Mike McAlister and the team at Array Themes have fully embraced Gutenberg and are one of the first shops on the scene with a free WordPress theme designed specifically to work with the new editor. The Atomic Blocks theme is now available on WordPress.org with minimal styling and seamless support for all core content and…
ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor has released a new plugin called Block Unit Test for Gutenberg that helps theme authors test their themes for Gutenberg-readiness. It is similar to the Theme Unit Test but is limited to testing Gutenberg blocks. After installing and activating both Gutenberg and sBlock Unit Test, the plugin creates a new page…
Progressive themes was a hot topic at WordCamp Europe 2018. During the event I had the opportunity to set up a panel with four experts who are working to integrate progressive web development practices more deeply in WordPress core, plugins, and themes. These practices make it possible for a website (or app) to work offline,…
Morten Rand-Hendricksen, Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning, has released WP Rig. WP Rig is a WordPress starter theme and build process combined into one. The starter theme provides a minimal set of templates with the ability to drag-and-drop files from the WordPress template hierarchy. It contains a heavily optimized code and file structure, support…
The Gutenberg team took questions from a full room users and developers this morning before diving into the specifics of the editor’s design, block creation, and how to further extend the new interface. The first question they addressed is the one everyone is asking: When will Gutenberg land in core? The team said the editor…
In an effort to further streamline the review process and take some of the burden off of reviewers, the WordPress Theme Review team has launched a Trusted Authors Program. The program is for authors who consistently submit themes that follow the WordPress theme review guidelines and have three or fewer issues in multiple areas. Applications…
The WordPress Theme Review team has implemented changes that simplify the process and places more responsibility onto theme authors. Theme reviewers now only need to check the following items to pass a theme. Licensing Malicious or egregious stuff Content Creation Security Although the bar to pass a theme is significantly lower, theme authors are still…
Envato has added unlimited WordPress theme and plugin downloads to its Elements digital assets subscription service. The company is including a curated collection of 210 WordPress themes and 100 plugins along with 400,000 other design assets already offered through the service. Envato is the largest WordPress theme marketplace on the web with 39,102 themes and…
WooCommerce is retiring its Canvas Theme after seven years. Canvas was one of the most innovative themes on the market when it first launched in 2010, giving customers the ability to modify their sites’ design and layout through an extensive options panel. It sold for $99 before the product URL was redirected to a retirement…
ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor has open sourced WPThemeDoc, the template he uses for documenting his commercial WordPress themes. Tabor is also the creator of Merlin WP, a theme onboarding wizard that makes setup effortless for users. After applying his aesthetic talents to the documentation aspect of his business, he decided to package up his efforts…
ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor released Merlin WP on GitHub in public beta this week. The project provides a beautiful experience for installing and setting up WordPress themes with all of their plugin dependencies, Customizer settings, widgets, demo content, and more. “I was inspired by David Baker’s Envato Theme Setup Wizard and was working to add…
Over the past few months the WordPress Support Team has been brainstorming ways to improve support across various aspects of the community. One new idea they are pursuing is hosting workshops where WordPress.org theme and plugin authors can present how they approach supporting their free, open source products that have been released to the community.…
While at WordCamp Europe I had the opportunity to meet Russian designer and developer Dmitry Mayorov, whose themes I had noticed earlier in the year in the WordPress Theme Directory. Mayorov’s design style is reminiscent of other niche theme developers like Anders Norén and Mike McAlister. He launched his own commercial themes business on ThemePatio.com…
Hamilton is a new portfolio theme released by Swedish designer and developer Anders Norén during his summer vacation. It was created for photographers, illustrators, designers, and image-heavy blogs. The theme displays portfolio items in a minimal, masonry-style grid with an optional tagline on the front page. “Hamilton has a pretty simple design at its core,…
Automattic has been teasing its plan to add commercial themes to Jetpack for several months after introducing theme installation for self-hosted users from WordPress.com. In March, the plugin opened up access to all of WordPress.com’s free themes via the Jetpack Manage interface. All signs pointed to Automattic developing the infrastructure to offer commercial themes via…