Earlier this year, WordPress.com launched an experiment giving Business plan subscribers the ability to install third-party plugins and themes. Automattic concluded the experiment earlier this week and officially made the features part of the subscription plan. “With support for plugins and third-party themes, WordPress.com Business users will be able to (more…)
This post was contributed by Rebecca Gill. Rebecca is the founder of Web Savvy Marketing, a web development, design, maintenance, and SEO consulting company based in Michigan and host of the SEO Bits podcast. Rebecca recently sold her Genesis Theme store to 9seeds, a store she managed and maintained for (more…)
One of the most important things that distinguishes self-hosted WordPress from WordPress.com is the ability to install custom themes and plugins. A recent change to WordPress.com’s Business Plan removes this limitation, allowing customers to install most third-party plugins and themes. In a WordPress.com support thread created in February, a user (more…)
Astute testers may have noticed a new feature in WordPress 4.7 beta 1 that enabled users to search, preview, and install themes from within the customizer. This feature was part of five feature projects related to the customizer that were approved for merge last month. Its goal is to unify (more…)
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Chip Bennett, Jose Castaneda, Tammie Lister, and Edward Cassie who are members of the WordPress Theme Review Team. We learn why the team exists, its goals, and what the process is for getting a theme into the (more…)
WP Contributions is a new plugin by Dustin Filippini, Damon Cook, and WebDevStudios that displays WordPress contributions via widgets. Widgets included are: Contributions to the Codex WordPress Core Contributions Featured Plugin Featured Theme Once activated, browse to Appearance > Widgets to access the new widgets. You’ll need to know your (more…)
If you’re brand new to bbPress, you may not know about some of the ways it can be extended beyond being a simple forum. Additional functionality can be added with plugins, its output can be manipulated through CSS, and development is easy to keep up with. Even though bbPress has (more…)
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 (more…)
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 (more…)
After using WordPress for seven years in a row, it’s hard to consider switching to another publishing platform. I have my gripes about WordPress and there are plenty of things that can improve the publishing process. However, after testing a few other open source alternatives, I was reminded of how (more…)
A few years ago, I talked about how great it would be if there were ways to visually build websites in WordPress. Today, tools like VelocityPage and Headway Themes allow users to visually build pages and even entire websites. As I’ve become accustomed to WordPress, I no longer desire these (more…)
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a plugin author requests administrator access to your site for troubleshooting purposes? That’s the question posed by WPBeginner along with a couple of tips to help you decide whether you answer yes or no. Over the years, I’ve given access to (more…)