Without much in the way of advertising, Underscores has become a popular choice for WordPress theme developers. To learn more about it, I asked Automattic employee, Konstantin Obenland, @obenland on Twitter, to explain what the theme is, how it got its name, and how people can contribute to the project. Why was Underscores created and…
If you love to blog but don’t want a theme with clunky sliders and overloaded widget areas cluttering up your site, then chances are you’re on the hunt for the perfect minimalist WordPress theme. Finding a theme that provides a beautiful reading experience with an unobtrusive, high quality design is no simple task. You’ll end…
Okay Themes, founded by Mike McAlister, has rebranded and is now known as “Array.” Despite the fact that the shop produced high quality WordPress themes, the previous name seemed to imply a passable, lackluster product. Array is a stronger name for a top-notch theme shop that is successfully pioneering a return to simplicity in both…
Writing documentation for products is oftentimes a thankless task. It’s a challenge to style and organize docs in a clear and approachable way. Unfortunately this tends to be an afterthought for many projects, even though it is the first point of connection for users seeking support. A WordPress theme specifically created for documentation makes this…
Over the past two years, Easy Digital Downloads has become a dominant player among WordPress plugins for selling digital products. EDD has been downloaded nearly 300,000 times due to its developer-friendly codebase and comprehensive set of features tailored to digital stores. While there are several dozen EDD-ready themes available, many developers prefer to build their…
Casper is a new theme for WordPress that is essentially a port of the default blogging theme for Ghost. Lacy Morrow built the theme using Underscores as a base. Morrow said that the goal for his theme was to approximate Ghost’s default theme while incorporating WordPress-specific features: The goal of this project is to emulate…
ThemeCheck.org is a new site that provides a free validation service for WordPress and Joomla themes. Visitors can upload themes and templates and the service will analyze the files and run tests to verify security and code quality. The site gives each theme a quality score along with a list of alerts and warnings. For…
In 2011, WordPress.com began offering commercial themes to its users. The service now has 105 commercial themes to choose from. In order to sell themes on WordPress.com, you either had to be invited or reach out to Automattic. Those days are over now that they have launched a new landing page for theme sellers interested…
Most of the free WordPress themes out there are geared toward single-author blogs. It’s rare to find a decent option for magazines, because these types of themes take a little more effort to design and build, given the massive amount of content typically included on the homepage. JustWrite is a new magazine theme on WordPress.org…
BuddyPress themes are still few and far between, despite the popularity of the social networking plugin for WordPress. After theme compatibility was introduced, effectively making BuddyPress able to work with nearly any WordPress theme, the market slowed its production of new products tailored specifically for BuddyPress. When you see a theme that highlights BuddyPress features…
Yesterday, we featured WP Inject, a plugin that makes it easy to insert Creative Commons licensed images into WordPress content. High quality CC-licensed images are incredibly easy to find these days. The vast majority of the collections include images that fall under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license. While these images are fine for blogging,…
Shortly after New Year’s, Nick Haskins caught the eye of WordPress publishers with his open source story telling plugin. The prospect of building feature-rich, interactive stories within WordPress, without having to touch any code, was so promising that the project’s Crowdhoster campaign was fully-funded by the end of January. The buzz around the Aesop plugin…
In an era where many website designs are powered by popular themes, it’s become common for folks passing by to want to snoop under the hood to find out which theme a site is using. If the visitor is not capable of inspecting the code with his browser, he might resort to a service built…
Dazzling is a new free theme that landed in the WordPress Themes Directory last week. It’s based on Bootstrap 3, which makes it responsive and mobile friendly. The theme features an optional full-screen featured slider, which works well for customizing business or creative websites. If you’re a fan of flat design with mint green accent…
After the rush of listing a theme or plugin on WordPress.org, the reality of providing support will soon set in. The best way to stay in touch with your user base is to subscribe to the support forums, since that’s the first place people generally go when looking for answers. Subscription options vary, depending on…