Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US. It’s a time of reflection and an opportunity to express gratitude for the good things in life. In episode 143 of the KitchensinkWP podcast, host Adam Silver asked his two sons why they’re grateful for WordPress. “I am thankful for WordPress because it gives you a job for the…
Earlier this year, Knock Knock Whois There LLC, an Automattic subsidiary in partnership with Primer Nivel, won an auction for around $19 million dollars to offer top-level .blog domains. On August 18th, an email was sent to users who signed up to Dotblog.WordPress.com notifying them that they could apply and secure a .blog domain name…
In this short episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss a handful of news stories making headlines. We discuss a recent security update to the WP eCommerce plugin, Upvato disappearing only to reappear in the near future, and Nashville, TN hosting WordCamp US in 2017 and 2018. Last but not least is Marcus’…
Earlier this year, Automattic added visual icons to the WordPress.com customizer after user testing showed users tried clicking on the parts of the page they wanted to edit, rather than searching through the menus in the customizer. In an effort to see if the same could be done for the self-hosted version of WordPress, Payton Swick…
When images are uploaded in WordPress 4.6.1 that have an empty alt text value, WordPress tries to generate one based on the caption text or the image title. If the image title is non descriptive as is common with photos uploaded from digital cameras, the alt text can be meaningless. In WordPress 4.7, the caption text and the image…
Over the weekend, the WP eCommerce team released version 3.11.4 of its e-commerce plugin. The update patches an SQL injection vulnerability that was responsibly disclosed by Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team. According to Justin Sainton, lead developer of WP eCommerce, the team was notified of the vulnerability on November 11th and patched within…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Back in August, we highlighted potential changes to the WordPress editor that would improve the user experience. The team has since implemented some of the suggestions outlined in ticket #27159 into WordPress 4.7, including rearranging some of the toolbar buttons. The headers drop-down menu is now in the top row of buttons while the strikethrough…