The new design for the official WordPress Theme Directory is live today. Contributors on the WordPress Meta team released a preview of the design in early January and worked quickly over the past month to resolve any outstanding issues related to the new plugin that powers the directory. In addition to an updated design, the…
The Roots starter theme for WordPress has rebranded as “Sage” with its 8.0.0 release today. Roots project creator Ben Word announced last year that he planned to change the theme to be framework agnostic in 2015. This release is the first step towards that goal. Fans of the starter theme appreciate its cleaner HTML, cleaner…
Last year, WordPress saw a renaissance in personal blogging themes. The official WordPress.org directory received a deluge of high quality themes that served to raise the bar for commercial developers when it comes to design and simplicity. In particular, the trend of flat, minimalist blogging themes is still running strong. Last month, theme design and…
Tom McFarlin released his Mayer WordPress theme on GitHub today. The theme was designed with writers, bloggers, and authors in mind and was previously only available to WordPress.com users for $79. Mayer is unique in that it was created to get users writing immediately, without having a bunch settings pages or additional widgets to configure.…
Devin Price, who owns and operates the WordPress commercial theme shop DevPress, announced that he is retiring his best selling theme, Zenith. I asked Price why he’s retiring his best product. “Retirement may not be the best term. It’s more like introducing the new year’s model and stopping production on the previous one. The designs…
Custom CSS boxes in themes are a common feature that allow users to easily add their own styles without having to edit any theme files. The inclusion of this feature in themes, as opposed to plugins, has long been a hotly contested issue among theme developers. WordPress.org Theme Review team admin Justin Tadlock announced today…
If you like designs that feature stunning, fullscreen background images, then Automattic’s latest free theme release is a prime candidate for your next blog redesign. Harmonic recently landed on WordPress.org and is rapidly closing in on 3,000 downloads. This theme puts the spotlight on your images and content. Harmonic’s striking homepage is accompanied by a…
Those who are new to WordPress theming are often confused by the mixture of PHP and HTML markup in templates. It’s easy to accidentally break theme functionality when everything is placed in the same file. For that reason, there’s a strong contingency of developers who prefer to integrate the Twig PHP templating engine with WordPress,…
Restaurant themes don’t often land in the WordPress Themes Directory. In fact, there are barely a dozen listed among the 3,000+ themes on WordPress.org. One problem with many commercial restaurant themes is that they are usually marketed as a complete package with everything built into the theme, including menu management. The lack of separation of…
Earlier this week, WP Theming‘s Devin Price announced a partnership with French translation specialist Fx Benard on a new theme shop aimed at the French-speaking WordPress community. Hexagone is now open for business with four products available – two commercial themes and two free themes. The duo plan to expand to offer more “products, support,…
In just one week since its release, the new Modern theme was downloaded nearly 2,700 times from WordPress.org. It was created by WebMan Design, a Slovakia-based company founded by Oliver Juhas. WebMan Design has been selling WordPress themes across multiple marketplaces since 2012 and recently began focusing on producing future-proof themes that meet WordPress.org standards.…
When Dumitru Brinzan launched AcademiaThemes in early 2014, he did so with the goal of providing high quality themes for the education sector. With one year under his belt, I reached out to Brinzan to find out how the business is doing. The first year was rough, thanks in large part to algorithm changes implemented…
Looking back on the theme landscape of 2014, a clear design trend emerged that highlights WordPress’ roots as a blogging platform. Minimalist, content-centric themes took center stage in the official WordPress Themes Directory, outpacing their more visually-bloated commercial counterparts. This past year saw a major renaissance in themes for the personal blogger, particularly designs that…
The Google web fonts library has over 650 fonts and without a keen eye for design, it can be difficult to find complimentary fonts. After we highlighted how you can customize Twenty Fifteen with over 650 free fonts, some readers questioned whether customizing fonts should be left up to designers. Typography Project Beautifully Illustrates Complimentary…
The new WordPress default theme, Twenty Fifteen, looks great and provides a lot of flexibility, but one thing it lacks is the option to customize fonts. A free plugin called Typecase, by UpThemes, solves this problem by giving users easy access to over 650 different fonts. Typecase uses the Google webfonts library, which has slowly…