The Weekly WordPress News, Tutorials & Resources Roundup No.76

This week we did a theme release over at ThemeFurnace, named “Exposition” its a clean blogging theme aimed at long-form writers and photographers. I designed something simple with a clean layout and typography as we had been receiving requests for more blogging themes.

We will also be releasing this in the WordPress directory – just amending a few things and will be submitting next week. I have been impressed how the directory has been going – theme reviews are taking a lot quicker now, around 3 weeks and the selection of featured themes is really nice – they are now picked on merit rather than as a reward for the theme reviewers ( the featured themes used to be a bit ropey ).

Check out the theme here and grab yourself a membership for $49 which now includes 13 themes. ( Don’t forget we also have a 20% discount coupon here on WPLift. )

Have a good weekend ( bank holiday if in UK :) ) On with the news …

This is our weekly WordPress news roundup post, you can view previous news roundups on this tag. Join our 8000 followers on Twitter for more frequent WordPress news throughout the week, Facebook page or even on Pinterest.

WordPress News and Articles

• Why Bootstrap is a bad fit for WordPress Themes – Agreed.
• Testimonials: increase your visitor’s trust –  Yoast talks about testimonials and their power at increasing trust.
• WPChat Relaunches as a Forum Dedicated to WordPress – A nice looking new forum dedicated to WordPress.
• Under the Hood of Semplice: A New Portfolio System Based on WordPress – Semplice is a portfolio hosting service built on WordPress, looks good.
• A Pakistan-Based Developer Is Building A Huge House For His Family After Selling One WordPress Theme – Video with the author of the Avada theme, top seller on ThemeForest.
• 7 months as a Ghost – The reasons this blogger moved back to WP from Ghost.

Tutorials and How-Tos

• How To Write A Blog Post That Converts: 5 Tips for Success – Ariel covers some solid advice on blogging for conversions.
• Top 8 Best Ways to Set Up a Testing Environment for WordPress – Options for creating a local WP testing environment – highly recommended if you create plugins or themes.
• Learning To Use WordPress Hooks – Solid intro to WP hooks on the ElegantThemes blog.
• Add a Beautiful Table of Contents to Your WordPress Posts – Overview of the Table of Contents plugin, great for stories / FAQs etc.
• Ultimate Guide to Develop Your First WordPress Plugin  – Good guide to creating WP plugins.

Resources & Freebies

• Nelio A/B Testing: Optimize Your WordPress Website to Increase Goal Conversion Rates – Joe reviews a cool plugin to help optimize your WordPress site with A/B testing.
• Increase Conversions with Customer Testimonials – 30 Free & Paid WordPress Testimonial Plugins – A roundup of plugins to add testimonials to your site, proven conversion boosters.
• 35 Clean & Professional WordPress Themes for Accountants & Law Firms – Our roundup of themes for accountants and lawyers.
• Customizer Library – This looks great for people making use of the theme customizer.