The Weekly WordPress News, Tutorials & Resources Roundup No.77

This week we saw the release of WordPress 4.0 RC1, you can download it now or check out Smashing Magazine’s guide to the new features.

One interesting post which caught my eye was this write up of the history of the theme company Press75, its an interesting look into one of the more successful theme shops, it’s success and ultimately its sale to new owners, complete with honest views and financial numbers. I love posts like this which give an insight that most people wouldn’t be brave enough to post.

Enjoy the news and have a great weekend!

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

• WordPress 4.0 Release Candidate – Download the first release candidate of WP 4.0!
• A Quick Tour Of WordPress 4.0 – Smashing Magazine provides an overview of the new features.
• A Brief History of a WordPress Theme Business – A great read by Jason Schuller about founding, growing and ultimately selling his theme company Press75.
• Matt Mullenweg Hosts Impromptu Q&A Session On Facebook – Matt popped into the Advanced WordPress FB group to answer people’s questions.
• ThemeForest and CodeCanyon introduce mandatory support and renewable packages – Welcome changes from Envato now require people to support their products and can charge for support packages.
• Post formats are slowly dying, and that’s okay – Brian’s thoughts on Post Formats within WordPress.
• For the Copy and Paste Programmers – Programming is about problem-solving, does copy and pasting others code undermine this ?
• BuddyPress 2.1 Beta 1 Now Available for Testing – Includes an improved @mentions system with auto-suggestion, sweet!
• 10 WordPress Blogs Well Worth the Read – WPLift included :)

Tutorials and How-Tos

• An Introduction to WordPress Custom Post Types: a Beginners Tutorial – Our beginners guide shows you how to create a custom post type within WordPress.
• An Introduction to WordPress Custom Taxonomies: a Beginners Tutorial – We continue the tutorial covering custom taxonomies.
• Tips for Saving and Retrieving Post Meta Data  – How to correctly handle Meta Data.
• Custom Meta Box Tabs in WordPress  – How to add tabbed boxes for meta data in WordPress.
• How to clean up your site structure – Yoast shows you how to tidy up and optimize your site
• How to Put Together a Mobile First, Performance Orientated WordPress Theme [Part 1] – Tips for building WordPress themes optimized for mobile devices.
• How to Put Together a Mobile First, Performance Orientated WordPress Theme [Part 2] – Part two of the tutorial.
• Adding Custom Fields To WordPress Programmatically – How to add meta fields in WordPress.
• How to Create Custom User Roles in WordPress – Follow this tutorial if you need to add custom roles to your WP site.

Resources & Freebies

• Customize the WordPress Login & Add Social Logins: Free & Premium Plugins – Big collection of login plugins to customize and add social media functionality to WP logins.
• Over 30 Hand-Picked WordPress Themes for Beauty Spas and Salons – WordPress theme collection for Spas and Salons.
• 20 Interesting Resources to Learn to Code Properly – List of sites to learn WordPress coding.