Over the last couple weeks I’ve started using Grunt with all my WordPress themes. It’s a development tool that helps automate certain tasks- like generating translation files, building sass files, adding browser prefixes, and minifying scripts.

A tool like CodeKit does many of the same tasks (and I highly recommend it if the command line terrifies you), but Grunt gives you more control and a huge library of modules to work with.

If you haven’t heard of Grunt yet, I think the place most people start is with Chris Coyier’s article “Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard“. Continue reading →

There are a number of changes in this latest version of Portfolio Press and Portfolio+. I’m hoping the update will be seamless for most users, but there will be a few steps to complete once you upgrade.

Page templates have been updated in this version, so if you have any page templates set (say for the portfolio on the home page), you may need to go to that page, re-select the template, and re-save. I wrote an update routine to do this but it won’t fire in all situations. So, just to be safe, give it a check and make the updates if needed.

Next, the theme should prompt you to change your posts per page settings in the reading options. I recommend 9. Previously, the theme had automatically controlled this, but people have often wanted to change the default (to 12 or 15). This now you gives you that control. It also fixes edge case paging bugs that some users experienced.

Finally, you’ll want to install the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin and generate new images. The theme should also prompt for this. There were a couple of image size changes in this update (especially if you had the one column layout selected)- and this will ensure that your images are at the proper size and should fix images that may have appeared blurry previously. Continue reading →