Siobhan McKeown announced that the first version of the WordPress Code Reference is now live. It’s still in the very early stages of development but is now out in the wild so that people can help contribute. Go try it out to see how easy it is to search the WordPress code base. The reference…
Interface is a new business theme in the WordPress Themes Directory, created by Theme Horse, the same folks behind the popular Clean Retina and Attitude themes that have more than 80,000 downloads combined. If you need to set up a simple business site and you’re into the flat-style mint green design trend, then the new…
Scroll Kit founders Cody Brown and Kate Ray announced today that they are joining the product team at WordPress.com. Automattic, having recently acquired Longreads and Cloudup, adds Scroll Kit to its collection, ostensibly in order to subsume its better features into WordPress.com. Unlike Cloudup and Longreads, which have continued on with business as usual after…
WordPress 3.9 brought a huge improvement to the WordPress theme browsing experience. By default, the new browser shows large preview images of themes with indicators for the ones you already have installed. It also allows for better filtering and exploring of featured and popular items. These updates to the theme browser make it far more…
Iain Poulson recently published a post that asks an important but easy question to answer. Will WordPress be a Plugin Business Killer? The post is based on the idea that features from a commercial plugin added to WordPress could kill the business based on that plugin. The short answer to Poulson’s question is no. Here’s…
If you’ve ever contributed to the WordPress project, whether through code, documentation, plugins and themes, speaking at a WordCamp, etc., your feedback is requested on the WordPress Contributor Experience Survey. Jen Mylo announced the survey today, noting that none of the questions are mandatory. One of the questions in the survey asks: “What can the…
When Google Reader was shut down on July 2nd, 2013, those who use RSS searched far and wide for suitable replacements. I’ve settled on using Feedly for my needs. However, there is a plugin available that adds an RSS reader to WordPress so you can create blog posts as you read RSS feeds from within…
ThemeLab, a popular site dedicated to WordPress theme topics has been acquired by Syed Balkhi. ThemeLab has been a valuable resource of information since 2007. Leland Fiegel, the site’s previous owner made a positive mark within the community when he published an in-depth post explaining why users shouldn’t download and use themes from shady sites…
Akismet is one of those quiet utility plugins that works in the background of your WordPress site without a lot of fanfare. When it’s doing it’s job, your blog comments stay spam-free and you never think twice about it. Forgetting to activate Akismet on a new site will quickly remind you of just how much…
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the new profile redesign to all users. If you haven’t updated your Twitter profile, you can click on the “Get it Now” button on the new profiles product page. Last week we featured Ozh’ Tweet Archiver as an easy way to archive your tweets to WordPress. The…
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…
Have you ever wanted to combine two images to show a before and after? You can’t do that with WordPress out of the box but it’s possible if you use the TwentyTwenty plugin by Corey Martin. The plugin takes advantage of the clip property within CSS by stacking two identical sized images on top of…
Dashicons are what’s known as an icon font and were added to the core of WordPress with the release of 3.8. The icons are vector based so they can be as large or small as you want without losing quality. Plugin authors can use CSS, HTML, or a Glyph for use within Photoshop to display…
Today Automattic introduced Postbot, a new stand-alone application for scheduling image posts. The new app allows users to upload multiple images and schedule them out over several days. Postbot creates a post for each image and automatically posts them to the selected blog, saving users the trouble of manually scheduling each one. When using Postbot,…
Although WordPress 3.9 has refined the media editing experience, it did so at the cost of removing a feature users appreciated. In WordPress 3.8, users could easily add a border, vertical, and horizontal padding to images. WordPress 3.9 removed this from the advanced image settings screen. It’s not just those who use the self-hosted version…