This post was contributed by guest author Sami Keijonen. Sami is a math teacher who enjoys learning about the web, accessibility, and WordPress. He juggles between freelancing, building themes at Foxland, and teaching. I’ve been doing several WordPress Theme Shop interviews lately. The original reason for the interviews was that people kept asking me…
digitale Pracht is a new theme on WordPress.org created by the folks at PALASTHOTEL, a digital products company based in Germany. The name translates to “digital splendor,” which aptly describes the theme’s bright new twist on the traditional blog design. The designers made a few bold choices with the layout, which does not support a…
Envato has been rolling out author-driven pricing across ThemeForest categories throughout 2016. The new pricing options have finally hit the WordPress category and authors are now experimenting with pricing changes outside of the average $35-65 range. Ben Chan, executive General Manager at Envato, explained why the company is extending author-driven pricing to ThemeForest after successfully…
Snowbird is a new theme released last week on WordPress.org, designed for storytellers with a blog-centered home page. It features a fullwidth header image, bold typography, and a host of layout and color options in the Customizer. Snowbird’s sidebar is hidden off canvas and can be toggled into view using the floating hamburger icon that…
Zerif Lite, one of the most popular themes on WordPress.org, has been suspended by the Theme Review Team for several violations of the Presentation vs. Functionality guideline. As a result, more than 300,000 users (including those on child themes of Zerif Lite) can no longer receive maintenance and security updates to the theme. Justin Tadlock,…
WordPress lead developer and 4.7 release lead Helen Hou-Sandí unveiled the design for the Twenty Seventeen default theme today and confirmed that it will be part of the upcoming release. Mel Choyce, a core contributor and design engineer at Automattic, is credited with the design of the new theme, which falls into the business or…
This week WordPress.com introduced a new Customizer panel to its users called Content Options. The new panel offers a number of minor tweaks that would ordinarily be handled by a few simple free plugins on a self-hosted site. It brings a whole new range of customizability to the WordPress.com sites that was not previously available.…
During the State of The Word at WordCamp US 2015, Matt Mullenweg highlighted customization as the largest opportunity to improve the WordPress experience. In a recent interview on WordPress Weekly, Mullenweg expanded on his thoughts saying he could see the customizer being the main focus of a release. “If I think about leading a release, I could…
Baton is a modern business theme that offers a unique approach to building the homepage. The theme features a clean top menu with elegant drop downs, a submenu, customizable heros, and multiple layouts for feature sections. While many business themes offer similar design features, Baton’s differentiating factor is that users can live edit any of…
Headway Themes, founded in 2009 by father-son duo Grant Griffiths and Clay Griffiths, is one of a handful of companies that helped pioneer the WordPress commercial theme market. Headway is not a page builder but rather a visual drag-and-drop layout builder for WordPress. In the past few weeks, several readers have contacted us wanting to…
During Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A session at WordCamp Europe, an unidentified Google employee asked about making WordPress sites more mobile-friendly: I work at Google with search and we think the web and mobile are important, but one thing that we noticed is that 28% of the new sites that choose WordPress and come online (that we’ve…
The WordPress Theme Review Team published an action plan today, summarizing the team’s consensus on moving forward to address bottlenecks in the review process. The queue is currently backed up with hundreds of themes waiting to be approved. “The Theme Review Team is aware that we currently have problems,” Tammie Lister said before introducing the…
There is nothing worse than visiting a restaurant website and having to download a PDF in order to view the menu, especially when browsing on mobile. This is one of the most clunky, inconvenient experiences on the web. Unfortunately, when visitors encounter a PDF menu, it’s often because restaurant owners don’t have websites that are…
Child themes have been in use in WordPress for more than seven years and the concept of using them to extend a parent theme is now an established best practice in theme development. The idea is that modifications made in a child theme will not be overwritten when an update is available for the parent…
UpThemes co-founder Chris Wallace announced this week that the theme company has been acquired by Andy Wilkerson of Parallelus, a successful Themeforest author. The two met at PressNomics and worked out a deal for the sale of everything related to UpThemes, including some unreleased themes and the managed hosting business the company launched last year.…