WordPress News

Who? What? When? Why? Grab your inverted pyramid and enjoy some hot piping news.

This morning Collis Ta’eed announced on the Envato Notes blog that their price adjustment tool, previously available to Envato Elite authors on their marketplaces that reached $75,000 in sales, is no longer available. Normally prices on the Envato marketplaces are set by Envato during the product review process, and not by the author of the product. The price adjustment tool, announced last year, allowed certain authors to test out different prices for their products beyond what the marketplace would set for them.

The change, Ta’eed said, comes to prepare for the next major change to Envato’s pricing strategy. The introduction of variable pricing for certain elite authors was Envato’s first step toward dynamic pricing. “While it has had some success,” he said, “it’s become clear to us that it’s not the long-term solution.” The updated pricing solution — while what it is isn’t exactly clear yet — is slated for release “later this year”.

With the pricing tool removed, any marketplace products with modified prices will be left at the last price their author left them at. This affects 160 current authors who have already reached the $75,000 Elite level.

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E-commerce is becoming more of a hot topic within the WordPress community. Given this realization, we’ve seen plugins like WooCommerce be released free of charge, among other great e-commerce plugins.

Envato, the company behind ThemeForest and CodeCanyon (just to name of a few of their properties), put up a bounty to plugin developers. They see a need for more e-commerce plugins to be available in their marketplace and they’re willing to pay to get those plugins up there.
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Matt Alexander has sold themes on ThemeForest for 2 years now, under the username digitonik. He’s ready to break free and start out on his own.

Matt decided to focus on the business side of themes, and offer them in a bundled fashion just like Elegant Themes is doing.

Matt’s new WordPress theme shop is called the “WP Business Bundle.” Props to Matt for being mindful and not violating the registered WordPress trademark owned by the WordPress Foundation.

I caught up with Matt and asked him why he made the move.

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Responsive design is definiteively a topic for 2011 and converging into 2012. Having a responsive design is more than just having a “mobile friendly” site. It’s about having a site that will look great and functionally work on nearly any device; whether it’s an iPad, a Kindle Fire, an iPhone or Droid, all the way back to the desktop.

Take WPCandy.com for example. If you were to resize the browser, it would work seamlessly without any issues. Not all sites do this, and most WordPress themes are not responsive yet. A few theme and framework creators have started creating responsive themes, but it’s still a long ways away before all of them are.

Enter stage left, ResponsivePlugin.com; created by Marios Lublinski, who runs Dessign.net, a site about creating modern and clean WordPress themes, conceived the idea of helping making all WordPress themes responsive.

There’s no mention yet about whether it’s going to be a free or premium plugin, but I imagine it will be a premium plugin, given that it has its own domain. Most free plugins offered, don’t have their own domain.

I’m really excited about this plugin because, if he can execute it properly, it will help make so many websites responsive and easier to read on non-desktop experiences. It’s a great idea and wish him all the success in creating the plugin.

When the plugin is released, do you think you’ll grab a copy to help make your site responsive?

Earlier today WordPress.org announced its participation in the January 18th protests against the USA’s Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Earlier this evening the blackout went into effect, and will block access (initially) to all of WordPress.org including the Codex, support forums, plugin directory and theme directory. The blackout will be in effect for 24 hours.

For more about the acts and protest in question visit sopastrike.com.

But the blackout on WordPress.org is not unavoidable. Scrolling to the bottom of a page will give you a link to clear the blackout for an hour and continue on to the website. On her blog, Jane Wells explained that while she originally wanted to see the whole site blacked out, instead the WordPress.org team opted to make the blackout only partial for the sake of those who depend on WordPress.org:

The reason we did this instead of a full shut-down is that there are many businesses and people who help drive the independent web that need access to the WordPress Codex, forums, plugin/theme repos, and APIs. We wouldn’t want to penalize them in our protest, so we just made it impossible to ignore instead.

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Late last year we first learned about the next rocketgenius project called Gravity Charge. Carl Hancock, co-founder of Gravity Forms and rocketgenius, recently mentioned that he has already been in discussion with the WooThemes team about integration between Gravity Charge and WooCommerce.

I caught up with Carl about the new integration, and this is what he had to say about it:

Because Gravity Charge will have extensive and powerful content access control capabilities, one of the logical integrations would be to use Gravity Charge for controlling access to content, files and downloads and enabling WooCommerce users to use WooCommerce for the checkout process itself.

With those plans in mind from Carl, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to be a powerful and functional plugin, providing a great utility for e-commerce website owners.

Recently NASA announced that it was launching a new Open Source section of its website: http://code.nasa.gov. This is just another step that NASA is taking to help make its code available to the public. The web team over at NASA looked at a number of content management systems available for the website. At the end of their search they decided on using WordPress.

To take it a step further, they ended up using the Twitter Bootstrap framework for building their theme. One really awesome tool that they get to use with this framework is something called “Less.” Less gives greater control over CSS, which allows for the use of variables and many other things within the CSS itself. Normally those kinds of things are not available in CSS, but Less makes that happen.

They also decided to use Super Cache as their caching mechanism for the site.

As I’m such a huge fan of WordPress, I can easily say they made a great choice and that I’m looking forward to seeing what they release on the NASA code blog.

George Ortiz presented at WordCamp Birmingham today, and announced that PressTrends will be coming out of closed beta this week on Tuesday. The public launch will also bring the launch of a plugin for WordPress users that will offer statistics and analysis based on information gathered by all sites tracked by PressTrends. PressTrends has been in private beta since November, serving statistics to selected theme authors and shops.

Based on the brief demo Ortiz gave (see the photo below) the upcoming plugin will track a site’s posts, comments, and active plugins. Based on performance, Ortiz said, he hopes that the stats will be able to offer bloggers tips for how to improve the number of comments and success that bloggers see.

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Orman Clark is a job creator

Orman for president! He might be a little late announcing his candidacy, but he’d probably be a strong competitor. It looks like Orman Clark is hiring a UI/web designer for a full time position to help him create WordPress themes and design resources. From the listing:

Working alongside myself (as well as keeping developers in check), you’ll be responsible for producing some of the most pixel-perfect, trend-setting, awe-inspiring, ridiculously-pretty-yet-functional designs this industry is yet to see. Roughly translated, you’ll be working on WordPress themes, web applications and other cool stuff. 2012 will be awesome.

This sounds like an awesome job for a freelancer looking for some stability. I’d be tempted to apply myself if I had forty hours each week to commit. Hit up his post for more details and to submit your application.

Earlier this week Storify.com announced their brand new plugin for WordPress, which integrates with your site allowing you to use your account from within your Dashboard. It seems this particular feature is highly requested by Storify users who also blog with WordPress.

You might be wondering just who, or rather what, Storify are? In short, you would use Storify to drop in social media stories on your blog, instead of using something like Twitter Blackbird Pie. You also might have seen Storify used regularly by the White House, New York Times, Washington Post, and many others, gathering all the social going-ons and delivering it all in one place. To quote their about page:

Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media.

I like that. I like it a lot.

With the number of WordPress events with many attendees and chatter happening on social networks, I can imagine the WordPress community really jumping on board and taking advantage of Storify now.  Have you ever used Storify.com before? Does the plugin make it more appealing than it might be otherwise?