In June 2015 Deque, an accessibility consultancy, open sourced aXe, its accessibility rules engine for automated web UI testing. aXe is a compact JavaScript library (~100 KB) that executes automated accessibility tests inside your testing framework or browser. Deque outlined a number of advantages that the aXe library has over previous approaches to automated testing…
Last week WooCommerce announced on Twitter that its Stripe payment gateway is now a free product. Prior to this decision, it was priced at $79 for a single license, $99 for up to five sites, and $199 for up to 25 sites. Exciting product announcement from @stripe (which is also now free for WooCommerce, woo!)…
This week Mandrill announced that it will be discontinuing its free tier for transactional emails. As of March 16th, new Mandrill users will create their accounts through MailChimp and existing users will be required to merge their accounts with a MailChimp account where they will be charged $20+/mo for transactional emails. The deadline for merging…
After leading the do_action( ‘wordpress-charity-hackathon’ ); event in 2014 and 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa, Hugh Lashbrooke is bringing the event to Texas with the help of Austin local David Cole. The Austin WordPress Meetup Group will be hosting the hackathon on April 8th, which will coincide with WooConf. Participants will spend the day…
In February 2015, the WordPress Theme Directory launched a new design. Konstantin Obenland worked with Samuel “Otto” Wood and the WordPress meta team to update the design and move the directory off of bbPress. Today Obenland announced that the Plugin Directory will be getting a similar treatment. Version 3 of the Plugin Directory will focus…
In October 2014, Jetpack 3.2 introduced a new site logo feature for theme developers. As Jetpack is widely used, it provided a way for theme developers to easily build in logo support, thereby increasing data portability across themes. After discussion in yesterday’s core development meeting, WordPress 4.5 is now set to introduce theme support for…
Today WordPress.com announced support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Google’s open source project to improve the experience of the mobile web for publishers. When visitors arrive to a WordPress.com site via a mobile search, posts will load faster than ever before. Each post is dynamically generated according to the AMP spec, with /amp/ added to…
One of the challenges of organizing a WordCamp is coming up with general swag for the event that will delight attendees, as opposed to filling swag bags with cheap plastic junk. Organizers are also tasked with arranging a gift for speakers. WordCamp Miami, which will be entering its ninth year running in 2017, is well…
WooCommerce is currently the most popular way to add a store to WordPress. Its usage is on the rise and seems to be growing in tandem with global WordPress usage. Wappalyzer estimates a 31% marketshare in the e-commerce category and BuiltWith has WooCommerce at roughly 29% among other shopping cart technologies. Either way you slice…
In a SMB trust index survey conducted by Alignable in the fourth quarter of 2015, WordPress ranked as the most trusted of 25 nationally recognized brands used by small business owners. The results were ranked using the (Net Promoter System), a trademarked customer loyalty metric that measures promoters against detractors to produce a net trustworthiness…
Over the weekend, Jeremy Felt released Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.3.0. Although VVV uses VirtualBox as its default virtualization provider, this release adds support for Parallels, VMWare Fusion, VMWare Workstation, and Hyper-V in the default Vagrantfile. Version 1.3.0 also adds MailCatcher to the default provisioning. When working in a development environment, you generally don’t want want…
Hack.summit() is a unique event for developers that is set to be live-streamed February 22-24, 2016. It is the world’s largest virtual conference ever assembled, with 64,000 developers registered for last year’s event. hack.summit() will feature an impressive array of programming language creators and open source contributors and all ticket sales/donations go to support programming…
During the 2015 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg shared a few stats about the growth of WordPress events around the globe. Last year there were 89 WordCamps with 21,000 attendees across 34 countries. A surprising 60% of the 601 WordCamp organizers were doing it for the first time. More people are getting involved…
Happy Joe founder James Dalman announced this week that the non-profit organization will be shutting down. Dalman started the organization to help veterans find employment opportunities in WordPress and other web technologies. He plans to continue with a modified version of the Happy Joe mission set up as a for-profit venture. After operating for the…
Last week GitHub responded to a letter from open source project maintainers with apologies for the lack of communication and lack of attention to feedback regarding issue management. Because contributions are the lifeblood of open source projects, maintainers are requesting additional features for issues and pull requests that would help make contributions more meaningful. The…
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