Weekly WordPress News: Martial Free Theme Launch, Business Opportunities in WP + More.

This week we launched a new theme named Martial on ThemeFurnace, it’s a clean blogging theme with a nice “Hero” header area and some custom widgets we built for the sidebar. There is an author widget which let’s you add a photo, some text and links to your social media profiles. We also added a popular / recent posts widget to let you draw visitor’s attention to your top posts.

You can download a free version from the WPLift themes section here.

Here’s the news!

WordPress News and Articles

• WordPress 4.4.2 – Security and Maintenance Release.
• The first WordPress REST API conference, in review – Brian covers the recent “Day of REST” conference in London.
• Business Opportunities in the Growing WordPress Economy – Joe covers some WP related business ideas.
• How We Talk About WordPress Influences Others – Tom discusses how we talk about WordPress.
• On Plugin Expectations – Don’t lose focus of your plugin’s purpose.
• Let’s Encrypt is Here – Open Source Security Certificates Available at SiteGround.
• More Data, Less Anxiety – Using A/B testing to make decisions.
• 6 Things We Learned In 2015 As a WordPress Agency – Tips for WordPress agencies.

Tutorials and How-Tos

• How To: Extend WooCommerce Reporting with Product Sales and Item Order Report Plugins – Add extra reporting to your WooCommerce site.
• Page Caching: Varnish vs Nginx FastCGI Cache – Which caching solution is best?
• 118+ free resources to learn JavaScript – Learn it we must.
• Working With Responsive Images In WordPress Core – Responsive images in WP.
• WordPress at Scale – Resource for scaling WordPress sites with large traffic.
• Design and Photoshop for WordPress: Tips & Best Practices – Tips for designing your themes in Photoshop.

Resources & Freebies

• Free Theme Release from WPLift: Martial, A Modern Blog Theme with WooCommerce Support – Read about our latest free theme.
• Make: A Free Drag and Drop WordPress Theme with Page Builder from The Theme Foundry – A brilliant free theme with Page Builder.
• 6 Top Custom Post Types Plugins for WordPress – Plugins for working with Custom Post Types.
• 60 Best CV & Resume WordPress Themes 2016 – Roundup of the best Resume themes for 2016.