Google announced today that it will begin penalizing pages with intrusive interstitials, commonly known as popup ads, beginning in 2017: Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile…
Last week Disqus announced that the company has partnered with Akismet to combat comment spam. The blog comment hosting service processes 1.8 million comments per day and approximately 15,000 (0.8%) are spam. “It only takes one spam comment to create an eyesore in a lively discussion so, in a sense, stopping all these varying spam…
Mergebot is a new SaaS solution by Delicious Brains Inc., that simplifies the database merging process making it somewhat similar to VersionPress. Although he hasn’t used the service as it’s still in early beta, Bernard compares the two and provides insight into how Mergebot possibly accomplishes database merging at a technical level. “On the outside,…
Borek Bernard, co-founder of VersionPress, published an update on the company’s blog that details the progress of version 4.0. According to Bernard, the team is making headway on providing third-party plugin support which is a major feature of 4.0. Composer workflows will be in the release and the team has hired a user experience expert…
Hot on the heels of WPCampus 2016, the event’s organizing team is currently accepting applications to host the event in 2017. The team is specifically looking for a campus or educational institution that can help plan and host the event. In addition, the following factors will help determine the location. Availability in early Summer months…
Envato is celebrating 10 years in business today. Founders Collis and Cyan Ta’eed started the company out of their garage in Sydney in 2006 with the launch of ActiveDen (originally called FlashDen). Envato expanded to provide an umbrella for a variety of different endeavors in the following years, including PSD Tuts and Freelance Switch launched…
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Insight Into Automattic’s Open Vacation Policy Alexis Croswell, of Culture Amp, published…
WordPress 4.6 was released this week with support for 50 translations at 100%, a record number for the Polyglots. The volunteer team has grown 114% over the past year and a half. “On April 15th, translation contributors totaled 4,690 for all time, with a rate of 3 new per day,” Polyglots team member Petya Raykovska…
Planning for WordCamp US is charging forward with the call for speakers and volunteers closing in less than two weeks on August 31. Last year the event had approximately 100 volunteers but organizers are working to expand the team to accommodate more attendees in 2016. “We’ll likely accept somewhere between 150-180 volunteers, which we think…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Rebecca Gill, founder of Web-Savvy-Marketing. We discuss a number of topics surrounding SEO including, what’s changed in the past five years, the purpose of SEO plugins, common misconceptions, and the amount of effort involved in obtaining good results. Gill also provides insight…
In the last two years, I’ve had many private conversations with people in the WordPress community about WordPress core’s leadership. A phrase I’ve often heard during these conversations is, [I just don’t want to get crucified by insert name of core developer here.] It doesn’t matter who is saying or thinking it, it only matters…
The .blog top-level domain extension is entering the sunrise phase today, during which trademark holders have first access to apply for their .blog domains via a certified trademark agent. Knock Knock, WHOIS There, Automattic’s subsidiary that is managing .blog domains, won the rights to oversee the sale and registration of the extension in 2015 for…
Jetpack 4.2 is a combination release with performance improvements and fixes for a couple of security vulnerabilities. These updates secure Contact Form submission exports from potential formula injections and fix a general XSS vulnerability in the misuse of the add_query_arg() function. The majority of enhancements in this release are centered on speeding up communication between…
Let’s Encrypt, the open Certificate Authority, passed 5 million active (unexpired) certificates this week. The project came out of beta in April and has grown rapidly in the past few months. At the end of June, Let’s Encrypt reported that it had 3.8 million active certificates covering more than 7 million unique domains. In a…
WP Site Care announced that it will soon be entering the WordPress products business with a commercial recipe plugin. Co-founder Ryan Sullivan said the company is partnering with Feast Design Company to launch Cookbook, a full-featured recipe plugin that is mobile and SEO friendly. “A good chunk of our current customers are food bloggers and…
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