The power of showcasing content

Featured Content is a great way to let users highlight their most important posts. Our Theme Wranglers use it often on WordPress.com, but this awesomeness is available to all theme developers.

The concept is simple: each theme can determine where and how Featured Content is displayed. Then, right from their blog’s dashboard, users can specify a tag to determine which posts to showcase in the Featured Content area. Users can even specify how many posts they want to show, and decide if they want to hide the tag from post meta and tag clouds.

Featured Content in Action

If you’ve been following the development of the Twenty Fourteen theme, you’ve seen the prominent featured posts section on the front page. This area was created with Featured Content! The user specifies which posts they want to feature, and the theme does the rest of the work. Check it out here.

Another great example of Featured Content is the rotating header on the Superhero theme. In Superhero, Featured Content was coupled with Flexslider to create the beautiful post slider that you see at the top of the front page.

The possibilities really are endless. Photography themes can use Featured Content to display beautiful photos, and business sites can highlight their most important news and alerts. Best of all, users don’t have to worry about Custom Post Types or theme-specific categories or tags. They simply set a tag, and the theme handles the rest.

Add Featured Content in a snap

Adding Featured Content to your theme is a piece of cake. You can find all of the information you need to get started on the Featured Content support page.

Keep in mind that Featured Content is designed to spotlight content right on your theme’s homepage. If your theme includes a front-page.php file, that’s the only template file to which you’ll need to add the Featured Content area.

Do you have a great idea for Featured Content? Or have you done something cool with it on your own site? Let us know! We’d love to see how Featured Content is being used in the wild!

Improved Jetpack Monitor notifications

Multiple users can now receive Jetpack Monitor email notifications. As an admin user linked to WordPress.com, you can opt in to receive these notifications right from your dashboard. Just navigate to the Jetpack page, find the Monitor module card, and click on Configure. Then, check the “Receive Monitor Email Notifications” setting and save your changes. Now if your site ever goes down you will receive notifications to your WordPress.com linked account email!

Write more efficiently with Markdown

Since introducing Markdown on WordPress.com, we’ve had a lot of requests to bring it over to Jetpack. Well, queue the trumpets, start the drumroll, Markdown is here!

For those who don’t know, Markdown is a quick way to add formatted text without writing out any HTML. Markdown lets you compose links, lists, and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks. If you want a quick, easy way to write and edit rich text without having to take your hands off the keyboard or learn a lot of complicated codes and shortcuts, then Markdown might be right for you. We do strongly suggest sticking with the “Text” tab in the Editor when using Markdown.

Here is an example of Markdown in the text editor:

And here is that same Markdown converted to HTML in the Reddle theme:

Isn’t that pretty awesome? You can check out the announcement post over at WordPress.com for more information about Markdown and see our Markdown support page.

Publicize Support for Custom Post Types

For our developer friends out there, we’ve added Publicize support for custom post types, allowing you and your clients to automatically post new entries from any CPT to your social media networks. You’d need to make one small tweak in the code defining the CPT—just add 'publicize' to the CPT’s 'supports' array.

For example, to enable the title, editor, Publicize, and Jetpack’s new support for Markdown: 'supports' => array( 'title', 'editor', 'publicize', 'wpcom-markdown' ),

As always, if you notice any issues with this release, just give us a shout over at the forums or send us a message through our contact form. Thank you for flying with Jetpack!

Well, the wait is over — we’re excited to announce that you can now share your latest content on your Google+ Profiles and Pages!

Improved overall performance

Jetpack 2.7, which has just been released, adds Publicize to your site. In order to connect your account(s), head to your dashboard, then go to Settings → Sharing. Clicking on the “Connect” button next to the Google+ logo will prompt you to authenticate your account. Once you have, you can start enjoying the benefits of publishing your content to Google+ — just make sure that you’ve enabled the Publicize module.

Jetpack 2.7 also contains multiple bugfixes and other little features. You can view a full changelog of these updates by visiting this page.

We hope you enjoy Jetpack 2.7!

New Modules: Single Sign On and Jetpack Monitor

Single Sign On replaces the previous WordPress.com Connect module, added in 2.4. Improving on the WPCC module’s setup process, Single Sign On takes one click to activate, then you’re off to the races! It will also streamline subsequent log ins, as you’ll no longer need a manual approval at sites where you’ve previously been authenticated.

Our other new module, Jetpack Monitor, is an uptime monitor that will check your site every five minutes. If it ever looks like your site is down, we’ll fire off an email to give you a heads-up. Easy, right?

We’ve also included a pile of other enhancements. We’ve switched the code editor in our Custom CSS module, and bundled new filters, new custom post types, and new widgets. We’ve added performance improvements across many modules, as well as support for WP-CLI. We now also make sure that your Publicize connections haven’t expired in the background as you write.

We’re tremendously proud of our latest release, and hope you’ll give it a shot.

- The Jetpack Team

The Jetpack Team recently spent a week collaborating on the awesomeness of this release down in Puerto Rico! Interested in joining us? You should apply!

Jetpack starts by looking for a Featured Image. If you didn’t define any, we will look for slideshows and galleries, and then for single images you may have inserted in your posts. If you’ve inserted an image that is hosted on another site, we can use it too.

However, sometimes you may not have added any image to your post. In such cases, you can add this code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file, or in a functionality plugin. This way, your readers will see a default image when sharing that post on Facebook, for example:

function jeherve_custom_image( $media, $post_id, $args ) {
	if ( $media ) {
		return $media;
	} else {
		$permalink = get_permalink( $post_id );
		$url = apply_filters( 'jetpack_photon_url', 'YOUR_LOGO_IMG_URL' );
	
		return array( array(
			'type'	=> 'image',
			'from'	=> 'custom_fallback',
			'src'	=> esc_url( $url ),
			'href'	=> $permalink,
		) );
	}
}
add_filter( 'jetpack_images_get_images', 'jeherve_custom_image', 10, 3 );

Reference

add_filter( 'publicize_checkbox_default', '__return_false' );

You can place this code snippet in your theme’s functions.php file, or in a functionality plugin.

When a theme author adds Jetpack Infinite Scroll support to their theme, they configure its options specifically for that theme. Occasionally you might want to override the theme’s defaults for your purposes, and in this article, I’ll show you how to do so in a child theme.

Here is a typical Jetpack Infinite Scroll setup function…

Read the whole post: How to Override Jetpack Infinite Scroll Settings in a Child Theme.

jQuery(document).on( 'jp_carousel.selectSlide', '.jp-carousel-wrap', function( event, slides ) {
	// This is just to show you what values get passed in.  Delete it before going to production.
	if ( window.console ) {
		console.log( this );
		console.log( event );
		console.log( slides );
		console.log( slides[0] );
	}
	// Do whatever extra stuff you want here.
} );

You can read more about it here.