WordPress 4.1 will be adding several major improvements for theme developers. Joost de Valk opened a ticket three years ago, requesting a better option for controlling the output of title tags. He proposed a patch that would output the title tag during the run of wp_head, based on whether the current theme has added theme_support.…
The life of a frontend developer has changed a great deal over the past few years, with the introduction of new technologies for authoring CSS and automating tasks. We’re starting to see that trickle down into every new WordPress starter theme. These days you’ve got to npm install allthiscrazystuff just to get started on a…
Jason Schuller, the original founder of the Press75 theme company, has been off the radar for a few years as he pursued experiments with alternative publishing platforms. He officially exited the commercial WordPress theme business earlier this year when Press75 was acquired by Westwerk, following a sharp decline in the shop’s monthly revenue. Prior to…
Some Like it Neat is a new starter theme for WordPress, based on the popular ultra-minimal Underscores theme. It also incorporates Bourbon, a lightweight mixin library for Sass. On top of that it adds Neat, which applies a semantic grid framework for Sass and Bourbon, enabling you to build any responsive layout that you can…
The default theme slated to ship with WordPress 4.1 dubbed “Twenty Fifteen” has officially been added to the development version of WordPress. In sharp contrast to Twenty Fourteen, Twenty Fifteen is a simple, two column, blog focused theme. The typography features Google’s Noto Serif and Sans, a font family designed to be visually harmonious across…
The contributor day following WordCamp Europe was a tremendous success, bringing approximately 180 people to the SiteGround offices in Sofia. A healthy mixture of veteran contributors were in attendance, as well as many folks who were brand new to contributing. At the beginning of the day, contributors split off into smaller groups to focus on…
The once popular image resizing script known as TimThumb is no longer supported according to co-creator, Ben Gillbanks. In 2011, TimThumb made headlines when a major security vulnerability was discovered and used to hack into several websites. The exploit that was found was a bug with the external image resize functionality and the fact it…
A few months ago, the folks at GavickPro abandoned their GavernWP Framework in favor of using the WordPress customizer for theme options. The shop’s customers found the original framework to be too cumbersome and confusing, so the GavickPro team decided to move away from frameworks altogether. With the customizer in place as the baseline for…
Envato has a nice article covering the current state of WordPress blogging themes. The article does a nice job highlighting not only the styles over the years but the inspiration behind them as well. The design traits profiled include: Modern Single-Column Layout Traditional Two-Column Layout The Journal Layout The Masonry/Grid Layout My favorite style is…
WordPress theme designer Anders Norén is an unstoppable force, rolling out his ninth free theme to WordPress.org in just over a year. Fukasawa is a masonry theme designed to showcase the work of photographers, collectors, and visual artists. The theme is named for Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, who is both well-known and highly decorated…
A steady stream of minimalist themes for writers has been flowing into the official WordPress Themes Directory this year. As people grow disenchanted with interaction on social networks, the personal blog is on course for a renaissance. The beauty of WordPress is that anyone with something to say can be a writer. Crawford joins their…
When we last interviewed Anders Norén, he was the new kid on the block with a handful of successful WordPress themes. Norén, a communications student from Umeå, Sweden, had just started tossing around the idea of pursuing WordPress theme development as a serious hobby. In the span of about one year, he has released eight…
The folks at ThematoSoup are in the habit of naming their theme releases for delicious soup dishes. The team, comprised of WordPress plugin and theme developers Slobodan Manic and Dragan Nikolic, is dedicated to creating minimalist-inspired WordPress products. “We eat, sleep and breathe WordPress and digital clutter gives us nightmares,” the duo expressed on their…
The folks behind Graph Paper Press launched a new custom WordPress theme builder this week. Theme.Works was created to be a new brand, featuring a theme building platform that allows users to build a WordPress theme in under 60 seconds. “We wanted something crazy easy for users to understand and use,” founder Thad Allender said.…
Storyteller is an interesting concept by Katharina Brunner. It’s a WordPress theme that when combined with the AddQuickTags plugin, provides the ability to build multimedia stories. Once activated, you’ll need to import a special JSON file into AddQuickTags. This file automatically adds alignment code to the Storyteller specific quicktags making it easy to align the…