Sarah Gooding is an Editorial Ninja at Audrey Capital. When not writing about WordPress, she enjoys baking, knitting, judging beer competitions and spending time with her Italian Greyhound.
WordPress has officially ended support for PHP 5.2 – 5.5 and bumped its minimum required PHP version to 5.6. The plan announced last December was to bump the minimum required version in early 2019 and, depending on the results, bump it again to PHP 7 in December 2019. Sites on (more…)
Gutenberg 5.3 was released today with basic block management, a feature that will be included in WordPress 5.2. It is a new modal that can be launched from the vertical ellipses menu, inspired by Rich Tabor’s CoBlocks implementation. Users can turn individual blocks on/off or even entire sections, such as (more…)
The 11th edition of WordCamp Miami was held this past weekend, a three-day event that featured multiple learning workshops and six different tracks. The speaker ratio was 50% male and 50% female, and nearly half of the speakers were new to WordCamp Miami. Another great year of amazing, diverse speakers! (more…)
WordPress contributor teams have shipped several new tools for theme developers in the past couple weeks, which have the potential to raise the quality of new themes coming into the ecosystem. The Theme Sniffer plugin is a new effort from the Theme Review team that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer (more…)
At WordCamp Nordic’s contributor day I had the opportunity to chat with Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko about WordPress’ Date/Time component, the code that manages date, time, and timezone functionality. Savchenko is one of the maintainers of this lesser-known component, which includes code that dates back to PHP 4 times. After volunteering (more…)
GitHub users may soon be able to contribute to projects on behalf of an organization. This feature has often been requested by developers who are contributing on behalf of their employers. “Corporate contributions to the third-party open source projects can still be a source of friction and ambiguity,” GitHub Product (more…)
10up has released a GitHub Action that enables developers to deploy to the WordPress.org Plugin repository by tagging a new version on GitHub. Helen Hou-Sandí, 10up’s Director of Open Source Initiatives, explained how it works: You’ll be able to manage your entire development lifecycle in GitHub—no more futzing with local (more…)
WordCamp Miami (WCMIA) is heading into its 11th year running this weekend, making it one of the longest running non-profit tech conferences in South Florida. Known for its many learning opportunities and workshops, the event spans three days from March 15 – 17 at Florida International University. For the vast (more…)
Last week Automattic published a video titled “A meditation on the open web” that calls out Facebook as the antithesis of the open web: As you get closer the air gets smoggier and you realize it’s a vast metropolis. It’s surrounded by high concrete walls, completely contained. Inside it’s bustling, (more…)
WordPress 5.1.1 was released yesterday evening with an important security update for a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability found in 5.1 and prior versions. The release post credited Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies for discovering and reporting the vulnerability. Scannell published a post summarizing how an unauthenticated attacker could take over (more…)
Daniel James is putting his Dark Mode plugin up for adoption. “I’m stepping back from plugin development (and WordPress contributions) and would like to see someone passionate about it pick it up,” James said. Dark Mode has 2,000 active installations and is the most popular among a handful of dark (more…)
Google is launching a new program called Season of Docs with the goal of fostering collaboration between technical writers and open source projects. The initiative is very similar to Google Summer of Code, except it is focused on documentation and technical writing contributions instead. Prospective participants can apply during the (more…)