The World Health Organization estimates that 285 million people worldwide are living with some form of visual impairment and 39 million of those are estimated to be blind. Many people with low vision depend on speech recognition technology to navigate the web and communicate their thoughts. This type of software also assists people who have…
Happytables is changing from being a platform that hosts restaurant websites to one that provides analytics and insights by tapping into apps that restaurants are already using to promote their businesses. The company uses WordPress as a command center for the application that communicates with various restaurant-tech APIs to deliver information to the dashboard in…
Yesterday GitHub announced pricing changes that give all paid plans unlimited repositories and change plans to a pricing-per-user model. Individual developers are the most likely customers to benefit from the changes, but many organizations will see an exponential increase in pricing. GitLab, a competitor in the Git repository hosting space, immediately addressed disgruntled GitHub customers…
It’s almost inevitable that as a WordPress plugin gains popularity, it will receive a bad review. How plugin authors handle and respond to bad reviews is crucial, especially in a public forum. Mika Epstein, who helps review plugins before they’re added to the directory and is a dedicated support forum volunteer, gives advice on how…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Andrea Middleton, who works at Automattic as a Community Organizer for the WordPress open source project. We discuss a number of topics including, updates to the WordCamp Central website, the for-profit subsidiary, and the experimental WordCamp incubator program. At the conclusion of…
Automattic announced today that it will begin offering top-level .blog domain registration starting in August 2016. The .blog domain extension will be available to both WordPress and non-WordPress sites. According to Mark Armstrong, an Automattic subsidiary is exclusively managing the registration of .blog domains and will be offering it for purchase through WordPress.com and other…
JetBrains announced today that it has released a security update for PhpStorm and all of its other IntelliJ-based IDEs due to a set of critical vulnerabilities: The cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw in the IDE’s built-in webserver allowed an attacker to access local file system from a malicious web page without user consent. Over-permissive CORS…
GitHub has been inundated with negative feedback after announcing a major change to its pricing today. All paid plans now include unlimited private repositories, but there’s a catch. The new pricing structure requires GitHub.com organizations to purchase a seat for each user. At $9 per user/month, collaborating on private repositories is now far more costly…
Affinity is the latest addition to WordPress.com’s small collection of themes created specifically for weddings. This highly customizable, elegant theme was designed by Caroline Moore with weddings and family announcements in mind. Affinity is a one-page theme with support for five different panels. Each panel’s content can be assigned in the customizer under Theme Options…
The organizers of WPCampus are seeking feedback via a survey on how schools and campuses utilize WordPress in their environments. The survey consists of five sections: How Do You Use WordPress on Campus Site Demographics, Traffic, and Data Plugins, Themes, and Features Security, Performance, and Hosting Your Team Structure & Workflows There are a couple…
In late 2014, WordPress 4.1 added a Recommended Plugins tab that takes into account the plugins you have installed and suggests plugins based on which ones are commonly used together. After nearly a year and a half since it was added, I asked the Tavern’s Twitter followers if they have ever installed plugins recommended by…
When Automattic acquired WooThemes in 2015, it gained employees, plugins, themes, and the company’s trademarks. These trademarks include, standard character marks, logos, and specific graphics such as the Verified WooExpert badges. One of the responsibilities of a trademark owner is to protect it from infringement. WooGPL is a service that provides customers with commercial themes,…
Storefront, the official WooCommerce theme built to work seamlessly with the plugin, has just passed the 2.0 milestone. This release introduces a new “best sellers” section to the homepage and adds compatibility with the upcoming WooCommerce 2.6’s tabbed “My Account” section and the average rating widget. The most important update in Storefront 2.0 is the…
Last week the creators of Timber, the plugin that enables WordPress theme developers to write HTML using the Twig Template Engine, released version 1.0 on WordPress.org. The plugin is active on more than 10,000 websites where theme authors have elected to keep PHP files separate from HTML. Timber is built on DRY and MVC principles…
VersionPress 3.0, released this week, is the first version since the plugin became a free, open source project. Creators Borek Bernard and Jan Voráček, who originally attempted to crowdfund the project and then raised $400,000 in seed funding, announced last month that they are transitioning to a public development model. The team’s goal with this…
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.