Background The Astra theme is well respected and has more than a million active installs. The team is very talented and contributes to the WordPress project. On Friday August 7th the Astra theme was suspended from the WordPress theme directory for 5 weeks. A review found affiliate IDs were added to up-sale links. These were…
I am writing this post on the history and current state of WordPress themes. Since I’ve been using WordPress there has been a big shift in themes and I think another one is underway. I’m looking at WordPress themes because today, as much as every before, it is important to pick a good theme. In…
Beaver Builder and Elementor are the two most popular and frequently recommended page builders in the WordPress ecosystem. For years they were locked in a page builder war for the hearts and minds of site builders. In April 2018 the stats were compelling enough that I called it, Elementor had won a decisive victory. The…
The WordPress Fire Drill Remember when you were in school and there would be the occasional fire drill? When the alarm went off, everyone would line up and file outside while the Fire Department watched. Those fire drills served a purpose: to make sure that we knew what to do in the case of an…
Introduction In this post I want to look at some gotchas when using Gutenberg, the new WordPress block editor. The demonstration is very visual and I’m not going to try to capture it all in screenshots. I recommend watching the video for that. Here I’ll review and summarize the issues. To illustrate the issues, I’m…
Last updated 1/1/2020 (pricing updated) A year and a half ago, when Pippin Williams wrote the authoritative review of WordPress page builders, there were several strong contenders. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have seen that the field quickly narrowed to two: Beaver Builder and Elementor. These two giants in the page builder arena have…
My Thoughts on Gutenberg For the past couple of years, we have been hearing about how hard it is to break into the WordPress theme and plugin markets. I think there will be a large shakeup with WordPress 5.0. Plugins especially will have to scramble to be compatible and take advantage of Gutenberg. Some will…
We are all familiar with FOMO marketing – playing on the consumer’s Fear Of Missing Out to quickly move them to purchase. This might be your standard sale – “buy now or wait until next year to get a good price,” or it might be the even more effective “one time only special.” When you…
