Many WordPress developers opt to use the Less CSS preprocessor to speed up theme development. Its availability of variables, mixins, and functions allows you to do more with CSS and to do it more efficiently. It also makes it easy to compile and minify files for production use. However, the initial setup for adding Less…
Jonathan Atkinson has been selling WordPress themes on Themeforest for the past five years. Through hard work and customer support, he’s learned how to make a living on Themeforest without having to pack hundreds of options into his products. Over the past year, Atkinson and his team at Cr3ativ.com have made an effort to convert…
Roots is a WordPress starter theme that incorporates the HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, and Grunt. It’s also known for creating cleaner HTML, cleaner script output, and its unique theme wrapper method for handling template markup. Up until now, you’d have to use the Roots theme in order to take advantage of any of its features. Ben…
Varying Vagrant Vagrants is likely the most popular Vagrant configuration for setting up a WordPress development environment. VVV makes it easy to create new WordPress installations for developing themes and plugins as well as contributing to core. One of the most time-consuming aspects of testing and reviewing WordPress themes is setting up a test site…
Without much in the way of advertising, Underscores has become a popular choice for WordPress theme developers. To learn more about it, I asked Automattic employee, Konstantin Obenland, @obenland on Twitter, to explain what the theme is, how it got its name, and how people can contribute to the project. Why was Underscores created and…
If you love to blog but don’t want a theme with clunky sliders and overloaded widget areas cluttering up your site, then chances are you’re on the hunt for the perfect minimalist WordPress theme. Finding a theme that provides a beautiful reading experience with an unobtrusive, high quality design is no simple task. You’ll end…
Okay Themes, founded by Mike McAlister, has rebranded and is now known as “Array.” Despite the fact that the shop produced high quality WordPress themes, the previous name seemed to imply a passable, lackluster product. Array is a stronger name for a top-notch theme shop that is successfully pioneering a return to simplicity in both…
Writing documentation for products is oftentimes a thankless task. It’s a challenge to style and organize docs in a clear and approachable way. Unfortunately this tends to be an afterthought for many projects, even though it is the first point of connection for users seeking support. A WordPress theme specifically created for documentation makes this…
Over the past two years, Easy Digital Downloads has become a dominant player among WordPress plugins for selling digital products. EDD has been downloaded nearly 300,000 times due to its developer-friendly codebase and comprehensive set of features tailored to digital stores. While there are several dozen EDD-ready themes available, many developers prefer to build their…
Casper is a new theme for WordPress that is essentially a port of the default blogging theme for Ghost. Lacy Morrow built the theme using Underscores as a base. Morrow said that the goal for his theme was to approximate Ghost’s default theme while incorporating WordPress-specific features: The goal of this project is to emulate…
ThemeCheck.org is a new site that provides a free validation service for WordPress and Joomla themes. Visitors can upload themes and templates and the service will analyze the files and run tests to verify security and code quality. The site gives each theme a quality score along with a list of alerts and warnings. For…
In 2011, WordPress.com began offering commercial themes to its users. The service now has 105 commercial themes to choose from. In order to sell themes on WordPress.com, you either had to be invited or reach out to Automattic. Those days are over now that they have launched a new landing page for theme sellers interested…
Most of the free WordPress themes out there are geared toward single-author blogs. It’s rare to find a decent option for magazines, because these types of themes take a little more effort to design and build, given the massive amount of content typically included on the homepage. JustWrite is a new magazine theme on WordPress.org…
BuddyPress themes are still few and far between, despite the popularity of the social networking plugin for WordPress. After theme compatibility was introduced, effectively making BuddyPress able to work with nearly any WordPress theme, the market slowed its production of new products tailored specifically for BuddyPress. When you see a theme that highlights BuddyPress features…
Yesterday, we featured WP Inject, a plugin that makes it easy to insert Creative Commons licensed images into WordPress content. High quality CC-licensed images are incredibly easy to find these days. The vast majority of the collections include images that fall under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license. While these images are fine for blogging,…