<div class="rss-widget"><ul><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wordpress.org/news/2014/03/wordpress-3-9-beta-3/' title='The third (and maybe last) beta of WordPress 3.9 is now available for download. Beta 3 includes more than 200 changes, including: New features like live widget previews and the new theme installer are now more ready for prime time, so check ‘em out. UI refinements when editing images and when working with media in the editor. We’ve also brought […]'>WordPress 3.9 Beta 3</a> <span class="rss-date">29/03/2014</span><div class='rssSummary'>The third (and maybe last) beta of WordPress 3.9 is now available for download. Beta 3 includes more than 200 changes, including: New features like live widget previews and the new theme installer are now more ready for prime time, so check ‘em out. UI refinements when editing images and when working with media in the editor. We’ve also brought […]</div></li></ul></div><div class="rss-widget"><ul><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/introduction-to-underscores-a-wordpress-starter-theme-with-konstantin-obenland?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=introduction-to-underscores-a-wordpress-starter-theme-with-konstantin-obenland' title='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. A Starter Theme Created by Automattic Why was Underscores created and how did it get its name? Ian Stewart tells the tale in detail in the announcement post for Underscores, but the gist of it is that Toolbox, the theme we used as a starter theme at the time, could not be updated without backwards compatibility concerns, and needed more drastic improvements. Since the fork underscores the new themes we build, we called it the Underscores Theme, or _s for short. Without a lot of advertising, Underscores seems to be a starting point for many developers. Why do you think that is? That is true, we haven’t done a lot of marketing for it yet. I think what developers really like is its simplicity and adherence to WordPress standards. Underscores comes from the combined experience of building themes for millions of users on WordPress.com, and creating default themes that ship with WordPress and have to work in all environments. This is paired with excellence in theming best practices and just enough functionality, markup, and styles to get started. This Is What Underscores Looks Like Activated Without Modifications When you download Underscores, there is very little to tear down or take away.  You can almost immediately dive into building your theme. We put a lot of thought into keeping it as lean as possible and still do when making decisions on new features and enhancements. Would you consider Underscores a starter theme, theme framework, or something else? Underscores is a starter theme. It is meant to be worked with, tweaked, and styled. It is not a framework or a parent theme to be extended. It is supposed to become a theme of its own, when finished. What is the ratio of Automattic developers contributing patches to Underscores versus contributions from the wider community? A Sampling Of Contributors To Underscores There have been 64 contributors on GitHub so far although GitHub only counts contributors who contributed through a Pull Request. Out of those 64, less than 20 are current or former Automatticians. I don’t have stats on the amount of Issues or Pull Requests opened, but the 2:1 ratio feels true for that too, maybe even 3:1. What projects does Automattic use Underscores for? O2 Is The Successor To The P2 Theme We use it for pretty much all projects where it makes sense to use a theme. Be it a new theme for the WordPress.com Theme Repository, a vertical like Portfolios, or a landing page for users of a certain mobile device. We even use it internally for the O2 theme, the successor of P2. Are themes more likely to be approved in a WordPress.com theme review if Underscores is used to build the theme?  Possibly. But not for the sake of using Underscores. Rather because the code quality of those themes is more likely to meet our expectations. Themes can be based on any kind of framework or starter theme as long as the code quality is right. We certainly don’t disqualify themes for not using it. What examples do you have of beautiful sites designed with Underscores? Have Baby. Need Stuff! Built Using Underscores There are plenty! Let’s start with Twenty Fourteen, the latest default theme. It was converted from Further, a premium theme based on _s. Every free theme and every premium theme by Automattic launched on WordPress.com in the last two years, are based on _s too. The official homepage of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Jaquith’s Have Baby. Need Stuff!, this ebay landing page, and the Western University site are all made from _s. Not a lot of commonalities between them, even though they have the same foundation. If you had to convince a developer to use Underscores, what would you tell them? Take advantage of the 1000 hour head start tutorial to building your theme. Underscores is a proven, reliable foundation to start from, built with the knowledge and experience from running themes on millions of sites, and creating default themes for WordPress Core. If you feel _s is too bare bones for you or find yourself adding the same libraries every time you start a new project, fork _s on GitHub, add the desired libraries and use your fork as the starting point! How can people get involved to help improve the theme? We maintain _s on GitHub to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute. Involvement can range from sharing opinions about existing proposals, to creating a new issue with improvement suggestions, to opening pull requests with code changes. What one thing do you want people to know about Underscores? You really don’t need to know any PHP or be a programmer to be able to use Underscores. As long as you’re somewhat comfortable with CSS and some HTML, Underscores can help you build the next great WordPress theme! Stats Related To Underscores It’s worth noting that the following statistics are for a theme aimed at developers with little to no marketing efforts behind it.  185,000 recorded downloads from Underscores.me since September 5, 2012 although it’s likely 250,000 to 300,000 in total. A total of 15,500 downloads for all of March Downloaded every 3.3 minutes. This excludes zip downloads from GitHub, forks, and theme updates. It’s the 17th most starred PHP project on GitHub: It is 19th in the list of trending PHP repositories on GitHub this month.  If you’ve used Underscores for a project or client website, send us a link in the comments.'>WPTavern: Introduction To Underscores: A WordPress Starter Theme With Konstantin Obenland</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/status-update-on-the-wordpress-front-end-editor-and-how-you-can-help?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=status-update-on-the-wordpress-front-end-editor-and-how-you-can-help' title='We’ve written about a number of alternate editors to WordPress for both editing and writing content. Sir Trevor WP, PrettyPress, Splitdown, and Barley to name a few. However, WordPress may soon have its own frontend editor built into core. WordPress Front-end Editor was proposed by Janneke Van Dorpe in late 2013, with the goal of merging the backend and frontend editors into one. After six months of development, I tested the plugin using a local server running WordPress 3.9 beta 3. Rough Around The Edges After installing WordPress Front-end Editor, it was hard to determine how to use it since the plugin doesn’t contain directions within the readme file. By trial and error, I was able to figure it out. When clicking the Edit Post link on the front end of the site, the admin bar displays a number of editing buttons such as bold, italicize, etc. In my tests, it wasn’t immediately clear what text or content became editable. Editor In Action Just about everything you can do in the visual editor can be accomplished with the inline editor. For example, you can use keyboard shortcuts to bold or italicize highlighted text. While you can change tags, categories, or access other options, there is a bug preventing them from displaying correctly. When previewing unpublished posts, both the active tab and the preview tab will load the front end of the site. This is a bug and has already been reported. One question I had concerning the editor is when would it be appropriate to use? It’s a great way to quickly edit typos or fix URLs without having to navigate to the backend of WordPress but that’s for content already published. I’m so used to creating content from the backend, it’s tough to imagine doing it any other way. When A Content Editor Crosses The Line I’m pleased to report that the editor is strictly tied to editing content. You can’t move widgets around, change the text within them, or change the site’s colors. Those tasks have been left to the theme customizer. I’m happy the team has made this decision since I believe enabling users to manipulate their theme with a content editor is crossing the line. How You Can Help The Project When I asked Dorpe what she needed help with the most, she responded, “We really need some people to help out with the development, because right now, I’m the only one working on it. We also really need a lot of people to test it and give feedback.” If during testing you run into a bug, please create a new issue on the plugin’s Github page. WordPress Front-end Editor The team meets every Tuesday, at 13:00 UTC-4 in the #wordpress-ui IRC channel. You can keep tabs on the project by subscribing to the front-end-editor tag used on the Make WordPress UI blog. The WordPress Backend May Become A Thing Of The Past If the WordPress Front-end Editor succeeds in its mission of bridging the gap between the backend and frontend of WordPress, it will revamp the way users create content in WordPress. The backend will become a thing of the past for some authors as they create and edit all of their content using the inline editor. Having the editor built into core would also give WordPress a feature other modern publishing platforms like Ghost, already have. There is no guarantee that the plugin will ever be merged into core but it’s an excellent example of one way to implement the feature into WordPress. Do you think having a frontend editor in WordPress would make content creation and editing easier? Can you see yourself using it as the primary method of creating content?'>WPTavern: Status Update On The WordPress Front-end Editor and How You Can Help</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/10-free-ultra-minimalist-wordpress-themes?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=10-free-ultra-minimalist-wordpress-themes' title='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 up wading through hundreds of themes. That’s why I’ve collected a few of the best minimalist WordPress themes from around the web. All of the themes featured here make liberal use of white space and display very little, if any, post meta. Remember that any of these themes can be even further stripped down to better reflect your spartan sensibilities. Create a child theme to preserve your ability to get updates, and then proceed to cut out post meta or anything that you feel is distracting to the reader. Tonal  Tonal is a content-focused theme from Automattic that sports a minimal design with large featured images. The theme supports post formats and can display images and videos at full width. The menu and widgets are hidden from sight in a pull-down panel. One particularly unique aspect of Tonal is its background adaptation feature. Select any solid background color and the theme will automatically modify your typography and other elements to preserve readability with the new background color. Demo | Download Casper  Casper is a free Ghost-style theme based on Underscores. It is essentially a port of Ghost’s default theme with WordPress-specific features added into the customizer for uploading your own logo, customizing the background and header images, text and social links. Demo | Download Lingonberry  Lingonberry is a beautifully-designed minimalist theme by Anders Noren. Check out our recent interview with him on achieving simplicity in WordPress theme design. The Lingonberry theme offers support for post formats. The hidden top menu pulls down navigation and a search bar. Demo | Download TinyPress  TinyPress is a mobile-friendly WordPress theme with bold headlines and a focus on readability. It includes matching social sharing buttons, styles for galleries and quotes, and a hidden menu that pops open a full page widget area when clicked. Demo | Download Gravit  Gravit is a bright, clean WordPress theme with support for post formats and large featured images. The theme has many options built into the customizer, including color controls for the post format icons, site title, text and background. Gravit also includes a unique “About Me” page design and template. Demo | Download Readly  Readly is a free theme from WP Shower that utilizes large fonts and supports post formats. It was designed for readability on all devices. The theme has several options built into the customizer, including the ability to change the theme color and add social links. You can also easily select between three pagination options: regular, load more, and infinite scroll. Demo | Download Aquarius  Aquarius is a retina-ready responsive theme that supports all standard post formats. Sidebar widgets are hidden from view with a slideout panel. Navigation is fixed and available at the top of the page as you scroll. Demo | Download Padhang  Padhang is a Javanesse word that means “bright.” This theme features a large header image and a single centered column for content. The custom header, background and colors can be changed via the theme customizer. Demo | Download wp-svbtle  WP-Svbtle is a theme inspired by the svbtle.com design. The theme options let you upload a custom image for the header logo or select from one of the included icons. The unique thing about WP-Svbtle is that the admin area and the theme are independent of each other. The theme includes a directory that provides a new writing dashboard with a zen style interface for composing new content. Demo | Download Hellish Simplicity  Hellish Simplicity is a theme created by Ryan Hellyer. It’s a clean, responsive theme that looks great on mobile devices. You can easily update the header text via the customizer. Demo | Download'>WPTavern: 10 Free Ultra Minimalist WordPress Themes</a></li></ul></div>