Polldaddy was founded in 2006 by David Lenehan in Sligo, Ireland and was acquired by Automattic in 2008. Polldaddy is a platform agnostic service providing users with the ability to create polls and surveys. Today, 12 years later, Automattic is retiring the Polldaddy name and replacing it with Crowdsignal. Outside of some minor color changes, and…
WooSesh, the free virtual conference devoted to WooCommerce kicked off earlier today. Todd Wilkins, Head of eCommerce at Automattic, Kelly Hoffman, Head of Design for eCommerce at Automattic, and Aviva Pinchas, Product Lead of the WooCommerce Marketplace at Automattic got things started with the keynote presentation. Wilkins highlighted what the team has accomplished since last…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I have a lengthy discussion about the numerous Accessibility concerns being raised by members of the community. We also talk about the WordPress 5.0 release date, tempers flaring in the WordPress core Slack channel, dealing with political situations within the WordPress project, and more. We share our thoughts…
Allan Cole, a WordPress Theme Imagineer at Automattic has published the first glimpses of the Twenty Nineteen default theme slated to ship with WordPress 5.0. Cole is leading the theme while Kjell Regstad who does Product and Editorial Design at Automattic will be a design coach. The theme takes a minimalist approach that’s a good…
The following is a guest post by Chris Van Patten who shares his experience learning and contributing to Gutenberg. There’s been a lot of talk of Gutenberg’s higher barrier to entry for new contributors. Van Patten is the founder of Tomodomo, a digital agency for magazine publishers. Over the past few months, but especially over…
Tiny, the company formerly known as Ephox has raised $4M in Series A funding from BlueRun Ventures. Tiny is the company behind TinyMCE, a popular text editor used in many opensource projects, including WordPress. In addition to the funding, Jeff Tannenbaum, partner at BlueRun Ventures is joining Tiny’s board of directors. The company has also…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Mike Schroder. Schroder co-led the release of WordPress 3.9 and in 2016, he led the release of WordPress 4.5. In the interview, we learn his WordPress origin story, his thoughts on Gutenberg and whether or not he sees it as the future of WordPress, the…
As activity ramps up to try to get WordPress 5.0 released in November, Matt Mullenweg has announced who will lead phase two of the Gutenberg project. Phase two focuses on Customization and entire site layouts. Alexis Lloyd, Head of Design Innovation at Automattic, will handle the design and product side. Riad Benguella, a JavaScript Engineer…
Fellow WordPresser Todrick Moore, a member of the Miami WordPress community and volunteer organizer of WordCamp Miami 2015 and 2016 passed away last week of Leukemia. “Todrick Moore was one of the kindest and strongest members of the South Florida WordPress community, and I still to this day remember meeting him first at his local…
The WordPress 5.0 release schedule has been published and not everyone is excited about the expected November 19th release. November 19th is three days before Thanksgiving, a major holiday in the U.S. Historically, WordPress has shipped major versions in early to mid December rather than November. Holidays were considered because of the sharp drop-off in…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss the headlines making the rounds in the WordPress community. This includes the start of the WordPress 5.0 release cycle, the 5th annual Hacktoberfest, and theme developers marketing their themes as Gutenberg-compatible. Near the end of the show, I describe how much of the press surrounding WordPress…
Mike Schroder known at GetSource on Twitter and Mike on WordPress’ Slack instance is joining Aaron Campbell at GoDaddy to contribute to WordPress full-time. Since 2011, Schroder has contributed to nearly every version of WordPress. In 2014, Schroder co-led the release of WordPress 3.9. In 2016, he lead the release of WordPress 4.5. He’s also…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Gary Pendergast, Gutenberg and WordPress core contributor to get an update on Gutenberg’s progress. We discuss its rollout on WordPress.com, the feedback and sentiment shared thus far, and when we can expect to see it merged into WordPress 5.0. We also talk about what…
Matias Ventura, Gutenberg’s technical lead, published an update on the progress of Gutenberg 4.0 and what users can expect. This version will mark the project’s 40th release. Ventura outlined a number of tasks that have been completed up to this point. These include, Full Screen, Unified Toolbar, and Spotlight modes to adapt to a user’s…
Gutenberg 3.8 is available for download. This release features a full screen mode that hides both the admin bar and the menu. Unlike previous versions of Distraction-Free-Writing mode where things would fade in and out of view, these two items stay hidden until full-screen mode is disabled. User Interface elements have been added to manage…