News & Articles

• WordPress in 2014 What You Can Expect (goodchee.com)
  2014 looks like it will be just as revolutionary, but this time it will be all about adding amazing new functionality. Here you cand find a few upcoming possibilities to whet your pallete.
• History of WordPress: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (www.wpexplorer.com)
  Ten years ago, WordPress was just a fork. Nope, not the kind you would use at dinner. In the world of software developers, a fork… Take a look on what WordPress had become.
• How To Tighten Up Your Post Titles When Using Genesis And WordPress (chrislema.com)
  Here’s the truth – Genesis and WordPress pack a powerful punch. But that’s often from the developer side of things. When a site owner wants to make tweaks, the result of Google searches is almost always snippets of code.
• WordPress Is Not Easy, And That’s Okay (www.poststat.us)
  Morten Rand-Hendriksen has put together one of the more thoughtful posts we’ve seen about the complexity of WordPress. As he notes, “the way we talk about WordPress to new users and clients gives them a distorted picture of what the application is and sets up unrealistic expectations. WordPress is not easy. Learning WordPress is.”
• WordPress Settings API Wrapper? No Thanks. (tommcfarlin.com)
  Honestly, we ought to take the time to learn the Settings API however the steep the learning curve, and start working with it. It is the definitive way to go about creating options pages, and it is the current version of the API that we have available.
• AppPresser Launches First Mobile App Development Framework For WordPress (wptavern.com)
  The WebDevStudios development team was one of the first agencies to pioneer WordPress-powered apps. Last year these apps were showcased by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who predicts that WordPress as an application platform will become the dominant development focus during the next few years.
• Mentor Others In The WordPress Community With WPMentor (wptavern.com)
  Matt Medeiros of Mattreport.com has launched a new website called WPMentor.org that brings mentors and mentees together.

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Plugin News

• Security Plugins: More of a Problem Than a Solution? (mattreport.com)
  How can we operate on unlimited everything forever? At some point there’s going to be a customer or situation that totally obliterates our support costs.
• Backup Plugins for WordPress (torquemag.io)
  if you are hosting on WP Engine — or another hosting company that offers automatic site backups—then you have no need for backup plugins. You have daily backups to fall back on; you need not do anything and the backups are done for you. Check out a variety of backup plugins.
• How To: Track WordPress Changes & User Activity – Free Plugins to Download (wplift.com)
  The number of events that these free plugins can track is pretty comprehensive. Actions such as creating new content, editing widgets, failed login attempts and changes to site options, to name but a few, can be easily viewed. If you want a better overview of what is going on with your WordPress site, these plugins provide an effective solution.
• 25 Useful WooCommerce Plugins You Might Never Heard Of (wpwebshop.com)
  Building your own WordPress webshop without using WooCommerce can be super complicated, and why bother when the WooCommerce plugin is completely free! There are numerous WooCommerce plugins and add-ons available, many of them are well known of, but there are many of them just as good, and yet you might not even know they exist.

Theme Releases

KELLY (www.bluchic.com)	x2 (wordpress.org)	Ridizain (wordpress.org)
Organik (wordpress.org)	Flatty (wordpress.org)	Wallpapered (wordpress.org)

Theme News

• How To Make Twenty Fourteen (Or Any Other WP Theme!) Super (premium.wpmudev.org)
  In this article, we are going to build a child theme that implements the improvements that Chris recommended in his review of Twenty Fourteen.
• Theme Friendly, An Upcoming Site For Commercial Theme Reviews (themefriendly.com)
  Theme Friendly is a project by Alex Mansfield that will serve to offer commercial WordPress theme reviews. Alex Is Also Blogging His Efforts To Build The Site Itself, Which Is Fun.
• WordPress eCommerce Themes Collection – 10+ Finest Options (wordpressresources.com)
  As the year starts, we bring you our collection of the finest WordPress eCommerce themes. eCommerce is the common tag for e-commerce or electronic commerce. It is a kind of industry where buying and selling products and services is done using the internet or other computer networks as the medium.

Tutorials

• 3 Tricks For Improved Child Theming in WordPress (premium.wpmudev.org)
  In this tutorial I will show you three simple tricks to easily avoid having to copy and modify any parent theme files. These simple tricks will allow you to customize your theme as needed, while overriding as few of the parent theme’s template files as possible.
• Using WordPress for Web Application Development: Features: Email (wp.tutsplus.com)
  Namely, it’s important to understand the components that go into creating an actual email – after all, it’s more than just an address, subject, and content. There are some technical nuances that are worth understanding before we go about constructing our own custom emails.
• How To Add Google Fonts To The WordPress Editor (tommcfarlin.com)
  With the popularity of web fonts rising – such as those from Google – you have to take a slightly different approach when implementing them in the context of the editor rather than the typical way of doing so with server side hooks.
• How to Limit Access to Your WordPress Dashboard (premium.wpmudev.org)
  Luckily, there are many ways to help you do it. In this post I’ll go over a few different methods, from simply using the permission settings built into WordPress to using code and installing plugins.
• Using WordPress for Web Application Development: Features: Saving Data (wp.tutsplus.com)
  In this article, we’re going to take a look at the APIs that WordPress offers for serializing information, and the facilities available for sanitizing data. Then we’ll round out the article by taking taking a look at how to safely retrieve information from the database.