May was an excellent month for free WordPress themes landing in the official Themes Directory. Several dozen were approved and added to the directory last week in one sweep. We’ve hand-picked some of the best themes released in the month of May, all of which have undergone the rigorous review process conducted by the Theme…
Tracks is a new free theme in the WordPress Themes Directory with a unique design that utilizes panoramic featured images. The homepage displays recent posts and a short excerpt for each, with big, bold images alternating down the page. If you’re looking for a simple theme with very few options to configure, then Tracks is…
When I discovered TeslaThemes last year, their unique looking designs really impressed me. Since so many other theme shops have tried the theme club model and failed, I didn’t have much hope for them. However, the company is celebrating their first year of being in business. The theme club model typically fails because it over…
For the past few years, the holy grail for many WordPress theme makers is to create a theme that is easy for anyone to customize without touching a line of code. One of the most difficult aspects of site customization is building the layout, especially if you’re shooting for a responsive website. Make is a…
At BuddyCamp Miami 2014, I learned about BuddyPress and what it’s capable of. During the first session, I learned you don’t have to worry about BuddyPress themes anymore since 1.7 introduced theme compatibility. This means that BuddyPress sites no longer require a BuddyPress-specific theme. Later in the day, there was a session devoted to BuddyPress…
Pictorico is a new free theme for self-hosted WordPress sites, created by the team at Automattic. While many themes in the WordPress Themes Directory lean toward the blog flavor, this one is geared toward portfolios and photoblogging websites. Pictorico is a single-column, grid-based theme that includes a post slider and looks its best with large…
Adding controls to WordPress’ theme customizer can be somewhat tedious and there are many tutorials dedicated to creating your own controls. WordPress Theme Customizer Custom Controls is a project on Github that provides a collection of ready-made controls that you can drop right into your theme. This set of extra controls was created by WordPress…
Sami Keijonen, founder of Foxnet Themes, is not happy with his theme sales, which total $1400 since early 2013. His Kultalusikka theme is the sales leader, with just 15 purchases. Keijonen has one theme for sale on WordPress.com, which was added in March of this year and has so far netted him $147.64. In a…
Support is one of the most difficult and expensive aspects of a business. At the same time, it’s often a determining factor on whether a company sticks around for one or several years. One thing I’ve noticed most of the established WordPress commercial theme businesses have in common is their reputation for providing good support.…
Interface is a new business theme in the WordPress Themes Directory, created by Theme Horse, the same folks behind the popular Clean Retina and Attitude themes that have more than 80,000 downloads combined. If you need to set up a simple business site and you’re into the flat-style mint green design trend, then the new…
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the new profile redesign to all users. If you haven’t updated your Twitter profile, you can click on the “Get it Now” button on the new profiles product page. Last week we featured Ozh’ Tweet Archiver as an easy way to archive your tweets to WordPress. The…
Many WordPress developers opt to use the Less CSS preprocessor to speed up theme development. Its availability of variables, mixins, and functions allows you to do more with CSS and to do it more efficiently. It also makes it easy to compile and minify files for production use. However, the initial setup for adding Less…
Jonathan Atkinson has been selling WordPress themes on Themeforest for the past five years. Through hard work and customer support, he’s learned how to make a living on Themeforest without having to pack hundreds of options into his products. Over the past year, Atkinson and his team at Cr3ativ.com have made an effort to convert…
Roots is a WordPress starter theme that incorporates the HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, and Grunt. It’s also known for creating cleaner HTML, cleaner script output, and its unique theme wrapper method for handling template markup. Up until now, you’d have to use the Roots theme in order to take advantage of any of its features. Ben…
Varying Vagrant Vagrants is likely the most popular Vagrant configuration for setting up a WordPress development environment. VVV makes it easy to create new WordPress installations for developing themes and plugins as well as contributing to core. One of the most time-consuming aspects of testing and reviewing WordPress themes is setting up a test site…