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…
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 functionality and the fact it…
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 many things I take for…
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 visual page or site builders.…
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 a couple of plugin authors…
Support is one of the most difficult and expensive aspects of a business. At the same time, it’s often a determining factor on whether a company sticks around for one or several years. One thing I’ve noticed most of the established WordPress commercial theme businesses have in common is their reputation for providing good support.…
CreativeMarket, one of the first WordPress theme marketplaces to fully support the GPL license has been acquired by Autodesk, for an undisclosed amount. The marketplace sells everything from themes to templates to fonts. The site became one of the first marketplaces to be advertised on WordPress.org after they announced they would only sell WordPress themes…
SellWP is a brand new service created by John Turner, who is also the developer of SeedProd. The goal of the service is to eliminate the stress and hassles of selling WordPress products allowing the developer to concentrate on the product itself. Some of the most difficult aspects of running a business such as licensing,…
WP Editor is a free WordPress plugin developed by Benjamin Projas. It replaces the default plugin, theme, post, and page editors and is integrated with CodeMirror and Fancybox. By integrating these two technologies, the editor resembles an environment coders will be familiar with. The first thing I noticed when writing my first post with the…
On this weeks edition of WordPress Weekly, Chris Wallace founder of UpThemes.com will be our guest. We’re going to dive deeper into the reasons why their open letter was written and published to the WordPress theme community. We’ll talk about what the state of WordPress themes are in 2014 and what UpThemes plans are for…
How many times have you bought a theme that would look perfect for your next project only to discover it’s not the right fit? I have gone through this experience multiple times but the companies I dealt with didn’t have refund policies. Instead, I had to learn a $60-70 lesson with no recourse. Unfortunately, the…
The founders of UpThemes, a commercial WordPress theme business started in March of 2010 has published an open letter to their customers and to the wider WordPress community. It’s a fascinating look into how the company has evolved over the past four years. The letter is filled with lessons learned and contains what I consider…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, we were joined by Jonathan Atkinson of Cr3ative.com and discussed what it’s like to make a living using ThemeForest. We dived into a number of topics including: Using ThemeForest as a launch platform The reputation of ThemeForest Can theme authors profit while coding themes the right way How theme…
No, Post Formats haven’t gone anywhere but theme support and their use appear to be waning. Joyce Grace over at ManageWP.com has published a great article that explores some possibilities as to why the feature is not being used, why we might see the feature make a comeback, and the SEO issues surrounding them. Outside…
While browsing the ThemeHybrid support forums, I came across an individual who shared a project he was working on called WP-Editor. While the plugin is not called WP-Editor, there are three plugins that make up the project that enhance the visual editor of WordPress. They are: WP Editor Boxes Add-on WP Editor Buttons Add-on WP…