<div class="rss-widget"><ul><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/wordpress-plugin-review-wp-db-migrate' title='WP DB Migrate is an awesome plugin created by Brad Touesnard. This plugin makes it easy to transfer the database contents between WordPress powered sites. While there is a Pro version of this plugin available, my experience was with the free version, hosted on the WordPress plugin repository.  I needed a quick and easy way to move a database of information from a public WordPress website to my local install. Since I didn’t have access to phpMyAdmin to retrieve the database, WP Migrate DB was the next best thing. It’s as easy as installing the plugin on the site I’m migrating data from and then installing it on the site I’m moving the data to. After installation, you’ll find the settings located within the Tools menu.  Easily Perform Search and Replace Before Exporting One of my favorite features of this plugin is the ability to replace the site URL and the file path to match the location of the site you’re migrating to. It’s the equivalent of performing a search and replace during a normal MySQL export/import routine. Being able to perform this task without having to use SQL statements or another plugin is a big time saver. Changing the site URL is easy! This plugin also provides the following options:  Replace GUIDs Disable the exporting of spam comments Disable the exporting of post revisions Save the database file to your computer Compress the file with gzip  Works As Expected The plugin worked without any problems. I was able to download the MySQL file with the changes I applied and then I imported that file into my local install of WordPress. Now my local install is in synch with the public version. Although it does take some time to import the file, it’s still not enough to motivate me to figure out how to mirror the sites at least once a day. However, if I decided that this would become a routine, I would upgrade to the Pro version which contains the ability to pull remote databases and push them to my local install. That feature alone would be worth the $39 dollars which also includes updates and support for one year. I realize there are other plugins that provide a similar feature set, but WP Migrate DB made the process so smooth, it was worthy of sharing.'>WPTavern: Database Migrations Made Easy Thanks To The WP DB Migrate Plugin</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/wordpress-twenty-fourteen-project-enters-crunch-time-for-3-8-release' title='The Twenty Fourteen project team, led by Lance Willett, is working like crazy to get the theme ready for the upcoming 3.8 release. The theme’s inclusion in 3.8 is dependent upon how many things can be accomplished during the crunch time before the merge window closes tomorrow. Since last week’s development chat, the team has made great strides and announced a number of major improvements today, including:  Many design changes to make the “first run” nicer and look better without featured images UI for Featured Content moved completely into Customizer (tag, display, count) Added contextual help and tips around the admin interface for setting up the Featured Content area Performance tweaks for faster loading IE, RTL, and i18n fixes  The Decision to Remove Placeholder Images Creating a theme that is so highly dependent upon featured images makes it a challenging to display content nicely without them. Originally, Twenty Fourteen included placeholder images in case no featured images were set. This was meant to encourage users to add featured images. Instead, it ended up making the theme look awkward without featured images. This week the team opted to remove the placeholders in favor of giving it a more general appeal as a blog theme. However, Twenty Fourteen will still look its best when feature images are used. Featured Content in Twenty Fourteen Twenty Fourteen is intended to be a magazine style default theme, so having an easy way to promote featured content is important. The theme was originally intended to work hand-in-hand with the “Featured Content” plugin that is being developed for 3.8. As it is yet unclear if that plugin will be ready, the team opted to implement a “featured content” tag instead. This can be set at Settings &gt; Reading and authors can determine which tag to use for displaying posts in the featured content area.  Author Widget Lance Willett said that they are hoping to include the Author Widget plugin in Twenty Fourteen to highlight multiple authors. This is well-suited to a magazine theme. For now it exists as the Authors Widget plugin but Willett says, “It’s fairly light and can merge right away.” How to Access Twenty Fourteen for Testing If you want to see how Twenty Fourteen is shaping up, check out a live demo at: twentyfourteendemo.wordpress.com/. This site is synced nearly every day with the core version of Twenty Fourteen.  There are a number of ways to get access to the theme for testing. You can grab it via SVN or switch to trunk using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. The easiest option, however, might be to simply download the WordPress zip from its github repository, which is a mirror of the subversion repository and synced via SVN every 15 minutes.'>WPTavern: WordPress Twenty Fourteen Project Enters Crunch Time for 3.8 Release</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://alexking.org/blog/2013/11/12/ux-panel-at-wordcamp-denver' title='I will be moderating a panel on user experience at WordCamp Denver this weekend. I hope to see you there. If you’ve got ideas for topics you’d like to see us cover, please post them in the comments. I can’t promise we’ll cover them all, but it’s always nice to know we’re touching on topics the audience finds interesting.'>Alex King: UX Panel at WordCamp Denver</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/easily-turn-a-static-html-site-into-a-wordpress-theme-with-theme-matcher' title='Despite WordPress powering over 20% of the web, there are still a lot of static websites that could use a dynamic upgrade. In order for a static website to take advantage of WordPress it requires two things: A WordPress installation and a WordPress theme that looks like the static HTML site. Thanks to a new website called Theme Matcher, creating a WordPress theme from a static website is easy.  How It Works Using The Example Theme Theme Matcher, created by Patrick Moody, takes static websites and automatically generates WordPress themes using Bones. Bones is a minimalistic theme that is great to use as a foundation. To see how this site works, visit Themematcher.com and use http://themematcher.com/example/ as the example URL. Follow the directions as described in the video. If you have difficulty finding the right spot to select as content, just select an area, then use the plus or minus buttons to add or subtract elements that will make up the content portion of the theme.  Next, select the area you want for the sidebar which will usually be to the left, or right of the content. If you feel adventurous, you can select an area outside of the content to use as the sidebar. You just might not be happy with the results. Alternatively, you can select an option to not have a sidebar via a link at the top of the website. After selecting the sidebar location, you can delete areas or preview the theme. When previewing the theme, experienced developers will be able to tell right away which parts are WordPress while the rest of the design remains static. Patrick Moody Answers A Few Questions Why did you choose the Bones theme to power ThemeMatcher.com? Bones is an incredible starter theme that has already been highly refined and optimized by over 60 contributors over the course of several years. It’s a great foundation that is fast, lightweight, and has very clean code. These are all benefits that are easy to miss on ‘custom’ projects, but are incorporated into every Theme Matcher conversion. Who are you targeting with this service?  	 WordPress developers saving time and getting a head start on client projects, and then customizing the theme further. Non-technical webmasters wanting to add a WordPress blog to an existing site. Designers that create a HTML template/mockup, then fast-track it into a WordPress theme with ease. Freelancers migrating sites to WordPress from another system   Nice Way To Save Time While the above is an excellent example of how Theme Matcher can help developers save time, there are a number of other uses for the site. Using Theme Matcher won’t take care of 100% of the work when transitioning a static site into a WordPress theme, but it gets you at least two-thirds of the way there.'>WPTavern: Easily Turn A Static HTML Site Into A WordPress Theme With Theme Matcher</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/wordpress-global-admin-search-evolves-to-tackle-bigger-problems' title='The WordPress Global Admin Search plugin, previously known as “Omnisearch”, is becoming a bigger project than it originally appeared to be. Searching the admin area of WordPress sounds so simple, right? But it turns out that search is a very nuanced feature that everyone has an opinion about. Last week Matt Mullenweg held a meeting to select new features ready to merge into the core for WordPress 3.8, but Omnisearch required more discussion before moving on. Up until this point, George Stephanis, the plugin’s developer, hadn’t received much feedback on the plugin in its current form.   Yesterday’s “Search Initiative” meeting provided a flood of feedback on how search might be used, what it should search and how it might be implemented. Global Admin Search Aims to Solve A Long List of Problems Stephanis outlined the pain points raised during the meeting surrounding the current state of admin search. One of the most bothersome things is that we have multiple search forms within the admin. If you want to search something you must first navigate to the correct thing you want to search, whether it’s posts, comments, custom post types, etc. This requires you to already know approximately where that content is located. Working with results can also be troublesome, because it isn’t always clear why specific results have been included. If relevant data is stored in a postmeta field, it can be very difficult to find, because these fields are not indexed for searching. Also, a search query with no results found ends up being a dead end for users if a related or revised suggestion isn’t offered.  Next Steps to Advancing Admin Search photo credit: 1D110 via photopin ccWordPress does not yet have a unified search results page to send people to on the back-end, so putting this in place would become part of this project. A possible implementation suggested during the meeting was a tabbed interface, which might include an ‘Overview’ tab and then others for different types of data being searched. Stephanis offers an example: a generic search term might land you on the overview tab but a search within the posts page for specific content would send you to the Posts tab with content displayed similar to how you would view results on their respective pages throughout the admin. A number of other periphery suggestions came up, such as auto-suggesting results based on links off of the current page, similar to the Jarvis or WP-Butler plugins. It’s yet to be decided whether some of these things will be left for plugin territory. Global admin search is likely to miss the 3.8 merge window that closes tomorrow, but will remain in active development for inclusion in an upcoming release. The project will evolve considerably to tackle the current issues with searching the admin and will hopefully provide an elegant solution in the coming days. Timely feedback is valuable for shaping the future direction of the admin search. What do you think about where search is headed? Do you see yourself using the global admin search? What is the most important problem that search would solve for you?'>WPTavern: WordPress Global Admin Search Evolves To Tackle Bigger Problems</a></li></ul></div>