A new era has begun for WordPress.org’s Plugin Review Team. Mika Epstein, who has served for the past decade, is stepping down, but not before launching a new crew of volunteers. The team is responsible for approving newly submitted plugins, maintaining the Plugin Reviewer Handbook, as well as investigating any reported security issues and guideline…
The WP Feature Notifications project has launched a community survey to get feedback on the current system of notices in the WordPress admin. The project aims to create a better way to manage and deliver notifications in the admin, and the survey is intended to further refine this work. A few months ago, the project…
Gutenberg 16.1 was released this week, debuting of the Pattern Library, which coincides with reusable blocks getting renamed to synced patterns. Users can now create and manage their own patterns that will also show up in the block inserter. Custom patterns are saved to the new Library alongside custom template parts. This release also adds…
WPScan is reporting a hacking campaign actively exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the Ultimate Member plugin, which allows unauthenticated attackers to create new user accounts with administrative privileges and take over the site. The vulnerability has been assigned a CVSSv3.1 (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score of 9.8 (Critical). Automattic’s WP.cloud and Pressable.com hosting platforms picked…
WordPress 6.3 hit a major milestone today with the release of Beta 2. The release leads opted to skip Beta 1, which was delayed yesterday after some technical issues with packaging the release, and have moved straight on to Beta 2. As WordPress 6.3 is set to be the last major release of the Gutenberg…
WordCamp Asia has announced its dates for 2024. The flagship event is now officially scheduled for March 7-9, in Taipei, Taiwan. Organizers have secured the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC) venue to host the event, which is located in the business district not far from Taipei 101, formerly known as the Taipei World Financial Center, a…
Last week Gutenberg contributors were engaged in a spirited debate regarding a proposal to rename the new Command Center to Wayfinder. The feature, designed to be an extensible quick search and command execution tool, will land in WordPress 6.3. The majority of participants in the discussion were strongly against calling it Wayfinder, as the term…
WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens attracted more than 2,500 attendees from 94 countries, made possible by 112 organizers and 250 volunteers. The event is now looking forward to 2024, which will be hosted by the Italian WordPress community in Torino, Italy, June 13-15. This modern city is located at the foot of the Alps in…
There has always been some confusion and overlap between reusable blocks and patterns. The difference was that reusable blocks can be created and edited in the block editor and then reused in other places – inserted into posts or pages. Block patterns, once inserted, can be edited and are not synced. They give users the…
Really Simple SSL, a popular plugin used on more than five million sites for installing SSL certificates, handling website migrations, mixed content, redirects, and security headers, has added a new feature in its most recent major update. Version 7.0.0 introduces vulnerability detection as part of a partnership with WP Vulnerability, an open source, free API…
If you haven’t visited the WordPress Pattern Directory lately, it may look very different from when it launched two years ago. At first there was an emphasis on getting the community to contribute to the resource but the directory has now passed more than 1,500 patterns. Contributors are making changes to provide a more curated…
WordPress.com has been known to experiment with its pricing from time to time, and the platform announced another major change today. Users on the Free plan are now able to use monetization features without upgrading. In the past, WordPress.com users who wanted to earn money on their websites by collecting donations, creating a newsletter, or…
Up until yesterday, the Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) blog lay dormant for nine years, the last post chronicling how the team set out to create a Gravatar app that somehow “morphed into a Selfies app.” Communication went silent after that, although the Twitter account posted occasionally. The service has pivoted to become “a personal digital business…
Blocknotes is a new experimental app that runs WordPress natively on the iPhone. It was created by WordPress core committer Ella van Durpe and is powered by WordPress Playground, a project that runs the software in the browser without a PHP server. “WordPress’ ecosystem can now run anywhere – desktop, mobile, web, even fenced ecosystems,” WordPress Playground creator…
A lively discussion is happening on the Gutenberg repository about renaming the Command Center. This new feature, designed to be an extensible quick search and command execution tool, was introduced in Gutenberg 15.6. In version 16.0, it came out of the experimental stage and its API is now public, ready for developers to create their…
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