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…
Elegant Themes emailed its customers last night to inform them of a critical security vulnerability affecting a large segment of its product line. An information disclosure vulnerability was found in the Divi Builder (included in our Divi and Extra themes, as well as our Divi Builder plugin) which resulted in the potential for user privilege…
WP Pusher is on a relentless mission to make it effortless for WordPress developers to connect their plugin and theme repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. Version 2.1.0 of the plugin eliminates the requirement to manually create a token with GitHub and introduces 1-click authentication via OAuth. This update makes setting up the plugin on…
The development team behind TGM Plugin Activation released its new generator last week. The popular tool is a PHP library that allows WordPress developers to require or recommend plugins for a theme or plugin. It essentially helps walk WordPress users through installation and activation of plugin dependencies in the admin. Bundling a bunch of plugin-type…
Last month a group of open source project maintainers confronted GitHub with an open letter of complaints regarding issue management. They were frustrated by a lack of communication from GitHub and a lack of features for managing issues. More than 1700 maintainers of open source projects, including several projects related to WordPress, have signed the…
Last week the feature plugin decision deadline closed and WordPress core contributors approved Responsive Preview and Selective Refresh for merge. The merge deadline is Wednesday, February 17, followed by the first beta next week. Both feature approved for 4.5 extend the customizer to improve live previews. A new version of the Customize Partial Refresh plugin…
After two years in business, Jami Gibbs is selling Rescue Themes. The niche theme shop specializes in products for nonprofits, politics, breweries, and e-commerce websites. Gibbs did not publicly disclose how much revenue the shop is generating, but Rescue Themes has seven products available on Themeforest ranging in price from $16-$59. She also has several…
During the 2015 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg highlighted Bluehost‘s recent efforts to update its customers’ outdated WordPress sites. After finding that 80% of their WordPress installations were not on the latest version, Bluehost wrote a Perl script that uses WP-CLI to update sites, even those running on versions as old as 1.0.2.…
The call for volunteers for WordCamp Europe closed this week and organizers announced that they have assembled a team of more than 100 people to help run the event. The 130 applicants represent 33 countries from Europe and beyond, with the highest numbers from the United States, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, and Romania. The event…
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.