Nick Haskins launched Story.am earlier this year as a hosted storytelling platform that offers all the features of Aesop Story Engine. Initially, the platform was only available to paying customers, but this week Haskins announced that Story.am is now available to everyone for free. The platform had not received much feedback in the several months…
One of the highlights of the recent WordPress 4.2 release is the completely revamped Press This interface. The feature’s intended purpose is to make it easy to share text, images, and videos from around the web in a quick post, but many users are newly captivated by Press This’ new minimalist design for post creation.…
Last week, I met Bianca Welds who lives in Jamaica. She’s used WordPress for more than 10 years and has knowledge of the developing tech scene in Jamaica. In this interview, we learn how she discovered WordPress, the Jamaican WordPress community, and if the country will ever host a WordCamp. How long have you used…
On this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I were joined by Drew Jaynes, web engineer for 10up, and release lead for WordPress 4.2. Jaynes explains how a release lead is chosen, their responsibilities, and what their role is. Release leads are shepherds who work with multiple teams to keep development on track. Jaynes…
Since WordPress 4.2 was released, some users are questioning why their sites have automatically updated to WordPress 4.1.3. There’s no information about the release on the Make WordPress Core site or the official WordPress news blog. However, this Codex article explains what’s in 4.1.3 and the reason it was released. Fix database writes for esoteric…
Jetpack 3.5 was released today, coinciding with WordPress 4.2. This release expands the capabilities of Jetpack’s centralized site management to include menus. If you have Jetpack Manage activated, you can now log into WordPress.com to manage menus for any of your sites that have opted in. The benefit of going to WordPress.com to manage menus…
WordPress 4.2 “Powell” has arrived and is now ready for download. It is named for Earl Rudolph “Bud” Powell, an American jazz pianist. This release, led by 10up engineer Drew Jaynes, offers a balanced mix of front-facing features that users will enjoy, as well as improvements for developers. Here is a tour of the highlights.…
The fame of wapuunk has spread far and wide and now fans of the creature can purchase t-shirts in the WordPress Swag Store. The punk Wapuu was created for WordCamp London 2015 by Scott Evans with collaboration from the event’s organizing team. The mascot was so well-received that Evans’ colleagues urged him to see if…
The WordPress Theme Review team made a major decision this week to enforce the use of the native customizer on new themes submitted to the directory. Theme authors who want to include customization options will no longer be able to create their own settings panels but will be required to follow the new customizer standard,…
Earlier this week, one of the largest coordinated efforts between WordPress plugin authors, Sucuri, and the WordPress security team resulted in a number of popular plugins receiving security updates. Due to inaccurate information within the WordPress codex, a number of developers improperly assumed the add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions would properly escape user input. When combined,…
The official Facebook plugin for WordPress launched in 2012 with the help of engineers from Automattic and currently lists 14 contributing authors. The plugin is active on more than 200,000 websites, but Facebook has not updated the plugin description page to let users know that it has been abandoned. The Facebook plugin has received no…
Gateway is an elegant and eye-catching new theme that recently landed on WordPress.org. Since its release less than a week ago, the theme has already been downloaded more than 1400 times. It’s easy to see why it’s an instant hit – the versatile design is perfect for writers, businesses, or personal sites. The homepage design…
WordPress 4.1.2 is available and is a critical security update for all previous versions of WordPress. The release has eight security fixes, one of which is high risk, three are medium-low risk, and the last four added to harden WordPress. This is the first major security update to WordPress core since WordPress 4.0.1 released in…
WordCamp Europe 2015 will be held at the end of June in Seville, Spain, but organizers are already finalizing host city applications for the 2016 event. A final call for host cities went out today and organizers announced that applications will close on Friday, April 24. This highly anticipated WordPress event is expected to bring…
Open source software makes up the vast majority of licensed code hosted on GitHub, as one of the primary features of the site is code sharing and collaboration. In of April 2015, GitHub reported 9.2 million users collaborating across 21.8 million repositories. For the past seven years since the site’s launch, one of the most…
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