This past weekend while managing a site that runs BuddyPress, I ran into a situation where I needed to change a group’s slug or permalink. Editing the permalink for a post or page in WordPress is easy but BuddyPress doesn’t have the same functionality. As you can see in the screenshot below, an edit button…
After the inaugural WPCampus concluded in 2016, organizers put out a call for campuses across the country to host the event in 2017. The WPCampus planning committee has announced that WPCampus 2017 will be held July 14-15, at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. In addition to announcing the date, the committee is accepting speaker submissions and looking for sponsors.…
When Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the WordPress project, delivers his annual State of The Word presentation, he always gives props to meetup organizers and attendees. In 2016, there were 3,193 meetup events in 58 countries attended by 62,566 people. Meetups are one of the cornerstones of the community and for many are the gateway to discovering…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Matt Medeiros, co-founder of Slocum Studio. Medeiros developed Conductor, a WordPress plugin that enables people to display content in blocks, similar to the approach that WordPress core is taking. He shares his thoughts and opinions on core’s approach and how it might impact the content…
Freemius Insights has announced that its analytics service that was previously only available to WordPress plugins is now available for themes. The company was founded in 2015 by Vova Feldman and his team after discovering how much information is not available to developers who host plugins and themes on the official WordPress directories and marketplaces.…
Slavco Mihajloski, security researcher at Sucuri, has discovered a critical SQL injection vulnerability in NextGEN Gallery, a popular WordPress plugin that’s active on more than a million sites. Mihajloski gives the vulnerability a 9 out of 10 on Sucuri’s DREAD scale. Dread stands for Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, and Discoverability. Each category receives a score between 0…
Discourse is free, open-source discussion software created by Jeff Atwood in 2013. In addition to celebrating its fourth birthday, the team announced the Discourse Encouragement Fund. The fund allows the development team to pay contributors for critical work. In the course of a year, Discourse has paid 16 different developers a total of $17,000 to work…
Cloudflare, a content distribution network used by many popular sites, published detailed information about a security vulnerability that leaked user information, some of which was private, including passwords, private messages, etc. The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Tavis Ormandy, a member of Google’s Project Zero team. The issue stems from a memory leak in…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week. We introduce a new segment of the show called “What’s on WordPress.tv?” where we highlight three videos to check out. We also share details of upcoming WordCamps in the month of March. Stories Discussed: A Case for REST API BuddyPress 2.8 Boosts…
In the past few weeks, the WordPress Core Editor team, led by Automattic employees Matías Ventura and Joen Asmussen, have been hard at work creating a new content creation experience. The team recently published a UI prototype for Gutenberg, an experimental block based editor. The editor displays content-specific toolbars when an element is selected and…
I’m in favor of WordPress collecting more anonymized usage data that could help make informed decisions on changes or improvements to core, such as tracking changes to the WordPress user interface, which buttons or settings are used most often, etc. A good example of when this data could have come in handy is the recent…
When we wrote about why plugins sometimes disappear from the WordPress plugin directory, it generated a healthy discussion in the comments. One of the topics of discussion brought up is whether or not users should be notified when a plugin disappears and if so, how? Currently, when a plugin is hidden on the directory, users are not…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news making headlines including, WordCamp Miami in its 9th year, OSTraining partnering with GoDaddy to release training videos, and why plugins sometimes disappear from the WordPress plugin directory. We also provide an update on the REST API vulnerability that is actively being exploited to deface webpages.…
Scott Arciszewski, Chief Development Officer for Paragon Initiative Enterprises, who is most widely known for his cryptography engineering work, published a post on Medium criticizing Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of the WordPress open-source software project, for not caring enough about security. Arciszewski has since retracted the post but you can read it via the Wayback Machine.…
Nearly 50K publicly available plugins call the WordPress plugin directory home but once in awhile a few of them seem to disappear. There is usually a good reason for why this happens but the only information available to the public is a page that says the plugin cannot be found. If the plugin is popular…