In an effort to inspire WordPress theme designers and add a variety of new themes to the directory, the WordPress Theme Review Team is hosting a Design Challenge Weekend, December 13-14th. The challenge is meant to do the following: Raise the design standard of the WordPress.org theme directory. Match developers to designers. Encourage designers to…
After the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia in the early 90’s, Serbia and its neighboring nations had an uphill climb to reach stability in their newly found autonomy. Transitioning from a planned economy to a market-driven economy was a challenge that Serbians have vigorously embraced over the past 20 years. Belgrade is now a growing center…
This is a great time of year if you’re in the market for themes, plugins, or webhosting. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving where many retailers offer deep discounts. In the past 2-3 years, WordPress businesses have done the same by offering substantial discounts for plugins and themes. WPLift has a great roundup of…
Many WordPress users elect to automatically close comments on older posts in order to keep the constant deluge of spam at bay. This method works, but it comes with a couple of drawbacks. The option, found under the Settings → Discussion screen, is essentially an an all-or-nothing choice on older posts. The comment deadline setting…
As the US gets ready to celebrate Thanksgiving, it’s the time of year where I stop to think about what I’m thankful for regarding WordPress. In no particular order, here are six things I’m thankful for when it comes to WordPress. The Community The WordPress community is a large reason for the project’s continued success.…
BuddyPress 2.2 is under active development and contributors are close to having the basics of a new Member Type API on board for the upcoming release. The new API would allow developers to separate users into different types, a common request for many BuddyPress-powered communities. User types make it possible to create some interesting community…
WooCommerce recently passed five million downloads, shortly before the Woo team kicked off the first WooConf earlier this month. The conference, devoted solely to WooCommerce, sold out with 300 attendees. The plugin had 294 contributors on its most recent 2.2 release and is currently being used on 18% of all e-commerce sites on the web.…
WordPress theme developers will be pleased to know that the upcoming 4.1 release will remove the custom background and header screens in the admin. These screens will be replaced with deep-links to the customizer. To be clear, header and background menus will still appear in the admin, but they will be deep-linked to the customizer.…
WordPress 3.0 introduced the ability for developers to register their own custom post types, enabling the software to be used more easily as a CMS. Custom post types ushered in a new era that allowed plugin developers to create and organize content in a more modular way. If you’ve ever tried to explain the concept…
With the release of WordPress 4.0.1 less than 24 hours old, we’ve received reports of plugins breaking due to the update. For example, Cool Video Gallery is broken because of the way it handles custom shortcode attribute parsing instead of using the Shortcode API built into WordPress. Mika Epstein, who is a support forum volunteer,…
CyberChimps, founded by Trent Lapinski, is seeking acquisition offers. Lapinski cites the reason as becoming too big too fast. CyberChimps owns and maintains Responsive, one of the most popular themes in the WordPress theme directory. CyberChimps also maintains iFeature, another popular theme closing in on 1M downloads. The core of the business is services, paid…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I discuss WordPress 4.1 beta 1, the delay of Composer by SIDEKICK, and a revamped WP eCommerce plugin. Later in the show, we’re joined by the founder of WP101, Shawn Hesketh. Hesketh shares his work process, the equipment used to record videos, and what parts of WordPress user’s struggle…
WP Engine is launching its high availability enterprise hosting platform today. The new product is called Mercury and it’s built to provide HHVM (with PHP-FPM failover) to customers who require better PHP performance. WP Engine is one of the first WordPress managed hosts to offer HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine), a PHP execution engine originally created…
WordPress core contributors released a security update today. All users who have not yet received the automatic update are encouraged to update as soon as possible. WordPress 4.0.1 is a critical security release that provides a fix for a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability, originally reported by Jouko Pynnonen on September 26th. Sites running WordPress versions…
In just under two years, DigitalOcean has managed to sail past competitors to become the world’s third largest hosting provider, according to a recent report published by Netcraft. The company’s SSD-based cloud hosting products cater to developers and other tech-savvy customers. As of November, DigitalOcean counts a total 187,866 active users running a cloud server…