WordPress emoji are served from s.w.org, but they are not compressed. This impacts the SVG loading time, depending on how many emoji you are using, and can even throw warnings on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Turkey-based WordPress developer Mustafa Uysal has just released Compressed Emoji, a plugin that makes use of the emoji_svg_url filter introduced…
After 14 years of blogging with MovableType, Andy Baio has relaunched Waxy.org on WordPress. Baio’s media and technology blog has been a continual source of original content about life on the internet and how it affects our culture. The migration includes 472 posts and 15,891 entries from his sideblog Waxy Links. Waxy.org played a small…
The bbPress development team has released 2.5.11 to add support for a technical change in WordPress 4.7. Users are highly encouraged to update to bbPress 2.5.11 before updating to WordPress 4.7. In 4.7, the loading order for the current user in the function stack was changed to accommodate user locale switching. Previously, BuddyPress and bbPress…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week. WordCamp US live stream tickets will be free this year and development of BuddyPress 2.8 kicks off. We talk about the revamped guidelines for the WordPress plugin directory and how they should help streamline the review process. Last but…
WordCamp Europe 2017 is set to host the next community summit in Paris. This will be the first time the event has been held outside of the United States, a change that makes it more accessible for contributors who are unable to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. Attaching the summit to WordCamp Europe…
Astute testers may have noticed a new feature in WordPress 4.7 beta 1 that enabled users to search, preview, and install themes from within the customizer. This feature was part of five feature projects related to the customizer that were approved for merge last month. Its goal is to unify the theme browsing and customizing…
Development for BuddyPress 2.8 kicked off during last week’s meeting and the target release date was set for January 25. In line with the project’s recent change of course, the upcoming release will be another one focused on developers and site builders. Long time contributor Slava Abakumov is leading 2.8 with a focus on reducing…
WordCamp US is less than a month away and attendees are finalizing their travel plans. In August, organizers were estimating 3,000 attendees on the ground but official numbers are not yet available as tickets continue to sell. A maximum capacity has not been published, because organizers have a great deal of flexibility to expand the…
With WordCamp US a little less than a month away, it’s time to take the 2016 WordPress user survey. The survey is quick and easy to fill out with only a few questions to answer. Results are anonymized and will be shared at this year’s State of the Word presentation. Results from last year’s survey…
Two months ago, revised guidelines for the WordPress Plugin Directory were opened up on GitHub for public feedback. This transparent and open process of updating the guidelines resulted in more than a dozen contributors submitting pull requests with improvements to the language and content. The revamped guidelines have now replaced the previous ones with language…
PressNomics, an annual conference devoted to the economics of WordPress has announced that the fifth iteration of the event will take place April 6-8, 2017 at Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, in Phoenix, AZ. The event is organized by Joshua Strebel of Pagely, a managed WordPress hosting company that recently celebrated its seventh birthday. A hallmark…
WordPress 4.7 is a little more than a month away and is going to be packed with new features and improvements. In particular, five feature projects related to the customizer were approved for merge and will be part of the release. One of the feature projects is the custom CSS editor that enables users to…
Zac Gordon, a WordPress educator, has opened enrollment for the Fall for his JavaScript for WordPress course. Gordon created the course after Treehouse dropped WordPress from its library in late 2015. Open enrollment began on October 25th and ends this Friday, November 4th. You can either take all four parts of the course for $397 or…
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) today kicks off its 18th year helping writers achieve their creative goals. The online event is organized by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that encourages participants to work towards writing a 50,000-word novel. Writers commit to posting their word counts to their profiles each day during the event, which runs from…
I recently logged into Skype and received two messages from people who I haven’t spoken too in years. Both messages contained a URL to Baidu with my Skype username at the end. I immediately became suspicious and after a cursory search of Google, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one receiving these messages. According…
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