News & Articles

• WordPress 4.0 Release Candidate (wordpress.org)
  The first release candidate for WordPress 4.0 is now available!
• Matt Mullenweg Hosts Impromptu Q&A Session On Facebook (wptavern.com)
  WordPress co-creator, Matt Mullenweg, stopped by the Advanced WordPress Facebook group and participated in a WordPress edition of ask me anything. After receiving a warm welcome from the group, Mullenweg outlined what types of questions he would answer. Here are a few of our favorites along with Mullenweg’s answers.
• Increase Traffic to Your Site With These Tried and Tested Blogging Tips (premium.wpmudev.org)
  A blog is one of the best ways to drive traffic to a website; whether it be a corporate website, directory, or online shop. By adding great content to your blog regularly, you will provide useful resources to visitors and publish more pages for search engines to index. In this article, we would like to share with you some tips on how you can use a blog to increase the volume of traffic to your website. I hope you find it useful.
• Post Language Project Proposes to Bring Better Support for Multilingual WordPress Content (wptavern.com)
  WordPress global usage on the web is now at 23%, and this year marked the first time that non-English downloads surpassed the number of English downloads. Major internationalization improvements coming in 4.0 will open up the platform even more for those publishing in different languages. German WordPress developer Caspar Hübinger is in the early stages of creating a proposal to add a Post Language feature to core.

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Plugin News

• The Best WordPress Chat Plugins And Why You Should Use One (www.elegantthemes.com)
  If you run a business, taking advantage of one of the many live chat plugins out there is a good idea. Not only will it put you in direct contact with your potential customers, it can also create a sense of community around your site, which is kind of, sort of important these days. Just a little bit. Check these great chat plugins right here!
• You Decide: WordPress Plugins and Solutions You Can’t Live Without (managewp.com)
  Cornucopia. That’s what WordPress is – a platform overflowing with plugins and themes and new ways to do neat things with your site. Plugin developers find boring ways to do cool things, cool ways to do boring things, and, best of all, cool ways to do cool things. What can’t you live without? What do you think other people should really know about? In this post, we’ll briefly overview a handful of good plugins and solutions.
• BuddyPress 2.1 Beta 1 Now Available for Testing (wptavern.com)
  BuddyPress 2.1 is right around the corner with Beta 1 landing in the hands of eager testers today. The upcoming release includes several improvements that make BuddyPress easier to use, more secure, and faster than ever. BP 2.1 is set to introduce a totally revamped @mentions interface with built-in auto-suggestion and beta testers will want to put it through the paces.
• Menu Humility: A Plugin to Put Plugins in Their Place (wptavern.com)
  WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith created Menu Humility, a plugin that reassigns the menu location for errant menu items.

Theme Releases

Customizable (wordpress.org)	BrickYard (wordpress.org)	Aplos (wordpress.org)
Beluga (wordpress.org)	Nouveau Riche (wordpress.org)	Welcome (wordpress.org)

Theme News

• The Best Places to Find Free Stock Images for Your WordPress Site (premium.wpmudev.org)
  Online, visuals are even more important. Research has found 46 per cent of people say a website’s design is the number one criterion for discerning the credibility of a company. This is a fairly comprehensive collection of our go-to sites for whenever we’re searching for a stock or feature image.
• ThemeForest and CodeCanyon Introduce Mandatory Support and Renewable Packages (www.poststat.us)
  Envato has announced a change in support terms for ThemeForest and CodeCanyon, which creates a requirement for authors to provide six months of support, and offers buyers “support packs” for renewing support.
• A Brief History of a WordPress Theme Business (medium.com)
  Jason Schuller published a great article on his experience with the running of a WordPress theme business starting with 2008 up to 2014.

Tutorials

• How to Create Custom User Roles in WordPress (managewp.com)
  For the most part the default user roles are all that are needed. But there are cases where you need a user role that doesn’t fit in with the parameters of the default roles. And in this article we’ll show you how to create your own custom user roles without using a plugin.
• Adding Custom Fields To WordPress Programmatically (code.tutsplus.com)
  One of the things that makes WordPress so powerful as a content management system is that the post_meta table starts as a nearly blank slate that you can easily add custom meta fields to. In this post we will be covering the basics of passing data into the post_meta table.
• How to Put Together a Mobile First, Performance Orientated WordPress Theme [Part 2] (www.codeinwp.com)
  In short, what we’re after here is giving you a guide on how to build a high performing mobile theme for WordPress. It may not seem like it at first, but the challenge is actually bigger than most people think. After all, the general belief is that you only have to make the theme responsive and, voilà, it’s mobile-optimized, right? Well, not quite. So without further ado, check this great tutorial.
• WordPress SEO Tutorial Videos (yoast.com)
  Yoast has teamed up with Shawn Hesketh, from WP101, who has created (and will continue to update) a beautiful set of 17 videos. These videos are now included in our WordPress SEO premium plugin.
• How to Clean Up Your Site Structure (yoast.com)
  We all know that moment where your website has grown to this monstrous collection of pages. That moment when you realize that you have too many pages in your menu and the coherence of your website is nowhere to be found. And we also know what a struggle it is to clean this mess up. In this article, we’d like to go over a number of things we would take in account (at least) when changing your site structure.

Podcasts and Videos

• What’s the Most Important Skill to Learn In the WordPress World? (chrislema.com)
  Check Chris Lema's podcast to find out a great story and what's the most important skill to learn in the WordPress environment for a person to stay relevant.
• Go Slowly as Fast as You Can (mattreport.com)
  Ben Fox co-founder of FlowPress, WPUniversity.com and Sidekick.pro shares smart ideas about pricing, building a team and having a greater vision for his new product offering.
• 195 – Improve Your WordPress Site in Just 20 Minutes (yourwebsiteengineer.com)
  Let’s face it, having a WordPress site takes time. You have to spend time regularly updating your site, creating content and maintaining your site. Today we look at a few things that we can do regularly to keep our site in tip top shape.
• Episode 057: The Bourn Creative Identity (dradcast.com)
  With more than 300 WordPress sites under her belt, Jennifer Bourn now shares her expertise and lessons learned as a speaker, blogger, and co-organizer of the Sacramento Meetup Group.
• Episode #47 Jason Swenk from jasonswenk.com (www.wpelevation.com)
  ason built a website called N’Shit to make fun of Justin Timberlake’s band at the time N’Sync. The website was a hit. From these humble beginnings Jason went on to build a multi-million dollar web agency, sold it and now teaches agency owners how to elevate to the next level.
• WPWeekly Episode 160 – The Founder Of BruteProtect, Sam Hotchkiss (wptavern.com)
  In this weeks show, Marcus Couch and Jeff Chandler are joined by the founder of BruteProtect, Sam Hotchkiss. We learn the circumstances which lead to the birth of BruteProtect and how it operates. Hotchkiss explains the details of the acquisition with Automattic and how it will be rolled into Jetpack. While some people are not happy that it’s being added to Jetpack, they discuss why it’s a huge win.