Sarah Gooding is a partner at Untame, a boutique digital marketing firm specializing in open source content management systems and social networking architecture. She enjoys staying on top of the latest WordPress and BuddyPress news. Get in touch with Sarah on Twitter @pollyplummer

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Sell Media: A Free WordPress Plugin For Selling Digital Files

If your website is driven by your creative media, be it photos, videos or audio files, the last thing you want to see is your hard work being used without your consent. The Sell Media plugin for WordPress gives you a way to sell, license and protect your precious media, with no fees. Absolutely free!

Sell Media is a neat and easy way for photographers, videographers, musicians and artists to organize their content in their WordPress sites and start turning a profit instead of turning out unlicensed content for digital ne’er-do-wells.

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7 Trusted Contact Form Plugins For WordPress Multisite

When building a WordPress multisite network it can be challenging to find plugins that will be compatible across the network. Even functionality as simple as a contact form can have you hunting for hours for a plugin that will work properly with multisite. Since a contact form is one of the most common requirements for any website, we’ve put together a list of some of the most trusted plugins for use with multisite networks.
Contact Forms 7

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Add Instagram Badges to WordPress

Last week Instagram introduced their new badges feature that gives you the ability to promote your Instagram profile on your website.

Instagram Badges is a very simple WordPress plugin that includes a widget you can drop into your sidebar to display your Instagram badge. The badge links to your Instagram profile so that you visitors can easily see your photos and follow you on Instagram.

The Instagram WordPress widget includes several badge sizes from tiny to large. Add a username and a title and you’re good to go.

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Add Age Verification to WordPress

Commercial distributors of material deemed harmful to minors are required to restrict their sites using age verification. A couple common examples you may have noticed are alcohol product websites or game websites with content not appropriate for minors.

WordPress has a solution for websites that require age verification. The Age Verify plugin automatically adds an age verification form to your site’s homepage, barring visitors from entering if they are not eligible.

Here’s how it looks on the front end:

The plugin allows you to specify a minimum age and offers several additional options:

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Commons in a Box: A Free, Easy-To-Install Community Based On WordPress and BuddyPress

The City University of New York has been offering its CUNY Academic Commons since 2009, providing faculty and staff with a way to share insights, ideas and passions with their peers. Since its inception, this platform has grown into a vibrant community of members who use blogs, groups, member profiles, discussion forums and wiki pages to contribute to an active community over 3,000 strong.

Now, the wiz kids behind the inception and development of this project have harnessed its power and released it in a new, extremely well-documented and packaged project, Commons in a Box, aka CBOX.

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Organize WordPress Posts By Color

Do your eyes ever go googly from looking at a long list of posts in the WordPress post management screen? Sorting through posts can be especially difficult on multi-author WordPress sites where the majority of the content has been created by an author other than yourself.

Color My Posts is a new plugin by WordPress developer Remi Corson. It was created to help you visually see the difference between the posts in your dashboard.

The Color My Posts plugin lets you organize posts in the WordPress admin based on the following criteria:

Post Status
Post Format
Post ID
Post Categories
Post Types
Post Tags
Author
Atom

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Agency: A Free Responsive Business Portfolio Theme

With more web traffic happening on tablets and phones these days, it’s invaluable for an online business portfolio to be responsive, minimal and effectively eye catching. If you are looking for a WordPress portfolio theme that accomplishes this and much more, right out of the box, you should take a look at Agency. It’s a beautiful free theme offered by EGrappler. Agency was built using Twitter Bootstrap and was designed to be the perfect theme for businesses or creative agencies.

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How to Put WordPress in Safe Mode For Quick Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting WordPress themes and plugins can be a frustrating experience if you don’t have any tools at your disposal. It’s especially difficult if you’re already locked out of your WordPress site. Don’t panic. You’ve still got some options. Here’s one you may not have heard about yet.

Turn on Safe Mode

Perhaps in the past you may have been advised to start deactivating plugins in hopes of finding the offending plugin, or switching to the default theme in order to see if your custom theme is causing a problem.

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WPExplorer Releases 3 Free Responsive WordPress Themes

The folks at WPExplorer have just launched a redesign of their website and a brand new logo. To celebrate the new branding and redesign, they have also decided to release three free WordPress themes, all of which include responsive design and built-in theme options for easy customization.

Here’s a quick overview of all the new freebies:
Tetris: A Free Masonry Tumblog WordPress Theme
The Tetris theme employs a masonry-style layout to display tumblog-style posts. It makes use of the excellent Soliloquy plugin for the featured slider on the home page.

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New In bbPress 2.2: Dynamic User Roles, Improved Profiles and Better BuddyPress and Multisite Support

bbPress 2.2 is now available. This the third major release for the bbPress project and it’s awesome. Your forums will not be left hanging when you upgrade to WordPress 3.5 and BuddyPress 1.7. The good news is that bbPress is already one step ahead and fully compatible with upcoming releases.

You may have noticed everyone raving about the latest bbPress release on Twitter. That’s because 2.2 is packed full of all kinds of goodness:

Added What’s New and Credits pages
WordPress 3.5 and BuddyPress 1.7 ready
Improved user roles and capabilities
Improved theme compatibility
Improved BuddyPress Group Forums integration
Improved forums convertion tool

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