<div class="rss-widget"><ul><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/adler-a-unique-personal-blogging-theme-for-wordpress' title='If you’re on the hunt for a new WordPress blogging theme but the designs are all starting to look too similar, you may want to check out Adler. It is one of the more unique themes to land in the WordPress.org directory in recent months with its uncommon typography choices and bright bursts of color. Adler was created by Romanian theme designer George Olaru of Pixelgrade. Olaru takes a unique approach to the popular fullscreen splash page style that many themes have adopted for a homepage layout, overlaying it with a serif font title paired with a hand-script style subtitle.  Styling for single posts is similar to the home page with the featured image serving as a fullscreen background for the title. Scroll further down and the post content is centered with no distracting sidebar widgets. Adler combines two unusual Google font choices in the design: Droid Sans Mono for paragraph text and Permanent Marker for blockquotes and subtitles. Images in posts overhang the text column to create a strong visual impact.  Adler’s files include a tiny leaf icon that is tastefully applied on the home and archive templates to separate posts. The effect is minimalist without appearing to be stark. The theme also includes support for Font Awesome icons.  The necessity for large featured images can sometimes be a drawback for users when selecting a blogging theme. After testing Adler, I found that the design doesn’t break if you don’t have a large featured image assigned to a post. In fact, posts lacking a featured image look just as nice as those that include one, so you’re not tied down to hunting for one every time you publish. Adler supports three menu locations for a primary, footer, and social menu. It includes support for one footer widget area, which spans three columns. There are just two options available in the native customizer that allow you to change the background color or add a background image. Adler was created to be a personal blogging theme and the design instantly communicates: “I have something to say.” Check out the live demo on Pixelgrade.com to see it in action. If you like what you see, you can download Adler for free from WordPress.org.'>WPTavern: Adler: A Unique Personal Blogging Theme for WordPress</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/new-wordpress-plugin-automates-slack-team-invitations' title=' Generating Slack team invitations can become rather tedious when you’re managing a large group of people – particularly when the team is open to almost anyone. In the case of a company or organization, a Slack admin can use the feature that permits anyone with an email from a specified domain to be accepted on signup. However, this feature isn’t applicable to teams that are made up of people with diverse email domains and associations. Julio Potier, a French security consultant and prolific plugin developer, created a solution for this particular scenario. As an admin on the WordPressFR.slack.com team, which is open to all French WordPress users, he needed a more convenient way to allow new signups. The team has 27 channels and 250+ members with 200 added in the first week. Julio decided to create a plugin to make the invitation process easier in the future. The new Slack Lazy Invitation plugin automates the sending of Slack team invitations by adding a frontend signup on your WordPress site.  The user simply enters an email address and the invitation is sent. A Slackbot confirmation will appear on the page.  To configure the plugin for your Slack team all you need to do is enter the group name and the security token for your Slack invitations. As this token is not easy to find, Julio wrote a bookmarklet that will automatically capture it for you. From the plugin’s settings page you can drag and drop the bookmarklet into your browser toolbar on the invitation page found at: https://YOURGROUP.slack.com/admin/invites.  Once the plugin is configured, the invitation signup page will be available at example.com/wp-login.php?action=slack-invitation. If you’re using either the wp-reCaptcha or google-captcha plugins, Slack Lazy Invitation will automatically add protection to the form.  The plugin also includes support for the SF Move Login plugin, so that the invitation form is available at /slack-invitation instead of the much longer URL. This slug can be changed in the SF Move Login settings panel. In the future Julio plans to add support for adding invite pages for multiple groups. I tested Slack Lazy Invitation and found that it works exactly as advertised. If you have a large Slack team with open invites, this plugin will save you quite a bit of time. Download it for free from WordPress.org.'>WPTavern: New WordPress Plugin Automates Slack Team Invitations</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/meet-peepso-buddypress-newest-competitor-in-open-source-social-networking-for-wordpress' title='When the first BuddyPress beta arrived on the scene in 2008, there was nothing like it for WordPress. Facebook was still relatively new to the public and Twitter was just a couple years old. A plugin that transformed WordPress into a social network was an exciting prospect. After seven years of virtually unchallenged dominance among WordPress social networking plugins, BuddyPress has a new competitor. PeepSo, trademarked “Your people. Your community. Your way,” is the newest contender in WordPress’ open source social networking plugin niche. Unlike BuddyPress, which for the most part has improved slowly through community contribution, the PeepSo project is run more like a startup and is 100% self-funded. It is currently being marketed as an alternative to BuddyPress. You&#039;ve been asking for it. An alternative to BuddyPress. It&#039;s here! http://t.co/Uxd7AQcnCL #wordpress #buddypress pic.twitter.com/yYRI5pnXJR — peepso (@peepsowp) July 22, 2015  The PeepSo plugin, available on WordPress.org, offers many of the same core features as BuddyPress but was launched with a collection of commercial add-on plugins for things like photos, videos, moods, tagging, locations, friends, and messages. A groups feature is noticeably absent from Peepso but planned for version 1.4. Current extensions seem to focus primarily on adding multimedia features to the activity stream.  Who is Behind PeepSo? PeepSo was founded by Merav Knafo, owner of JomSocial, Joomla’s most popular social networking solution. Knafo, a veteran in the Joomla community, brings a unique perspective on the differences between the Joomla and WordPress markets for social networking software. As Joomla captures roughly 7% to WordPress’ 60% of the CMS market share, Knafo saw an opportunity to break into a larger market. “As a business owner, it’s my job to pay attention to trends in my industry and unfortunately, Joomla has been on a downward trend since 2009,” Knafo said. “Many of our JomSocial customers have asked us to ‘make JomSocial for WordPress,’ because they wanted to switch to WordPress but there was nothing like JomSocial for WordPress. Finally, I could not ignore the trend nor the requests and decided to get into the WordPress market as well.” Knafo hopes to parlay her experience with JomSocial into her new venture with PeepSo. “We stuck with Joomla for almost 10 years now and took JomSocial to a whole new level when we took over in 2013,” she said. “I am very proud of what we’ve accomplished with JomSocial and super excited to implement all this experience and knowledge into PeepSo.” How PeepSo Got Started The idea for PeepSo was incubating for a few years before Knafo had the opportunity to execute it. “Brad Bihun used to be a customer of ours at iJoomla, and then he switched to WordPress,” she said. “We happened to live very close to each other in Encinitas, California, so we met up and suggested I’d created ‘JomSocial for WordPress.’ “At that time, I didn’t even own JomSocial and I was too busy with all the iJoomla products. Then a couple of years later, I acquired JomSocial and he approached me again, but once again, I was just too busy. A year and a half into JomSocial acquisition, when things got a lot smoother, I finally said yes, he introduced me to the SpectrOM team, and we got started.” Although the plugin appears to be marketed as a direct competitor to BuddyPress, Knafo said that it wasn’t created specifically for that purpose but rather to give WordPress users a more robust array of options for building networks. “Obviously we felt there was a need for another product as an alternative to BuddyPress,” she said. “Leaving users with just one option is rarely a good idea, people like options. “We don’t necessarily plan to take on BuddyPress, we just want to offer those who want an alternative, a product that is of high quality and that is being continuously developed. Ultimately, people will choose the solution that serves them best. We are just getting started, but we have big plans and an excellent track record doing this successfully with Joomla.” The Differences Between PeepSo and BuddyPress I asked Knafo what her team perceives to be the most notable differences between PeepSo and its more established competitor, based on what they found to be lacking in BuddyPress. “I’d say the look and feel is a lot more modern in PeepSo right off the bat with no special themes needed,” she said. “The features are more up-to-date with the latest and greatest features of big social networks, such as Facebook – from cover photos to ‘likes’ and so on.” BuddyPress core developers have opted to leave the aforementioned features to separate third-party plugins as opposed to packing them into core. With certain features, i.e. photos and videos, PeepSo does the same, except the add-ons are supported by PeepSo core developers. “PeepSo is lightweight and allows you to only add features that you need, to keep it lightweight,” Knafo said. “PeepSo’s code is so beautiful it made our developers shed tears of joy when they first saw it – that said, I never looked at BuddyPress’s code, nor would I be able to tell whether it’s beautiful or not.” In terms of code differences, PeepSo’s development team cited what they believe to be a few major differences between their codebase and BuddyPress:  All object oriented – from the PHP to the Javascript Built with a templating engine similar to what you see in shopping cart systems. This allows use with virtually any theme. The JavaScript uses an extension mechanism, allowing add-ons to extend the abilities of the postbox. We made the database queries as optimized as possible to allow for greater scalability.  “We have a track record creating and supporting a very large social networking application (JomSocial),” Knafo told the Tavern. “We know the ins and out of this business. We may be new to WordPress, but we are veterans when it comes to social networking applications.” Where is PeepSo Headed? The PeepSo development team, guided by lead architect Dave Jesch of SpectrOM, has an aggressive roadmap for improving the plugin’s core and adding more features via commercial plugins. “Our main goal is to add more plugins to PeepSo, you can see our road map here. We’ll start with a chat plugin, custom profile fields and then groups, events, pages and so forth,” Knafo said. The team also hopes to partner with other developers who want to create PeepSo plugins. I asked her if the team plans to create a hosted PeepSo platform for community managers. Knafo said it isn’t totally out of the question but isn’t high on the priority list at the moment. “We tried to do this with JomSocial but we had a hard time finding the right hosting solution for it,” she said. “That said, we are open to the idea, a bit down the road.” PeepSo is just getting started and has not yet attracted many customers. However, Knafo’s experience of successfully running an open source project for the past 10 years has given her the determination to break into a new and unfamiliar market. “The sales have been as can be expected this early after the initial release, not too shabby to start with but we expect whole lot more sales as the WordPress users become aware of PeepSo, download the free version and give it a try,” she said. “We’re here for the long haul and we take no shortcuts in doing this right. We know it’s a huge undertaking; there is so much more to do. I am confident that investing in WordPress was the right move, I’ve been very pleased by the feedback and the community. My hope is that WordPress developers will join us and create awesome plugins to take PeepSo to the next level.”'>WPTavern: Meet PeepSo: BuddyPress’ Newest Competitor in Open Source Social Networking for WordPress</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/only-70-tickets-remain-to-livestream-prestige-for-free-august-1-2-2015' title='With just a few days remaining before Prestige takes place, there are only 70 tickets left to watch the event for free. Courtesy of Rocketgenius, the event’s primary sponsor, more than 500 people will be watching the event for free this weekend. To watch the event for free, use the code GravityFormsLS when purchasing a streaming ticket. Prestige is a conference founded by Kiko Doran and Josh Broton in 2014 that focuses on the business aspects of WordPress. The first event was held in Minneapolis, MN, in October of 2014. Earlier this year, Prestige was held in Las Vegas, NV. This weekend marks the third time the conference will be held. The Future of Prestige The first and second conference had approximately 100 attendees and Doran expects the same amount this weekend. However, future iterations of Prestige will have lower attendance. “We are transitioning to more of an online event. We’re actually going to make the in-person events smaller moving forward.” Doran told the Tavern. There’s also a chance the conference could morph into something completely different. “After organizing two WordCamps, I figured out some of the things I loved about them and some of the things I don’t. Prestige has given me the freedom to try new things and see what people like and what they don’t like,” Doran said. Prestige in Las Vegas, NV Image courtesy of James Dalman Although the conference has been held twice this year and in different cities, the organizing team plans to host at least one Prestige conference in Minneapolis every year. Talks are underway for the next event but details are not locked down. “We plan to do one in Minneapolis every year because we love the community there. We’d like to do Minneapolis in the summer time, due to weather, then we’d like to do any winter events in a warm place,” Doran said. Organizing a conference is a challenging experience that benefits from having motivated organizers. Doran explains what motivates him to organize Prestige, sometimes twice a year. “I have a small awesome team of organizers that love putting this event on. That and the people who come and share their knowledge. It’s a smaller event but to me, that’s the appeal of it. Everyone is far more approachable in this environment,” he said. A First for Prestige This weekend’s event features a hands-on workshop by Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative. It’s the first session in Prestige’s young history to involve hands-on exercises. The session is uncharted territory for the conference which has mostly focused on people sharing their experiences building  businesses. How Long Will Doran Organize Prestige? With this being his third conference, I asked Doran how long does he plan to continue organizing Prestige, “I’ll organize the conference as long as there is a demand for the content. People often say to scratch your own itch. This conference started off as a little self-serving in that I wanted to ask people all of these questions. Then I thought, couldn’t others benefit from this information as well?” he replied. I’ll Be at Prestige Conference I’ll be among the 100 expected attendees at this weekends conference. If you’re attending the event, please stop me and say hi. If not, make sure you grab one of the 70 tickets left to watch a livestream of the event. You can also monitor the #Prestigeconf hashtag on Twitter. If you’ve previously attended Prestige or watched the livestream, please share your experiences in the comments.'>WPTavern: Only 70 Tickets Remain to Livestream Prestige for Free August 1-2, 2015</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://wptavern.com/wordpress-users-association-under-new-ownership' title='The WordPress Users Association (WPUA) is breathing new life after it was acquired by Paul DeMott earlier this year on Flippa for $797. WPUA originally launched in December 2010, with the goal of providing a central place for WordPress users to swap war stories, learn how to get the most out of WordPress, and take part in getting special discounts on themes and plugins. Redesigned Front Page Three years after its launch, the site appeared to be dead. In 2013, I paid to become a member to confirm my suspicions and to see if the site still accepted payments. Free themes and plugins offered to members were not impressive and there wasn’t much to choose from. All of the videos used for WordPress training were broken. Despite these setbacks, I was able to successfully complete the refund process. Financial Details Earlier this year, WPUA.org was listed on Flippa.com, a domain auctioning site. As part of the auction financial details of WPUA.org were made public. According to the seller, the site made $20K when it launched. The previous owners spent between $500-$1,000 on ads and answering WordPress questions through the Ask a WordPress Expert section of the site. The following shows revenue, costs, and profit between October 2014 and March 2015. WPUA earned revenue primarily with product or service sales and affiliate income. WPUA Revenue At the time the site was listed for auction, it had 3,500+ total members made up of free and paid subscriptions. The site today boasts more than 5,600 members. Previous Owner Explains Why He Sold The Site Wesley Williams is the former owner of WPUA.org and helped launch the site in 2010. Williams transitioned away from the domain because his web development business used the majority of his time. “We felt with our limited time to invest in it that it was best to transition it to someone who shared our passion but had a little more time to invest in growing the community and serving the members. We completed this transition back in April,” Williams told the Tavern. From my perspective, the WPUA was not a successful venture but Williams says otherwise. “I wouldn’t say it wasn’t a success. There are thousands of members and we provided a lot of help to a lot of new and experienced WordPress users. As my main core business grew and as the time requirements of our projects increased, we couldn’t devote the time required to answer questions and give the help needed. “Actually, WPUA was a big success in my mind. Just from a number of members point of view it was a success. From the amount and number of questions and people we helped it was a success and from a financial standpoint it was a success,” he said. Williams explains his goal with WPUA and why some members of the community may not be aware of the growth it had. “My goal was to help the under-served, those just getting started and without the technical know how to make what is actually simple fixes or changes to their WordPress site. “I didn’t run the WPUA in the circles of all the established WordPress technical crowd, even though a large number of them became members of the WPUA. I ran it focused on users new to the platform and so because of that, some members of the WordPress community might not be aware of the growth and success it had,” he said. Through the course of time, Williams and his team adjusted membership levels and access points which helped increase registrations. Williams also learned that what members wanted was a direct way to ask questions and receive expert answers. “A person new to the platform didn’t want to post their question in a forum and they weren’t really sure what the real question was. Thus, we removed the forum and went to an ‘Ask an Expert’ system where they could email their questions. This seemed to work better for everyone,” he said. Overall, Williams is happy with how WPUA progressed and feels fortunate to have played a role in its growth and success. Who is Paul DeMott? In the following video, DeMott explains how to build a eCommerce site with WooCommerce and calls himself the new president of recruitment for the WPUA. According to his LinkedIn profile, he lives in Cincinnati, OH and is the owner of Paul’s SEO and Web Expertise which works with companies to develop websites that bring in internet traffic and sales. Not much is known about DeMott and multiple requests for comment have gone unanswered. It’s unclear what his plans are for WPUA.org but so far, it’s remained as a paid subscription membership site. If you are a past or current member of the WordPress Users Association, please tell us about your experience in the comments.'>WPTavern: WordPress Users Association Under New Ownership</a></li></ul></div>