The FBI issued a public service announcement today, warning concerning WordPress website attacks being carried out by individuals sympathetic to the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL) a.k.a. Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). The perpetrators of these attacks are defacing sites across various platforms such as news organizations, businesses, government sites, and religious…
Two weeks ago, I asked you to participate in Bob Dunn’s survey that asked, how do you learn WordPress? Dunn has published the results to the survey and they’re not surprising. Out of 428 responses, 63% learn WordPress best using text and images. Roughly a third of respondents learn best using video tutorials or one-on-one…
WordPress 3.8 marked a major milestone for the admin with the inclusion of “MP6,” a brand new responsive design and color scheme. By now many users have become accustomed to the color scheme, but 4.2 will introduce subtle changes to create a more harmonious color palette. Over the past several months, Hugo Baeta has been…
Andrew Nacin announced on the Make Core blog that Konstantin Obenland will lead the release of WordPress 4.3, while Scott Taylor will lead 4.4. Obenland’s latest contribution to WordPress is the redesigned theme directory. Taylor is largely responsible for the audio and video improvements in WordPress 3.9. Nacin defines a WordPress release lead as someone…
WordPress 4.2 will soon be released with expanded core support for emoji, a new feature that users either love or love to hate. By making a key database change from utf8mb3 to utf8mb4 to add support for emoji, WordPress also receives the benefit of being able to natively handle Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. On…
When ModernThemes launched its site with a dozen free WordPress themes last year, founders Robbie Grabowski and Mike Driscoll committed to getting all of their themes listed on WordPress.org following positive feedback from the community. At that time many of their themes had issues that would preclude them from being hosted in the official directory.…
ThemeReview.co partners Emil Uzelac and Justin Tadlock announced over the weekend that the service is expanding to include plugin reviews. The professional theme review service launched at the beginning of January and has been growing steadily, thanks in part to strategic recommendations from Envato and StudioPress. Uzelac and Tadlock are both senior reviewers at WordPress.org,…
PressThis is a bookmarklet that allows you to quickly publish drafts or posts without having to navigate the backend of WordPress. It was added to WordPress in version 2.6 and can be found in the Tools menu. One of the major features coming in WordPress 4.2 is a completely revamped PressThis bookmarklet. Michael Arestad proposed…
When a social network is filled with mystery man avatars, it can give the impression that the site is a ghost town, overrun with spam users. Sometimes members are too lazy to upload a profile photo, no matter how many friendly prompts you try to offer. Missing profile images makes for ugly directory pages and…
Donnacha MacGloinn published an excellent post on WPMayor.com predicting the end of the webhosting industry. Although he talks about the industry as a whole, MacGloinn says the need for specialized WordPress hosting is quickly disappearing. With the lingering perception that this stuff must be difficult, and the customer’s delight with all that WordPress can do…
Twitter users have often asked the question: “What does it mean to favorite a tweet?” The act of favoriting can communicate any number of things depending on the context, such as bookmarking, agreeing, showing support, or responding to a mention. UK researchers studying the favoriting feature on Twitter discovered that users could identify more than…
The PHP UK Conference celebrated its 10th annual event this year at the end of February. More than 700 participants gathered in London to share knowledge and experiences surrounding PHP and related web technologies. WordPress community members Jenny Wong and Aaron Jorbin both spoke at the conference and the videos have just been released today.…
If you’re a musician or a music teacher and want to show sheet music in WordPress, you might be interested in a new plugin developed by Paul Rosen called ABC Notation. ABC Notation uses ABCjs, an open source ABC music notation JavaScript library that renders sheet music. To render sheet music, simply add the string…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Lewis Howes, host of the School of Greatness podcast. Lewis shares his story of achieving his lifelong dream of becoming a professional football player, only to have it crushed by an injury. Without a backup plan in place and limited skills, Lewis…
Hew is Automattic’s 67th free theme release on WordPress.org. The new theme, designed by Ola Laczek, was inspired by Ryu, a classic among personal blogging themes. Ryu was released two years ago and for awhile it seemed like everyone was using it. Hew brings that same clean, identity-focused design that features the author’s Gravatar at…
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