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In this article, I’m going to have a thorough look at the most popular theme marketplace for WordPress themes. We’re going to try and understand what are the pros/cons of selling WordPress themes on ThemeForest. If you’re a devoted reader of the Freemius blog this post’s title may ring a bell for you. If it does, it’s probably because of a post we’ve published here in the past, titled: “Is CodeCanyon a Good Place to Sell Your Premium WordPress Plugin?”. As many of you know, ThemeForest is built & managed by the same company that runs CodeCanyon: Envato.
So if you’ve got premium WordPress themes you’d like to sell and are wondering if ThemeForest is a viable option for you – read on.
What’s ThemeForest?
Themeforest is a gigantic marketplace for various website designs. The offered options include static templates, as well as themes for different content management systems.
Not surprisingly, the WordPress oriented portion of Themeforest products is the largest and most popular one. In fact, at the time I’m writing this if you visit the ThemeForest homepage you’ll find WordPress mentioned in their main

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on? I'm Ionut Neagu. I studied computer science, and then in my final year of college I got into freelancing. I found some early success, so I kept doing that for about a year.
I thought that the next step would be expanding by starting an agency, and that clients would come to me on their own, simply because I had some business cards printed out and a business website on the Internet. Spoiler alert... it doesn't work like that.
I failed. The agency idea didn't go anywhere.
So I decided to pivot, and I launched ThemeIsle with a couple of friends. The goal was to give people access to some high-quality and simple to use WordPress themes. I had many hopes going into it. However, six months in, I was, again, ready to close the whole thing down.
But somehow we endured. We found the funds necessary to keep the ball rolling. One month after that, we hit $12,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Six months later, we'd reached $60,000/month.
We experienced our ups and downs, for sure. However, nowadays more than 500,000 people use our products actively. We average around $50,000 in revenue each month building cool WordPress themes, our most

Backups — it’s a daunting word, isn’t it? Just hearing it probably makes you think of your valuable time wasted on a bunch of complicated, manual processes involving databases and FTP directories. But all of this is a myth we’re happy to bust. The truth is this: thanks to modern plugins, it’s now fast and incredibly easy to make backups for WooCommerce — and restore them if the need arises.
You already know you need to be making backups of your store and its data. But what you might not know is how to create and manage those backups without giving yourself a headache.
Today we’re going to show you how. Read on to find out how you can get your store backed up for any situation, and how to properly use backups in the event of an emergency.
Why backups matter, and when you might need them
If you recently updated WooCommerce, you might have spotted a notice like this on your Plugins page:
Major updates like these are why it’s best have backups of your WooCommerce site. Although we expect the update process to go smoothly, we can’t always predict the outcome — especially if you’re using a lot of custom code, plugins from third

WPSass is a simple way to use Sass with WordPress via Node NPM Scripts in SCSS flavor. So, I am working on a WP REST API product launch, for which I had to build several simple HTML pages inside WordPress. All I had to do was compile Sass to CSS. Where I found WPGulp to be an overkill.
So, I went ahead and wrote a very simple package for just one thing. Sass to CSS conversion in WordPress development. It doesn’t even use Gulp. Use Sass with WordPress via Node NPM Scripts in SCSS flavor.
Use Sass with WordPress, Node Script in SCSS flavor.
Make sure you have node installed. If not download and install node.
→ STEP #1: Install NodeJS & NPM
After installing NodeJS you can verify the install of both NodeJS and Node Package Manager by typing the following commands. This step needs to be followed only once i.e. if you don’t have NodeJS installed. No need to repeat it ever again.
node -v
# v7.10.0

npm -v
# 4.2.0
→ Step #2. Download package.json
Download package.json file inside the root folder of your WordPress plugin or WordPress theme
If you have cURL installed then you can run the following command to download it in one go (just make sure you open the root folder

At the heart of every web application is a basic process: receive a request, return a response. With the right architecture, this process is able to serve everything from the smallest site all the way up to the very largest. Once sites start getting more complex, there’s quickly a need for two separate-yet-related abilities: scheduled tasks, and asynchronous processing of long-running tasks. WordPress includes the ability to do both of these through a system called wp-cron. It offers scheduled and repeating tasks (just like cron), and can be used for asynchronous processing. However, it has serious issues when running at scale, like unreliability, sequential processing, and compatibility with multisite. Replacements require complex setup processes, don’t integrate well with WordPress, or don’t scale for real production use.
To fix these problems, we built Cavalcade, a horizontally-scalable WordPress jobs processing solution. We’ve been running Cavalcade in production for almost two years, and it’s also in use on WordPress.org, so we’re confident in its stability and capability.
Limitations of wp-cron
Cavalcade originally came out of project requirements

At Pangolin, we’re rather enthusiastic about React. Pangolin was our first foray into the technology, and the more we’ve learned, the more confident we’ve become that React was the right call for us. However, getting started can be tough. We decided to create a boilerplate so that you can get React into your WordPress projects as painlessly as possible.
Introducing, WP Reactivate.
WP Reactivate is an open source WordPress plugin boilerplate that allows you to easily create React based applications to be rendered as a shortcode, widget, or settings page.
It uses Webpack to easily compile our next-generation Javascript into ES5 and bundle our modules into a single file.
We’ve also allowed shortcode attributes and widget options to easily be used in your React application by using wp_localize_script to make the data available as a global object in the JS. Check out Quick Start in the README to see how this is achieved. We’ve taken care to make sure that JS assets are only loaded when the shortcode or widget is active on the page.
Also included is a Settings Page endpoint where we show you how to update a setting via the default REST API Settings endpoint.

You may have shopped online many times, chose from hundreds of products and paid using your credit card. If you are familiar enough, you have reasons behind opinions like preferring Amazon over eBay. But have you ever imagined, from where all these products, different pricing, different colors, and sizes are coming from? More importantly, how are all these things are getting managed? People usually create online shops and marketplaces to do businesses like that, then they grow. This industry has boomed because of the low cost of launching and ease of maintenance. It is so easy that even you could start your own version of Amazon or eBay right away.
If you are interested in building marketplaces, then there is a reward waiting at the end of this post.
Let’s describe the system behind it a little bit. An online marketplace is essentially an ecommerce platform often created by an individual or an organization, where multiple third parties come together to publish products and services for the purpose of selling. Online shopping has grown exponentially over the last decade due to the convenience, simplicity, and ease it provides.
Creating an Online Marketplace
It is a booming industry,

In this article, we explore 11 of the most helpful add-ons for Elementor, developed by several talented third-party developers. Elementor is an extremely extensive plugin, especially if you compare it with other single-purpose plugins like Hide Comments. With it, you have the ability to manage a wide array of WordPress functionality. This includes customizing your sites images, forms, sliders and so on.
Even though you can do a lot with our plugin, some functionality is bound to be left out. This is where 3rd party plugins come-in handy. While our internal team has to stay focused on our roadmap and key developments, external developers can more freely sidetrack and develop imaginative features, like a typing effect headline for example.
Extending Elementor is something we are very interested in encouraging. That's why we invest a lot of efforts on helping add-on developers in various ways. These include releasing a well-documented API, creating a beta-tester group and engaging in responsive communication with other developers on our GitHub page.
I'm happy to say it worked. Today there are numerous helpful Elementor addons out there. These add-ons have been created by highly skilled

Today is 14 years from the very first release of WordPress. The interface I’m using to write this (Calypso) is completely indistinguishable from what WordPress looked and worked like even a few years ago. Fourteen years in, I’m waking up every day excited about what’s coming next for us. The progress of the editor and CLI so far this year is awesome, and I’m looking forward to that flowing into improvements for customization and the REST API. Thanks as always to Mike for kicking off this crazy journey, all the people chipping in to make WordPress better, and Konstantin and Erick for surprising me with the cool cake above.

Speaking of which, we too want to look into all that craze, but do so in a bit different manner – by showing you the new stuff in action. And “in action” is the keyword here. What follows is our run-through of all the new features coming in WordPress 4.8 + how they actually work:
TOC:
(By the way; earlier this year, we published a roundup post titled, Our Hopes and Fears for WordPress 4.8. It’s a compilation of answers that we got from the community during the last WCUS 2016 in Philadelphia. Wondering how much of the community’s hopes and fears have been addressed in the new WordPress? – check it out.)
Here’s the most exciting stuff coming in WordPress 4.8
1. New and improved text widget
Like it or not, the current default text widget in WordPress is not the most useful thing for the regular user. It supports only raw text (or HTML code) and gives you no formatting tools at all.
The new text widget is set to change that with the inclusion of (nearly the same) visual editor that we’re used to from the post/page editing screen. Quite similarly, you will be able to switch between Visual and Text when editing widget content. And, yes, you

Sometimes we do not realize the time we spend in performing certain repetitive tasks in our daily lives. For example, to share in the different social networks the new posts that we publish in our blog in WordPress. And it is not something that is done quickly, given the amount of RRSS existing. But thanks to the service offered by IFTTT you will have more time for you. You know that from Silo Creativo one of our priorities in optimizing our work to become much more productive. And for this, we want to show you how to use IFTTT and apply it in WordPress to automate all those repetitive tasks and better use your time
What is IFTTT?
The acronym itself tells us: If This Then That. It is a free online service that allows us to automate specific tasks. That is, an action will be triggered when certain conditions are met in an app, online service or device. These actions-reactions were formerly known as recipes, but now IFTTT calls them Applets.
But then, how do the old recipes differ from the new Applets? Before, with a recipe an action provoked a reaction. And now with the new Applets, an action is completed with one or multiple reactions. Unfortunately, the Applets service with multiple

The WordPress maintenance mode page is something that is automatically shown to visitors temporarily when you make updates on your site, such as updating plugins, themes, or core. This is to keep from anything appearing broken or out of sync while files are being patched. However, there are a couple issues with this. The first is that sometimes your WordPress site might get stuck in maintenance mode. This essentially takes down your whole site until you manually fix it. The second is that the default maintenance page/message isn’t styled, looks rather ugly, and is limited in its messaging to your visitors and customers. This might not be the best for your branding or reputation. Today we’ll explore some ways to resolve these issues. WordPress Maintenance Mode
The WordPress maintenance mode is a great little feature that is built into core and was introduced in version 3.0. Whenever you update a plugin, theme, or your WordPress installation, the following message is shown to your visitors until the update operations have completed.
“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”
During the update and installation process, some backend

WordPress is now 14-years old. The CMS has come a long way from a simple blog application. Today, WordPress powers corporate portals, social media websites and of course blogs! Despite the challenges from emerging CMS and specialized publication platforms, WordPress continues to grow. The numbers suggest that it now powers 27% of the Internet — no small feat for an application that didn’t receive much love in its initial years. Here is a short overview of how WordPress fared in the last year. And yes, there is a special gift at the end for all fellow WordPressers.
Happenings in the Year!
Controversies
Matt Mullenweg refused to participate in President Trump’s program of creating a Muslim Registry.
Jetpack ignites controversy with its alternate marketplace for free themes.
WordPress.com Business users could now install third party themes and plugins.
Matt Mullenweg launched WordPress Growth Council to make a tank-tank for individuals and organizations.
WordPress Updates
WordPress has updated its recommended requirements. The list include PHP 7.0 or higher, MySQL 5.6 (or MariaDB 10.0) and HTTPS support.
WooCommerce undergoes a brand reorganization as WooThemes redirects

As first introduced in the Image Widget Merge Proposal, WordPress 4.8 includes media widgets (#32417) for not only images (#39993) but also video (#39994) and audio (#39995), on top of an extensible base for introducing additional media widgets in the future, such as for galleries and playlists. To quote [40640]: The last time a new widget was introduced, Vuvuzelas were a thing, Angry Birds started taking over phones, and WordPress stopped shipping with Kubrick. Seven years and 17 releases without new widgets have been enough, time to spice up your sidebar!
Since widgets are a very old part of WordPress (since 2.2), widgets in core have been very much entirely built using PHP with some Ajax sprinkled on top. In the time since WP_Widget was introduced in 2.8, WordPress has made dramatic shifts toward developing interfaces in JavaScript, including with the Customizer in 3.4 and the Media Library in 3.5, and more recently with the focus on the REST API and the editor (Gutenberg).
Given that the media widgets are naturally interfacing with the media library JS, it is necessary that the media widgets make use of JavaScript to construct their UI instead of relying on PHP. The media widgets

Should I translate my website? That’s a question many business owners ask themselves. For good reason. The Internet is bringing the world together. In an increasingly international business environment, offering your website in other languages can be a worthy business strategy.
English has long dominated the World Wide Web. Still does. As of the moment of this writing, the English languages makes up a little more than 26 percent of the Internet. That means, if your site is in that particular language, it appeals to the majority of online users out there.
The bad news: it neglects the other 74 percent. That doesn’t seem right, does it? After all, that’s millions of users. Plus, it’s a growing group. While the English-speaking world is already well connected to the web, other languages like Chinese, Arabic and French still have millions of new users to add to the mix. A huge opportunity for growth in the future.
In short, everyone who is doing business on the net (and who isn’t these days?) should consider serving their site in more than one language.
However, for some types of businesses it makes even more sense than for others. For that reason, in this

WordPress 4.8 is officially the best WordPress 2017 has seen! Users will receive new and refined features focused on Editing and Customizing their sites while developers will be able to take advantage of 109 enhancements and features added. Let’s look at the many improvements coming in 4.8… Media Widgets
Not one, not two, but three new media widgets make their way into core. It’s like the AV crew just showed up and now the party can really begin. You get an audio widget. You get an image widget. You get a video widget. Check under your seat, media widgets for everyone!
Media Widgets for Images, Video, and Audio
As first introduced in the Image Widget Merge Proposal, WordPress 4.8 includes media widgets (#32417) for not only images (#39993) but also video (#39994) and audio (#39995), on top of an extensible base for introducing additional media widgets in the future, such as for galleries and playlists. To quote [40640]: The last time a new widget was introduced, Vuvuzelas … Continue reading Media Widgets for Images, Video, and Audio
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<blockquote

Below is a summary of the discussion from yesterday’s JavaScript chat (agenda): Introducing a JS module pattern to WordPress
@omarreiss helped lead the discussion and kick-started the conversation by opening a detailed and thoughtful ticket in trac (#40834) which introduces modules, their goals and how we could go about using them in core. The discussion was around considerations specific to WordPress and a need for modularity was mentioned – @westonruter called out this need for the Customizer, see #30277. Ideas for code that could be extracted into modules included quickedit, core date utilities and wp.media.view.FocusManager.
The decision was made to move in the direction of using Webpack (and ES6 imports) as our bundler of choice, and to work first on switching out browserfy in our current build chain.
Choosing a future JavaScript framework
Discussion started on choosing a new framework for use in core. The main frameworks discussed so far were React and Vue. Attendees shared their hope, goals and criteria for choosing a new framework and mentioned: stability, longevity, mature, well-adopted, proven in a WordPress context, accommodating to accessibility requirements,

1. Create a blacklist to prevent site access from certain IP addresses.Websites are made to have visitors. However, those guests can occasionally become a problem. Sometimes, there are certain site visitors that are no longer welcome. Htaccess files can be used to block those particular visitors. This is also useful to keep bots away from your site. The code used to create your blacklist is as follows: <limit get="GET" post="POST" put="PUT">
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 123.456.789
deny from 93.121.788
deny from 223.956.789
deny from 128.456.780
</limit>
You can add as many IP addresses as you want this way to keep your site free of troublemakers. If someone is spamming your site, this little piece of code is your new best friend.
2. Create a redirect while performing site maintenance.
While you’re performing site maintenance, you want visitors to be redirected to a page that lets them now what’s going on and maybe when your site is expected to be open to visitors again. You can use the htaccess file to accomplish this using the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$

Way back in 2013, the WordPress 3.4 Green release introduced the Customizer to the masses. If you’re up for a trip down memory lane, here’s the announcement post over on Make WordPress. Not without its fair share of naysayers, the Customizer looked to, and still does, bring accessibility and instant feedback to visual changes you make on your WordPress site. Its humbler beginnings focused on smaller things like changing your site background color or changing your site title, but to anyone who really understood what it represented, it meant WordPress users would have:
The ability to preview changes before making them go live on their site.
A foundation for plugin and theme developers to deliver settings and options according to WordPress best practices.
Needless to say, the underlying value of the Customizer has helped it navigate its teething pains and become a feature that is both meaningful and good to use.
In this post, we’re going to have a look at different ways anyone can leverage the power of the Customizer to extend their WordPress site. We’ll touch here and there on a few development techniques, but rather than give you play-by-play tutorials, we want

Want to know some cool WordPress facts? WordPress turn 14 years old today, so we thought what best way to celebrate the world’s most popular website building software than to create a top 25 facts about WordPress infographic. Here are 25 most interesting facts about WordPress that you may not know. You can click on the image below to view the infographic or keep reading the text version
1. WordPress is Older Than Twitter and Facebook
The first version of WordPress was released on May 27, 2003. This makes WordPress older than both Facebook and Twitter.
2. The Name – WordPress
Christine Selleck Tremoulet, a prolific blogger and a friend of Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress), suggested the name WordPress.
3. WordPress Powers Nearly 27% of All Websites
According to W3Techs web technologies surveys, WordPress currently powers nearly 27% of all websites.
4. WordPress Dominates 76.4% of CMS Market Share
According to Wappalyzer, WordPress dominates the content management software usage with 76.4% market share.
5. WordPress is Open Source and Free
WordPress is released under GNU GPL license, which allows anyone in the world to download and use it. The source code is freely

[To better illustrate our core value of community service, we are sharing an internal post from Senior Front End Engineer Derrick Koo, who recently made his first code contribution to the WordPress project. We hope his story encourages more people who are “on the fence” about contributing to take the plunge and start giving back to the WordPress community. —Jake Goldman, President & Founder] Contributing code to WordPress Core can be intimidating for a first-timer. With thousands of tickets out there, it can be hard to know where to begin. With development out in the open, it takes a lot of courage to submit a first WordPress patch.
For the benefit of new and aspiring contributors, I’m sharing my experience making my first code contribution to WordPress. Starting with little knowledge of the Core contribution process, I embarked on a journey that resulted in one line of CSS, and my first Core props.
Find a ticket
One day, WordPress lead developer (and fellow 10upper) Helen Hou-Sandí asked me to investigate a relatively straightforward browser bug in the Twenty Seventeen theme.
Tickets are just bug reports (or potential enhancements) in the WordPress

There are a lot of options you have as a website owner when it comes to running speed tests to check performance. Previously we took an in-depth look at the Pingdom tool. Today we want to dive into how to better use and understand the data from the popular website speed test tool GTmetrix. Tools like this rely on grading systems and scores, along with warnings of what might be wrong on your site. Sometimes these can be downright confusing, and so taking some time to interpret what they actually mean, can help you not just increase your scores, but also the performance of your site, which is what really matters. GTmetrix
GTmetrix was developed by GT.net, a company based out of Canada, as a tool for their hosting customers to easily determine the performance of their site. Besides Pingdom, it is probably one of the most well known and used speed testing tools on the web today! In fact, the reason we are writing this is that we have a lot of Kinsta customers that are always asking us how to follow the advice they see on their GTmetrix reports. Compared to other developer tools, GTmetrix is pretty easy to use and the beginner can pick it up pretty quickly. It uses a combination of Google

None of the WordPress migration or backup and restore plugins can handle huge sites reliably – you’ll run into timeout issues etc. Here’s how to migrate your huge sites reliably. The guide below presumes you have an origin WordPress server and a destination WordPress-ready (PHP+MySQL+Nginx) server. Use SSH and Screen
You need to be able to SSH onto your server to do this reliably. You also need to be able to rely on the process completing, even if you switch your computer off or your session gets terminated (like if your network connection drops). Screen is what we need for that purpose – it creates a detachable screen inside SSH that will keep running even when we disconnect from the server.
To use screen, just run:
screen
(then hit enter a few times)
You can then run commands then hit CTRL+A CTRL+D and it will disconnect from the ‘screen’.
You can reattach detached screens using:
screen -r
If there’s more than one detached screen, it’ll instead list the detached screens like this:
And you can reconnect by copying one of the session identifiers into a command like this:
screen -d -r 4674.pts-3.p1
Create a MySQL backup reliably
This technique

I am a road warrior who has racked up several million miles over the past decade, and since I’m also working more-than-full-time running Automattic (a totally distributed company) and leading WordPress I need the ability to be productive wherever I can find a comfortable place to sit. I carry a backpack with me almost all the time and obsessively tweak and iterate what’s in it, which lead to posts in 2014 and 2016. This is the latest edition, and I hope you enjoy it. This is a grey wool buff, which works as a scarf, a hat, or an eye cover if I’m trying to sleep. I tried this out because of one of Tynan’s also-great gear posts.
Theraband resistance band, which I aspirationally carry around to help stretch in the morning. Hat tip: Jesse Schwartzman of this blog post fame.
Some generic Maui Jim polarized sunglasses with rubber nose pads, which I like for running or hiking because they don’t move around or slip even when you’re hot.
Tzukuri “Ford” + charger, a super-cool Audrey company that is like a combination of a Tile and cool sunglasses. They connect via bluetooth to your phone and can notify you when you leave them behind, or use the