Publish: A Free Minimal and Responsive WordPress Theme

I’m pleased to announce that Publish is now available for download in the WordPress.org themes directory. Publish is a theme I’ve been working on for quite a while, started back last year and then released to GitHub in February this year. When I started contributing to _s, I did a complete revamp of the theme, but kept the main intent – a minimal blogging theme with focus on the content.

Publish is ideal for single-author blogs, but supports multi-author blogs too. To change the “logo” Gravatar, you’ll need to change the main administrator e-mail address via Settings – General. Publish supports navigation menus, has a sidebar for your widgets, implements threaded comments, has support for various post formats and the sticky post. It has also got a responsive layout, with a drop-down menu for mobile devices. Other features, including post thumbnails, are on their way, so hang in there, or submit a patch!

Give it a spin and let me know what you think. Since theme reviews are live on WordPress.org, I’d really appreciate one, whether good or bad. If you would like to contribute to Publish, feel free to open pull requests or issues on GitHub.

The WordPress Settings API Video

Here’s the video of my session about the Settings API in WordPress from WordCamp Sofia 2012. You can find the slides and notes/transcript in a post I published earlier: The WordPress Settings API.

If you’re interested in making the Settings API better and less painful to use, please chime in to the discussion on this core ticket: #18285. Have fun!

WordPress.org Plugin and Theme Reviews

As reported by Otto, plugin and theme reviews on WordPress.org are live, and here’s a demo! This allows plugin and theme users to not only give a one-to-five star rating, but to also provide some actual feedback, of what they liked or disliked about that particular theme or plugin. It provides an extra channel of communication between the users and developers, which makes it easier to understand those “one stars.”

Thank you Scott Reilly and the team, for finally making this happen!

WordPress Community Summit Wrap-up

The summit is over and the feeling is amazing. I’m staying in Tybee for a few more days, to have some fun and make my long travel worth the effort, not that the summit was not worth it :)

WordPress Community Summit

The event took place in the Tybee Wedding Chapel, which is 99% awesome and 1% creepy. Around a hundred people attended the summit, though some couldn’t make it because of Hurricane Sandy, that hit some airport areas and caused flights to be cancelled. In any case, most seemed to have followed the summit online and notes and summaries have been (and are still being) posted to the event site.

It was the first time I’ve been to an unconference event and I really loved it. There were many discussions varying from core enhancements, themes and plugins, updates and i18n, to documentation improvements and women in WordPress. Quite a few action points were written down and hopefully will be followed up in the coming weeks. The ones I’m most excited about contributing to Core and making WordCamp.org more open, and a better place for WordCamp organizers and attendees.

I met a great deal of folks who I only knew by Gravatars and their WordPress.org handles, hand a fun time hanging around with them before, during and after the event, chit chatting about WordPress, travel and life. I’ll be back in Moscow on Friday, hopefully Sandy will be out of the way by then.

There’s a summary of the morning discussions and the afternoon discussions with action points published by Mark Jaquith. Other and more in-depth summaries will be posted on the summit blog in the coming days. There’s also a new “make site” on WordPress.org called meta which will help improve the WordPress.org network itself.

WordCamp Sofia 2012 was a Blast!

WordCamp Sofia 2012 was held this weekend and it was awesome. Over two hundred attendees, over ten sessions, a speakers dinner and an after-party. Big shout-out goes to Nikolay, Veselin, Iliya and Mario, for putting the whole thing together, and making such a great event.

WordCamp Sofia 2012

It was a long weekend for me with all the flights, but it was totally worth the travel. I stayed at the beautiful Grand Hotel Sofia, which was close to the event venue — the Telerik Academy in the Wedding Mall.

The event was split into two tracks — a users track and a developers track. My friend and coworker Sara Rosso gave the first, not too technical session, about some of the things WordPress can do, which was amazing. My session about the Settings API was the last one in the developers track. All the other sessions in between were in Bulgarian, so I couldn’t understand much, but from what I heard, some of them were terrific.

I met a lot of people at the event and made a lot of friends. Some of them were people with whom I interacted for a long time on Twitter, others were new friends, working on interesting projects around WordPress. I was surprised to see how big the Sofia WordPress community is, especially compared to Moscow.

The after party was great for non-work related chatter, found out a great deal of interesting stuff about the culture in Sofia and Bulgaria. Was thrilled to see how well Mario and Petya can play the piano :)

I hope to see everyone again next year, and maybe a couple more sessions in English, since most of whom I met with were fluent in English. Thanks again to the organizers, sponsors, speakers and everyone who attended the event. Can’t wait to see the videos pop up on WordPress.tv!

Image courtesy of Margarit Ralev. You can find a lot more photos from the event in the WordCamp Sofia 2012 gallery on Facebook.

The WordPress Settings API

This weekend at WordCamp Sofia 2012, I gave a session about the Settings API, which is a way to create simple, flexible and secure options pages for your WordPress plugins and themes. The session covered the basic usage of the API along with a few more advanced topics. Here are my slides and notes/transcript.

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