WordPress contributor teams have shipped several new tools for theme developers in the past couple weeks, which have the potential to raise the quality of new themes coming into the ecosystem. The Theme Sniffer plugin is a new effort from the Theme Review team that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer to test a theme against…
At WordCamp Nordic’s contributor day I had the opportunity to chat with Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko about WordPress’ Date/Time component, the code that manages date, time, and timezone functionality. Savchenko is one of the maintainers of this lesser-known component, which includes code that dates back to PHP 4 times. After volunteering for years in the WordPress…
GitHub users may soon be able to contribute to projects on behalf of an organization. This feature has often been requested by developers who are contributing on behalf of their employers. “Corporate contributions to the third-party open source projects can still be a source of friction and ambiguity,” GitHub Product Manager Ben Balter said. “We’re…
10up has released a GitHub Action that enables developers to deploy to the WordPress.org Plugin repository by tagging a new version on GitHub. Helen Hou-Sandí, 10up’s Director of Open Source Initiatives, explained how it works: You’ll be able to manage your entire development lifecycle in GitHub—no more futzing with local Bash scripts or controlling commit/push…
WordCamp Miami (WCMIA) is heading into its 11th year running this weekend, making it one of the longest running non-profit tech conferences in South Florida. Known for its many learning opportunities and workshops, the event spans three days from March 15 – 17 at Florida International University. For the vast majority of the WordPress world…
Last week Automattic published a video titled “A meditation on the open web” that calls out Facebook as the antithesis of the open web: As you get closer the air gets smoggier and you realize it’s a vast metropolis. It’s surrounded by high concrete walls, completely contained. Inside it’s bustling, lots of honking traffic, people…
WordPress 5.1.1 was released yesterday evening with an important security update for a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability found in 5.1 and prior versions. The release post credited Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies for discovering and reporting the vulnerability. Scannell published a post summarizing how an unauthenticated attacker could take over any WordPress site that has…
Daniel James is putting his Dark Mode plugin up for adoption. “I’m stepping back from plugin development (and WordPress contributions) and would like to see someone passionate about it pick it up,” James said. Dark Mode has 2,000 active installations and is the most popular among a handful of dark or “night mode” plugins in…
Google is launching a new program called Season of Docs with the goal of fostering collaboration between technical writers and open source projects. The initiative is very similar to Google Summer of Code, except it is focused on documentation and technical writing contributions instead. Prospective participants can apply during the month of April 2019. Google…
WordCamp Nordic hosted a successful kids workshop over the weekend where participants learned how to start publishing with WordPress. The event was held during Contributor Day at the same venue, tucked into a comfortable corner with soft chairs and ample floor space for the kids to stretch out. Petya Raykovska led the workshop and participants…
WordPress core contributor Alex Shiels has published a proposal for a WordPress.org block directory that would host JavaScript-based, single block plugins. The directory would make blocks searchable and installable from within the Gutenberg editor. Building a directory for discovering blocks and seamlessly installing them is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg identified as…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I review feedback from last week’s show, share a few more memories of Alex Mills, and discuss an article that describes what it’s like to be a content moderator for Facebook. We also share our opinions on the idea of WordPress having shorter release cycles. Stories Discussed: The…
The inaugural WordCamp Nordic will be live streamed for free on March 8, from the Paasitorni Congress Center in Helsinki. The conference starts at 9 AM. Those watching remotely can tune into both tracks via the following links: Track 1 https://2019.nordic.wordcamp.org/live-congress-hall/ Track 2 https://2019.nordic.wordcamp.org/live-sirkus/ The WordCamp’s organizers published the direct links, so there is no…
One of the the most important factors in WordPress’ growth is the software’s availability in 186 languages. Its vibrant community of translation volunteers, known as the Polyglots team, continually update the translations to ensure access for millions of non-English speakers around the world. In 2016, the team began hosting their own events dedicated to educational…
Freemius, a monetization, analytics, and marketing library for WordPress plugin and theme developers, patched an authenticated option update vulnerability in its wordpress-sdk four days ago. The library is included with many popular plugins, such as NextGEN Gallery (1,000,000+ installs), 404 – 301 (100,000+ installs), WP Security Audit Log (80,000+ installs), and FooGallery (100,000 installs+). Freemius…
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