Brian Krogsgard, Author at Post Status • Page 172 of 201

Envato updates recent changes to ThemeForest theme submission requirements

Envato has updated some of the implementation schedule and details from the recent changes … Read more

Floating Social Bar plugin does sticky social buttons with lazy loading

Syed Balkhi of WP Beginner and Thomas Griffin, maker of Soliloquy, just teamed up … Read more

The WP Conf to “fork” WordCamp Los Angeles

I was tagged in a tweet by Brad Williams that referenced The WP Conf, which is currently only a half-finished website, but is an independent WordPress conference slated for late this year, and calls itself, “a WordPress conference forked from WordCamp and WordCamp Los Angeles.”

Based on intensive investigative journalism… er… I mean, based on the author of the posts on the site, it was simple to discover that community veteran and WordCamp LA organizer Austin Passy is at least one of the people involved in The WP Conf. I quickly reached out to Austin for more info, to see if he can share more about the event. He had the following to say:

I was just ready after running WordCamp LA for four years to move on. But I enjoy organizing and am good at hosting events and parties, and I wanted to create a new breed of a WordPress conference. I think the community is ready for something different but at the same time can run concurrently with WordCamps.

-Austin Passy, organizer of The WP Conf

I was profiled on WooThemes to talk about WooCommerce, WordPress, and maintenance

I’m extremely honored to have been profiled on WooThemes to talk about working in … Read more

Plugin aims to make managing nonprofits easier

A company called Wired Impact has released an intriguing new plugin called Nonprofit Board … Read more

Accessibility objectives for WordPress – initial thoughts

Members of the Make WordPress Accessibility group have created an initial set of accessibility … Read more

Why every new employee should do customer support

Mel Choyce recently joined Automattic as a Design Engineer. In this post, she talks … Read more

Gravity Forms releases Zapier addon, enabling massive third party integration opportunities

Gravity Forms has released an addon to integrate with Zapier, which is an automation … Read more

WordPress podcasts to keep an eye on

The WordPress podcast landscape seems to be exploding. I’ve been keeping my queue filled for a while now with the shows available. Let’s talk about a few.

The DradCast

The DradCast is a carryover from WP Late Night, hosted by Sucuri CEO Dre Armeda and WebDevStudios co-founder Brad Williams. They are ridiculously experienced and well respected in the WordPress community and can always pull in the best possible guests. They tend to talk about the bleeding edge of WordPress news, events and hot topics.

Matt Report

There are a variety of Slocum Studio shows that I also enjoy. I’ve been on the relatively new Week in WordPress podcast before. But my favorite of their shows is the Matt Report, where Matt Medeiros interviews various WordPress-based entreprenuers and business owners. You’ve probably heard of some of his guests, and others are fresh faces that can really provide great insight. Matt Report has been going strong for 40+ episodes now. I never miss one.

Week in WordPress: talking WordPress news and more

Matt Medeiros, Adam Warner, Curtis McHale, Jeff Chandler, and Pippin Williamson all got together … Read more

An interview with WordPress expert Otto Wood

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Otto Wood for a couple of years and … Read more

Design inspiration: WordPress VIP site redesigns

It appears the WordPress VIP website has a new look and feel. I have … Read more

Automattic acquires domain search website, Lean Domain Search

Automattic has acquired Lean Domain Search, a domain search tool. The website allows users … Read more

Replace the WordPress the default category metabox with radio buttons

Justin Sternberg posted on the WebDevStudios blog a code example for changing the default … Read more

How WooThemes makes distributed team culture work

The iDoneThis blog profiles WooThemes and their distributed work culture. The author also learns … Read more

On WordPress themes and frameworks

Let’s pull the bandaid off real quick, and it won’t hurt as bad: Theme Framework has turned into a marketing term.

I lean more every day to giving theme framework the premium treatment. Just because a product costs money doesn’t make it premium at all. Nevertheless, the marketing term came and it stuck, and almost everyone uses the term. Well, not me. I completely agree with this post that commercial products should be called such.

Similarly, the term theme framework has become completely loaded. From a technical software perspective, it is defined like this:

In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. A software framework is a universal, reusable software platform to develop applications, products and solutions.

— Wikipedia

In the WordPress ecosystem, the term theme framework was introduced (I think) in early 2008, and was already relatively prevalent by 2009. I’m not sure who was first, but I’m going to give credit to Ian Stewart for officially coining the term. Even before then, Ian and other leaders in the theme sphere where thinking about the need for abstracted code, but the mechanisms weren’t yet in place to pull the concepts together.

What is a theme framework?

The challenge in answering this question is pretty much why I’ve come to just consider it a marketing term. If forced to break frameworks down into four groups, I’d do so like this: