I have only been on the job for less than two months. In that time, one thing has become abundantly clear. The largest companies in the WordPress ecosystem send out press releases to news organizations such as WP Tavern. Small businesses may send an email with few details. Others send nothing at all. As a…
For those of you unable to attend WordCamp US at St. Louis, Missouri, this weekend, the event will be available for live streaming. The conference runs from Friday, November 1, through Sunday, November 3. Friday and Saturday’s regular sessions, which do not include workshops, will be streamed. While previous events like WordCamp US 2018 have…
I had the opportunity to test the Image SEO plugin over the past week. Image SEO is a plugin that connects to an accompanying online service that processes images uploaded to a WordPress installation. The plugin can automatically rename file names, create alt tags for screen readers, and optimize images for Pinterest. The plugin is…
GoDaddy launched an eCommerce tier for their managed hosting plans on October 22. The new tier launched in partnership with WooCommerce and offers over $1,500 of commercial extensions and themes for setting up an online shop. The eCommerce plan utilizes GoDaddy’s onboarding process available with all managed hosting plans. The system automatically sets up the…
Themes are the face of WordPress. Like it or not, the average user is more interested in what their site looks like when they first begin using the platform than what the thousands upon thousands of plugins can do for them. Perhaps that’s unfair to plugin developers — there are more exciting things happening in…
The Gutenberg team released version 6.7 of the Gutenberg plugin last week. The announcement post listed a little over three dozen bug fixes and several enhancements to existing features. The most notable features included in the update are Storybook support and gradient backgrounds for the button block. All of the bug fixes included in Gutenberg…
On October 9, Juliette Reinders Folmer announced on the core WordPress blog that WordPress 5.3 will use the spread operator. The spread operator was one of the new features made available in PHP 5.6, a version released in 2014. WordPress abandoned PHP 5.2 – 5.5 with the release of WordPress 5.2. This means the core…
I don’t write fluff pieces. I call ’em like I see ’em. If your project is a dumpster fire, I’m going to say it’s a dumpster fire. Whenever someone comes to me in hopes that I review their product, I give them some form of the preceding paragraph. It doesn’t matter if it is a…
Nine months after the announcement of Newspack by WordPress.com, the Chilean news site El Soberano became the first publication to launch on the new platform. On October 16, the small news team relaunched with a fresh design powered by the Newspack theme and its newsroom-focused plugins. Newspack is a project of Automattic, the parent company…
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and various other products, announced earlier today that Mark Davies has joined the team as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This news comes fresh off the heels of Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr in August and a $300 million Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures in September. The investment round…
The core WordPress team released version 5.2.4 of WordPress on October 14. The release addresses six security issues that were all privately reported through WordPress’ responsible disclosure procedure. Like any security release, users should update immediately to the latest version to keep their sites secure. For those with automatic updates enabled, the new version is…
The Tavern was provided access to test GoDaddy’s onboarding process, which is a part of its managed WordPress hosting service. The company has revamped its system since we covered it in 2016. The web host has had time to garner feedback since then and build an easy-to-use, headache-free way to launch WordPress sites. GoDaddy has…
The team behind the Meta Box plugin updated their MB Settings Page add-on to include support for the customizer and multisite. The customizer feature allows theme authors to integrate their custom settings into the customizer using framework-specific code. The multisite integration allows plugin authors to create a network settings page. The new features come on…
MachoThemes, the WordPress development company behind the Modula Gallery plugin, has acquired three gallery plugins. The company is currently rolling the first two of the plugins, Final Tiles Grid Gallery Lite and PhotoBlocks Grid Gallery, into Modula. The third plugin, EverLightbox, will remain as a standalone project. The three plugins were purchased from Diego Imbriani…
Rosa 2 is the sequel to Pixelgrade’s best-selling theme, Rosa. The new theme re-imagines its previous incarnation in the context of the block editor (Gutenberg). I was provided a copy of the theme for free to test and provide my thoughts. The theme sells for $75/year, or you can pay a one-time fee of $95…