Today our favorite CMS celebrates its 20th anniversary 🎉. A special website dedicated to this event has been established by the WordPress team:
What started as a way to make a better blogging experience has grown into a vibrant open source project that powers an ever-growing percentage of the world’s websites.
https://wp20.wordpress.net
Let’s commemorate some historic milestones the WordPress project passed within two decades:
If you manage multiple themes with similar npm dependencies you should install npm packages globally and link them in your theme directories. First of all this saves a lot of disk space. But it also disburdens the upgrade process of development frameworks and toolkits that are used across projects.
1. Install packages globally by adding the “-g” flag:$ npm install -g package_1 package_2 package_3 package_4 etc.
2. Link the packages in your local theme directory/directories:
Bootstrap-Theme$ npm link bootstrap @popperjs/core ...
Material-Theme$ npm link material-components-web ...
FSE-Theme$ npm link autoprefixer css-loader sass sass-loader ...
Happy Coding!
This WordPress plugin we developed integrates the awesome Bootstrap Icons (MIT) library in the WordPress rich-text toolbar. Just the way it should be.
You can download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory:
Of course <i> Toolbar makes a great addition to our Bootstrap Starter Theme but since the Bootstrap library is not required and the plugin has no dependencies it will work with any other theme like our Material Starter Theme and our Full Site Editing Starter Theme.
A working and maintained Emoji Picker Plugin has been brought back to WordPress. Easily add Emojis from any rich-text block like Paragraphs, Headings, Lists, etc. without leaving the Editor.
Emojis are pictograms used in instant messengers, forums and web pages to reflect emotions. They have become so popular that Oxford Dictionaries has named “😂” word of the year 2015.
Nowadays all browsers and operating systems support the Emoji characters. When picking your Emojis from the Emoji Toolbar they will be added in raw format so no images are loaded on the frontend.
Block based Themes are coming to WordPress sooner or later and we just published the first “beta” release of our Full Site Editing Starter Theme.
If you see yourself as an early adopter who likes to get his/her hands dirty feel free to generate a copy via the Theme Generator: https://them.es/starter-fse
The source code is licensed under GPLv2 and has been published on GitHub.
Full Site Editing is a collection of features that allow to fully customize a WordPress site via a new site editor. Overall the Full Site Editing experience using block based Themes looks promising and already works pretty well but you need to be aware that not all features are final and that bugs will appear during development.
Now a 100% (!) PageSpeed score is achievable with WordPress. Even on Mobile.
At the current state (WordPress version <5.9) this Starter Theme is not recommended for production sites. Please use it at your own risk and provide technical feedback to the Gutenberg team if possible!
One more thing: Block based features are still in development and have not yet been fully integrated in WordPress core. In order to enable the Site editor you need to install the Gutenberg Plugin on your site.
Last year Github changed the name for newly created repositories: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-the-default-branch-for-newly-created-repositories-is-now-main
To align with this change we’ve decided to rename all our existing Github repositories.
If you run a local master branch of any of our repositories you need to update your local branch to main:
The Bootstrap Starter Theme has been updated to make use of Bootstrap 5 which has been released last week.
Feel free to test out the new Starter Theme by downloading it using the Theme Generator:
Heads up: If you still want to develop with the legacy Bootstrap 4 build just select the old version in the Generator!
All sources can also be found on GitHub: https://github.com/them-es/themes-starter
Over the last couple of months we’ve been working hard on the latest addition to our product line – a complete billing suite which integrates seamlessly into WordPress – and we’re happy to announce that the free version has been shipped to the WordPress Plugin directory
🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻
If you are working as a Freelancer or are responsible for Accounting and Billing in a small agency and are looking for an easy-to-use, future-proof PbD* solution to create Invoices, Quotes and basic Accounting records, go on and give Billy a try.
*Privacy by Design: Billy posts are privately published, by default.
The plugin will work with any modern WordPress theme that supports the Block editor.
Your valuable comments and suggestions are highly appreciated and will be examined by real people. Promised.
In the meantime we are getting the PRO add-on ready which will soon be is available now for purchase here: https://them.es/plugins/billy
Billy Pro has some really cool extra features and integrates CRM tools which may speed up your billing processes rapidly.
Since the “Pro” version will be available as an add-on, installing the free Plugin from the WordPress directory is required in any case – so nothing is ever lost by checking Billy “Free” out.
Stay tuned!
Find useful WordPress related code snippets in our new GitHub Gists repo:
Important notice: The Grunt config in our Starter Themes got replaced by gulp + webpack in the latest releases.
Gulp is quite similar to Grunt and allows to automate tasks like SASS > CSS compilation.
Webpack makes bundling of (Javascript) modules a breeze. The main advantage of bundling modules into a single file is that static assets get a smaller file size.
Including and bundling new Javascript modules is really easy and works out-of-the-box with the given configuration. A tutorial which explains how to include webpack modules to main.js can be found here: https://webpack.js.org/concepts/modules
