenty Sixteen. According to Lister, the process of determining the new default theme…
Hybrid Core 3.0, developed by Justin Tadlock, is available for download. More than a year in the making, 3.0 has over 269 commits and a slew of new features. After the release of Hybrid Core 2.0 last year, Tadlock assumed it would be at least two years before he tackled another major release, “I’d planned…
Earlier this month, a new proposal landed on trac, advocating the removal of post formats from core. Many believe that this feature would be better as a plugin, since it has received little improvement over the years and is not used by the majority of WordPress users. If the UI can be improved to be…
During this week’s WordPress Theme Review Team meeting, members considered the possibility of allowing themes hosted in the directory to make use of the WP REST API plugin. Since the API is not yet included in core, any theme or plugin author who wants to use it must have the feature plugin installed. Ordinarily, WordPress.org…