GoDaddy launched its Go WordPress theme last week. It has been publicly available through its GitHub repository for several months, but the theme review team finally approved and set it live in the theme directory. Thus far, the theme has garnered 7,000 active installs and is likely to hit the popular list, given GoDaddy’s history…
As the WordPress theme review team wound down their team meeting yesterday, they were finalizing what their focus area for 2020 would be. The general agreement among members was that block-based themes should be at the top of the list. There was some pushback from a minority that did not want to see block-based themes…
Rosa 2 is the sequel to Pixelgrade’s best-selling theme, Rosa. The new theme re-imagines its previous incarnation in the context of the block editor (Gutenberg). I was provided a copy of the theme for free to test and provide my thoughts. The theme sells for $75/year, or you can pay a one-time fee of $95…
Twenty Twenty, the upcoming default WordPress theme, was committed to core and shipped with WordPress 5.3 Beta 1 yesterday. Like most core themes, Twenty Twenty is simple in function. It comes packaged with a handful of custom features and options, but it remains true to the mission of being an easy-to-use default theme. The theme…
With the WordPress theme directory dominated by business-oriented themes, it’s sometimes tough to find themes that cater to more specific user groups. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find something outside the norm. Bayleaf is a blog theme specifically designed for sharing food and recipes. The theme is designed and developed by Vedathemes. They currently…
Anders Norén unveiled the designs for the new Twenty Twenty theme today. As speculated earlier this week, WordPress will repurpose Noren’s Chaplin theme in order to expedite shipping the new default theme on the constrained 5.3 release timeline. Although the new default theme will be based on Chaplin, it will not retain the same style.…
WordPress 5.3’s release lead coordinators announced a new batch of focus leads during yesterday’s core dev chat. Anders Norén, one of the most well-respected theme authors in the community and an early adopter of Gutenberg, will be leading the design of the upcoming Twenty Twenty default theme. He is working alongside team Theme Wrangler Ian…
After several months of discussion, WordPress.org’s Theme Review Team has decided to discontinue the Trusted Authors (TA) Program that launched in April 2018. The program, which was controversial from its inception, allowed certain authors to bypass the normal theme review queue after demonstrating an ability to submit themes with fewer than three issues. Trusted Author…
Gatsby, the open source app and website framework based on React, celebrated the stable release of Gatsby themes by launching a Theme Jam contest. Participants were invited to create their own Gatsby Themes and submit them for an opportunity to win swag or the grand prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to the Gatsby Days event of…
For years, the WordPress admin has become increasingly overloaded with admin notices. Some of them are giant, branded notices with their own particular designs that obstruct users’ activities in the admin. The Theme Review Team is taking action to curb obtrusive notices that fall within its purview – those generated by themes hosted in the…
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) met today and agreed to put new accessibility requirements in place for themes hosted in the official directory. These include some of the items that are required for theme authors who want to add the accessibility-ready tag. A handful of these requirements will soon be added to the standard…
Anders Norén has released Chaplin, his 20th free WordPress theme, designed specifically for use with the block editor. Chaplin could be loosely described as an agency or business style theme but the capabilities of the block editor enable users to create advanced page layouts that would suit many different types of websites. The layout for…
Two weeks ago, Justin Tadlock published a proposal on behalf of the Theme Review Team to create a set of standardized packages that theme authors can drop-into their themes. This week, the team has released two feature packages that illustrate what the project is trying to accomplish. The first is an Autoloader that provides the…
The Theme Review Team has been discussing ideas in Slack on how to solve the problem of themes in the review queue suffering from common theme issues. Just Tadlock has proposed a idea he calls Theme Feature Repositories. The idea is to create standardized packages on the Theme Review Team GitHub repo that authors could…
Elementor launched its Hello theme on WordPress.org this week. After just a few days in the directory, the theme already has more than 10,000 active installations. It is essentially a blank starter theme that offers 100% compatibility with Elementor. Page builders with a large user base are in a unique position to influence the WordPress…