WordPress News

It’s time for a simpler default WordPress theme

Brian Krogsgard

December 20, 2013

Konstantin Obenland has been involved with the development of the last three default WordPress themes. In this post, he makes a great case for simplifying the default theme with Twenty Fifteen; and he goes as far as advocating simply using…

WordPress Foundation financials

Brian Krogsgard

December 19, 2013

WordPress News

As a non-profit organization, the WordCamp Foundation publicly files financials. However, they've gone an extra step and broken down their costs for the 2012 tax year on the website. The Foundations expenses were $580,161 for the year, and the breakdown…

WordCamp San Francisco 2014 announced

Brian Krogsgard

December 18, 2013

WordPress News

With perhaps the earliest announcement I've seen for a WordCamp, WordCamp San Francisco 2014 has been announced to occur October 24th - 26th. It appears the contributor day is going to flip this year, and be before WordCamp instead of…

“Patches Welcome”

Brian Krogsgard

December 17, 2013

Business

As a phrase, this is often more of a conversation killer rather than encouragement for collaboration. The delivery method of this popular phrase is paramount, and the audience needs to be genuinely considered when we say "patches welcome" to those…

BuddyPress 1.9 released with notifications

Brian Krogsgard

December 17, 2013

WordPress News

BuddyPress 1.9, "Sammy" was released last night, and for the first time in two years added a new component: notifications. Sarah Gooding has done a nice job on WP Tavern highlighting the various details of the release.

Design is not a democracy

Brian Krogsgard

December 17, 2013

Design

With all the recent changes to the design of WordPress admin, the new default theme, and other design projects for other WordPress properties, I think this is a valuable lesson for us to remember: design is not a democracy. In…

Share sidebars in WordPress Multisite with transients

Brian Krogsgard

December 17, 2013

Development

Corey Collins goes in depth on the WebDevStudios blog to offer a solution to a problem experienced by many Multisite users: for sharing sidebars across a Multisite instance. The solution uses transients to store everything and a small AJAX function…

The faces behind WordPress 3.8

Brian Krogsgard

December 17, 2013

WordPress News

On the "About" page of updated WordPress installs, you can look at a list of all contributors for a given release. Bob Dunn has gone the extra step to make a list and show the face of every contributor to…

Publish more with Color Schemes Roulette for WordPress

Brian Krogsgard

December 16, 2013

WordPress News

Color Schemes Roulette — a brand new WordPress plugin, that will randomly change your admin color scheme every time you hit that Publish button. It’s also a great motivator, proven to increase blogging frequency up to 170% right after activation!

Automattic trial data and employee retention

Brian Krogsgard

December 16, 2013

Business

Matt Mullenweg does a lot of interviews, and much of this one at the Lean Startup Conference is similar to many others, highlighting how WordPress got started, the culture of open source and how Automattic works. But at the end he mentioned…

Get a free year of learning WordPress by telling your story

Brian Krogsgard

December 13, 2013

WordPress News

Brian Richards is giving away 12 free year-long subscriptions to WP Sessions. All you have to do is tell him why you would benefit from the gift. WP Sessions is a pretty awesome way to learn from some of the…

Track progress of “features as plugins”

Brian Krogsgard

December 13, 2013

Make WordPressWordPress News

I tried to find something like this yesterday and had a hard time. I stumbled across it today finally: a list of current "features as plugins" that are being worked on, along with helpful information on their status. This will…

Theme development enhancements in WordPress 3.8

Brian Krogsgard

December 13, 2013

WordPress News

On ThemeShaper, Konstantin Obenland highlights some of the enhancements in WordPress 3.8 that benefit theme developers, primarily for the post format and custom background features. It might also be worth noting the change in screenshot size requirements as well (to…

Make your own WordPress admin themes

Brian Krogsgard

December 12, 2013

Design

As I noted in my feature post on WordPress 3.8, the new WordPress build tools (using Grunt) and the port of the admin CSS to Sass make it much easier for WordPress core to make new admin themes. Well, with…

The design of WordPress 3.8

Brian Krogsgard

December 12, 2013

DesignMake WordPress

Matt Thomas goes into detail on design considerations for MP6, which became the new look of WordPress in 3.8. Also, it's just so impressive how many people were involved in this project. Excellent wrap-up by Matt.

Meet WordPress 3.8, Parker

Brian Krogsgard

December 12, 2013

DesignMake WordPress

WordPress 3.8, "Parker", has just been released. WordPress 3.8 is the result of four months of hard work by 188 core contributors. Named after Charlie Parker, jazz saxophonist and bepob innovator. WordPress 3.8's development was led by WordPress co-founder, Matt…