“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This is a common mindset among WordPress users who don’t regularly update their themes and plugins. The fear of an update breaking something is often stronger than the desire to gain enhancements and security fixes. Why improve something that already works perfectly well? Antti Kuosmanen, founder of Seravo.com,…
In a recent interview on the WordPress Weekly podcast, when asked about his comments at WordCamp US regarding customization being the biggest opportunity to improve the WordPress experience, Matt Mullenweg said, “The Customizer is everything.” He followed it up by saying that customizing sites via both the Customizer and themes is currently the platform’s weakest…
Semper Fi Web Design, the company behind All in One SEO, a popular WordPress SEO optimization plugin that’s active on more than 1M sites, has released 2.3.7 to patch a persistent XSS security vulnerability. According to the plugin’s changelog, 2.3.7 sanitizes the Bad Bots module referer and user agent. While it doesn’t sound significant on the surface, this…
The WordPress community team announced today that the next Community Summit will be held in Paris, France at WordCamp Europe 2017. Last year the Summit was held at WordCamp US in Philadelphia and the event’s website published a post requesting that those interested save the dates for June 2017 in Europe. The Summit brings together…
One of the most common complaints I often hear from those who have a large number of attachments in the WordPress media library is the lack of Category and Tag support to organize media. When combined, tags and categories are a decent way to organize content. Three years ago, a ticket was created on WordPress Trac requesting that…
WordPress 4.6 will introduce some exciting updates that give plugin and theme authors a standardized way of registering metadata. This refers to the additional data that is attached to WordPress’ main content types (posts, users, and comments), which users often interact with via custom fields or metaboxes when editing posts. Anytime WordPress can standardize an…
Last year the WordPress Stats page was updated to provide more sophisticated methods of collecting and processing the data, causing some dramatic shifts in the data reported. As of last week, the pie charts have been redesigned to display that information with a more pleasant color scheme and new data for languages is now available…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the open source software project known as WordPress. In this one hour and thirty minute interview, we cover a wide range of topics including: How the death of his father has altered the things he does and thinks…
Last week, Dan Cameron, creator of Sprout Invoices, received an email from the WordPress.org plugin review team stating that his plugin was in violation of the repository guidelines. Sprout Invoices was promptly removed from the directory and all of its 5-star reviews were also removed. Cameron had been discounting the professional license of his plugin…
Jetpack 4.1 was released today with performance improvements that make calls to the database more efficient, reducing what Jetpack does on each page load. Slideshows should load faster now that the Carousel module has been tweaked to no longer load full-size images in the previous and next previews. Using Photon in dev mode has also…
Nearly eight months after acquiring Aseop Interactive from Nick Haskins in 2015, Hyun Supual has released Aesop Story Engine 1.7.8. Supual prefaced the announcement by explaining why the blog hasn’t been updated in months. “Although this blog has not been updated too frequently, work has been continuing on Aesop Story Engine,” Supual said. “The recent focus has…
During the week following WordCamp Europe 2016, session videos from the event started trickling onto WordPress.tv. The uploading is complete and every single session recording is now available. One of the most unforgettable pieces of swag from the event was a 15-page coloring book that includes wapuus and illustrations designed around this year’s WCEU theme.…
When we announced that the new WordPress plugin directory redesign was in open beta, a number of readers provided us with their feedback. Some of the most common items mentioned include: Missing tabs Too many read more links Everything displayed on one page leading to a lot of scrolling A lack of search filters Based…
The Bulgarian government has just passed an amendment to its Electronic Governance Act that mandates all custom software created for the government must be open source. The amendment was voted on in the Bulgarian parliament and put into effect July 1, 2016. According to Bozhidar Bozhanov, a 27-year-old software engineer and advisor to the deputy…
When Adii Pienaar, Magnus Jepson, and Mark Forrester created WooThemes in 2008, they never envisioned a future where the lion’s share of the company’s revenue would be derived from e-commerce. After establishing WooThemes as a major player in the WordPress themes marketplace, the company’s founders launched WooCommerce with the goal of increasing revenue by selling…
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.