Every month, several new WordPress themes are released, both free and premium. This month the trend was no different as numerous wonderful WordPress themes were released. Quite interestingly, however, is the fact that many of the new themes of January 2014 were based on Twitter Bootstrap. 1. TypeFocus TypeFocus is a minimal theme based on Underscores. It features a typography-centric layout meant for personal blogs. Download 2. Bright News Bright News is a magazine layout theme that comes with custom color schemes, custom shortcodes and Google Fonts integration. It is translation ready and fully responsive, and is also available as […]
If You Wouldn’t Say It in Person, Would You Say It Online?
This question is at the center of the recent security breach involving Disqus, a widely used comment hosting service, and Gravatar, a service owned by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s company Automattic. Gravatar allows users to maintain a consistent profile picture across websites enabling a Gravatar plugin. Until recently, Disqus enabled Gravatar which uses an MD5 hash, an algorithm designed in 1991, to mask the email addresses associated with each Gravatar account. Gravatar’s MD5 hash has been proven to be easily hackable. In December, a group of investigative journalists at Sweden’s Researchgruppen was able to de-anonymize the identities of thousands of […]
Rethinking the WordPress Editor
Over the past couple of weeks there have been a couple of feature tweaks and improvements in the mix for WordPress’s content creation experience. First, the UI team is making some headway on a functional front-end editor which allows users to create new posts, upload media, and change metadata—all from the front-end. It’s being designed from the ground up to provide a great UX and a barebones UI. A user will be able to use WYSIWYG tools in the admin bar and modal windows for creating galleries and adding custom fields, all without having to move to the back-end. You’ll […]
Make Mobile Apps With WordPress
It’s now possible to make iOS and Android mobile apps with WordPress. I’m not talking about using WordPress as a data source, but using the whole thing. That means using themes and plugins to build your app. It’s all done with AppPresser, the first mobile app framework for WordPress. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for how you can use WordPress. For example, you can now use a plugin like WooCommerce to create an eCommerce app, like the one shown above. eCommerce is just the beginning, you can create almost any type of app. You can add […]
Early Reactions to the Launch of AppPresser
On Tuesday, AppPresser shook things up by making mobile app development accessible to everyone by launching the first mobile app development framework for WordPress. Their theme and extensions allow developers to create app-like features for sites and utilize device hardware like the camera, geolocation, push notifications, and contacts. There is also an extension that supports all WooCommerce features for an app. Early reactions on Twitter have been very positive. The more I look at @apppresser, wow, the more I am totally impressed. #WordPress http://t.co/5hxfwbzrsM — BobWP (@bobWP) January 7, 2014 As I work with @phonegap and @WordPress on a regular […]
CSS Hero: A Plugin to Customize WordPress Themes
If you are looking for a powerful and easy to use tool to help you customize WordPress themes, allow me to introduce you to CSS Hero, a creative platform plus WordPress plugin that intends to change the way designers and developers interact with their projects. CSS Hero Simply put, CSS Hero lets you customize your WordPress themes using a point and click approach. You can add special effects such as hover or shadow, edit elements such as margins and padding, experiment with live color and background changes, or even choose fonts directly from Google Fonts. CSS Hero supports responsive themes, […]
Book Release: Responsive Design with WordPress
Delivering the best possible experience to your audience across all devices is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have. With the release last month of Joe Casabona’s new book Responsive Design with WordPress, there is now a comprehensive resource for developers on how to utilize what WordPress offers to create a responsive site. Creating a responsive site is “not just for design, but for performance,” Joe says. His book not only covers responsive layout, but how to implement responsible responsive design—i.e., delivering features in the most optimized way. His book covers principles as well as implementation, including how to create responsive […]
Core Trac Gets Some Improvements
One of the biggest barriers of entry for new users looking to contribute to WordPress core development is Core Trac, the bug and issue tracker for WordPress. Thanks to the efforts of Andrew Nacin, that barrier of entry has been lowered a bit with some great improvements in the new year. Trac has had a bit of a facelift, both aesthetically and functionally, to make it a bit easier to navigate and use. Thought it might be good to check in and let you know what’s new. The most obvious change is the few design tweaks that were made. The […]
Helping Your Customers Find Success
He was like every other startup CEO that you’ve ever met. Tons of ideas. All of which sound appealing. He was a vision caster. He was energetic. It was virtually impossible not to get excited every time we got on the phone. And nothing changed when we started talking about refreshing his website. Why would it? The skills that had served him to well in every other part of his life should translate, right? But they didn’t. Because his website, as I would fondly explain more than once, wasn’t for him. It wasn’t about his vision. It wasn’t about his […]
Backup Plugins for WordPress
It seems just a few days ago I was updating client sites to WordPress 3.6, then 3.6.1 … 3.7, and 3.7.1, now 3.8 … and with the newer versions comes automatic security and bug fix updates that can happen at any time. This is progress, and this is good! However, without reliable backups, any update can prove to be disastrous if there are code conflicts with themes or plugins. Note: if you are hosting on WP Engine (which I happen to be)—or another hosting company that offers automatic site backups—then you have no need for backup plugins. You have daily backups to […]
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