This week WordPress.com introduced a new Customizer panel to its users called Content Options. The new panel offers a number of minor tweaks that would ordinarily be handled by a few simple free plugins on a self-hosted site. It brings a whole new range of customizability to the WordPress.com sites (more…)
During the State of The Word at WordCamp US 2015, Matt Mullenweg highlighted customization as the largest opportunity to improve the WordPress experience. In a recent interview on WordPress Weekly, Mullenweg expanded on his thoughts saying he could see the customizer being the main focus of a release. “If I think about (more…)
Baton is a modern business theme that offers a unique approach to building the homepage. The theme features a clean top menu with elegant drop downs, a submenu, customizable heros, and multiple layouts for feature sections. While many business themes offer similar design features, Baton’s differentiating factor is that users (more…)
Headway Themes, founded in 2009 by father-son duo Grant Griffiths and Clay Griffiths, is one of a handful of companies that helped pioneer the WordPress commercial theme market. Headway is not a page builder but rather a visual drag-and-drop layout builder for WordPress. In the past few weeks, several readers (more…)
During Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A session at WordCamp Europe, an unidentified Google employee asked about making WordPress sites more mobile-friendly: I work at Google with search and we think the web and mobile are important, but one thing that we noticed is that 28% of the new sites that choose WordPress (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
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. (more…)
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 (more…)