News

WordPress 3.5 Elvin Is Ready For Download

by Sarah Gooding December 11^th, 2012 27 Responses

It’s a happy day in the world of WordPress. The 3.5 “Elvin” release is now ready for download. Yes, that’s right, the 3.5 release has been dubbed “Elvin” – not as in elves but rather named for jazz drummer Elvin Jones. Curious about what’s new? Here’s a quick summary:

WordPress Media Completely Re-Envisioned

This release includes massive changes to the WordPress media library. You’re simply going to love how easy it is to add new media to WordPress. It provides a totally new experience for uploading photos and creating galleries.

New Twenty Twelve Default Theme

Plugins

Managing Images in WordPress with the Media Attacher

by Craig Grella December 8^th, 2012 2 Responses

There are 2 ways to upload images into your WordPress site – through the post/page image uploader or through the media library.

Both place images into your overall media library; and both give you the ability to drag and drop upload multiple images at once.

So what’s the difference and which one should you use? Good questions.

Most people add images into a post using the Add/Insert button located just above the post/page editor. This gives you the ability to upload files from your computer, a web url, or from inside your media library.

Plugins

Sell Media: A Free WordPress Plugin For Selling Digital Files

by Sarah Gooding December 6^th, 2012 2 Responses

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.

Multisite Showcase, Plugins

16 Cool Responsive WordPress Plugins for Images and Videos

by Patrick Cohen November 26^th, 2012 10 Responses

Ensuring that your site looks good, loads fast and is easy to navigate is great. It becomes essential when users view it on the smaller screens of their mobile devices. Using a responsive WordPress theme is one way to ensure that your content adapts to those screens.

However, sometimes media stubbornly refuses to resize itself properly to fit those smaller screens. If media on your site is not resizing properly when viewing on smaller screens, you’re gonna love these responsive WordPress plugins!

WordPress Plugins

WordPress Image Optimization Plugins: Our Top 10

by Tom Ewer September 14^th, 2012 Leave a comment

Images are important.

Even if your blog’s content relies heavily upon the written (or typed) word, how well you utilize images to draw people into the meat of your content and retain their interest can have a major impact on engagement metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and page views.

But on the flip side, images can also be a big drain on your site’s resources. Whilst poorly coded themes and bloated plugins can slow your site down, a few large images can have a far greater impact.

WordPress Image Optimization Plugins: Our Top 10

Tutorials

How to Create Awesome Lists Using Your WordPress Media Library

by Patrick Cohen September 4^th, 2012 Leave a comment

Your WordPress Media Library can be one of your greatest allies when it comes to creatively displaying lists in your pages, posts and widgets.

Lists can be one of the most efficient ways of conveying information to users of your WordPress site. We all use ‘em (some sparingly, some extensively) to highlight important elements in the body of our posts and pages.

WordPress Media Library Lists - Create awesome lists with your media library!

Tutorials

Never forget your Featured Image Dimensions

by Clifford Paulick August 15^th, 2012 6 Responses

Updated August 31, 2012: Thanks to one of the commenters and one of our own developers, the first 2 code snippets have been completely replaced with much-improved, completely different code compared to this post’s original content. As this is one of my favorite bits of functionality, I am very grateful.

All Featured Images Have the Same Dimensions
The following code provides you and your authors with a constant reminder of your ideal Featured Image size so your Featured Images always look their best.

{code type=php}

add_action( ‘do_meta_boxes’, ‘my_do_meta_boxes’ );
function my_do_meta_boxes( $post_type ) {
global $wp_meta_boxes;

WordPress Plugins

7 Plugins to Boost Your Blogging Productivity

by Craig Grella August 9^th, 2012 7 Responses

We have websites because we want to share content with the world; be it a blog, online magazine, e-store, nonprofit site, or community forum. WordPress gives us the ability to publish that content efficiently, and to reach the masses with relative ease.

But sometimes we get caught up in the back-end things that take time away from publishing content or delivering our services; like backing up WordPress, making sure the cache runs smoothly, including post attachments that actually link up to the right files, and figuring out that darn image uploader!

Plugins

Improve the WordPress Media Library with Enhanced Media Picker

by Tom Ewer August 7^th, 2012 1 Response

Just the other day, Sarah featured some proposed improvements to the media library in WordPress 3.5. Whilst the improvements are still very much at a formative stage, they represent something that has been a long time coming.

Media has never been handled particularly well in WordPress. If you run a post on proposed improvements to WordPress (like I did), you’ll always get at least one negative comment regarding the media library. So with that in mind, it is nice to see that the WordPress dev folks are taking steps to improve it.

Impatience is a Virtue

Improve the WordPress Media Library with Enhanced Media Picker