As a child of the ’90s, I was growing up in one of the largest transitional periods in human history. The Internet Age was upon us. I was born and raised in a small community in rural Alabama. The country. The backwoods. To give you an idea of how small the place was, my entire…
GNU Project maintainers are working to oust Richard Stallman from his position as head of the organization. In a joint statement published yesterday morning, a collection of 22 GNU maintainers and developers thanked Stallman for his work and declared that he can no longer represent the project: We, the undersigned GNU maintainers and developers, owe…
The Google Security Team has announced a timeline for when Chrome will begin blocking mixed content by default in order to ensure that HTTPS browsing is more secure. Mixed content refers to HTTPS pages that load resources, such as images, videos, stylesheets, and scripts, over HTTP. The gradual rollout will begin with Chrome 79, which…
In what is seen as a win for accessibility advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Domino’s petition to appeal a lower-court decision on whether the pizza chain’s website and mobile app must be accessible to those with disabilities. The earlier U.S. 9th Circuit court ruled that websites fall under Title III of the American with…
WooSesh is happening next week on October 9 and 10, and registration is now open. This is the second edition of the virtual WooCommerce event hosted by WPSessions. In addition to presentations focused entirely on e-commerce, the event will include a “Hallway Track” that offers opportunities for attendees to connect with each other, along with…
The WordPress.org SVN system received a version bump to 7.2 on October 3. This change means that plugin authors can now use newer PHP syntax in plugins they submit to the official plugin directory. In the future, the version maximum will match what’s running on WordPress.org. This should be good news for any plugin developers…
In what began as a heated conversation on Twitter, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson took to the airwaves to debate opposing viewpoints on market share, monopolies, and power in open source communities. Hansson reacted to a statement Mullenweg made in an interview after Salesforce Ventures…
The WordPress theme review team (TRT) is kicking off a review weekend October 5 and will begin at 10:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). These events, called “review shindigs,” are marathon sessions where the team joins together to review themes and teach best practices. The current plan is to hold the event on the first Saturday…
PHP 7.4 is slated for release on November 28, 2019. WordPress 5.3 will also include several commits that address deprecated features. It’s unlikely that most WordPress plugin and theme developers will be able to use the new PHP 7.4 features for a while except when working on setups where they have some measure of control…
BuddyPress 5.0.0 “Le Gusto” was released this week with the long-awaited BP REST API, a new Invitations API, and BuddyPress info on the Site Health screen. The release was named for a favorite pizza restaurant in Fortaleza, Brazil, where BP REST API contributor and core committer Renato Alves resides. The new REST API is fully…
Brian Gardner announced he was stepping down from his role with StudioPress this past Friday. Last year, WP Engine acquired StudioPress. After staying on board for the remainder of his contract, Gardner stepped down from his role with the company. “The past 15 months have gone by quickly, and it sometimes feels like yesterday that…
Gatsby Days London kicked off yesterday with a lot of momentum after Gatsby Inc. announced a $15M Series A funding round last week. The one-day conference drew 200 attendees and was the third in a series of Gatsby Days that have been held in other cities. They are designed to give the community an opportunity…
Edit Flow, the modular editorial plugin that enables collaboration inside the WordPress admin, is no longer being actively developed. After no updates for nine months, Mark Warbinek, a frustrated user, contacted Automattic to ask if they have abandoned the plugin or still plan to update it. A support representative from Automattic confirmed the company will…
Now that WordPress 5.3 Beta 1 is open for testing and with the official release slated for November 12, it’s time for theme authors to begin making sure their themes are ready for several changes. Most work will revolve around the block editor. WordPress 5.3 will include versions 5.4 – 6.5 of the Gutenberg plugin,…
Secure the News is a project that was created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2016 to track HTTPS encryption across major news organizations’ websites. It lists the publications and automatically scores them on a scale of 0-100, based on HTTPS implementation according to best practices, as defined by General Services Administration (GSA)…
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