May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the US, dedicated to educating people about mental health and illnesses since 1949. WP Elevation is joining the observance this year with a special emphasis on freelancers and the tech industry. The company, which provides education for WordPress consultants, will be focusing all of its content on mental…
WP Docker is a new project from 10up that makes it easy to set up a local WordPress development environment with Docker. Last year 10up worked with Joyent, a cloud infrastructure company, to create a production-ready implementation of WordPress in Docker. After their experience with this project, 10up created WP Docker as a simple, open…
Shopify’s official plugin for WordPress was removed from the plugin directory this week. The plugin allowed users to create “Buy Buttons” for products from their Shopify stores and insert them into WordPress posts and pages using a shortcode. It was built by WebDevStudios and had approximately 9,000 active installations before it was removed. Shopify’s documentation…
In 2016, WordPress meetups had the fastest growth the community has seen in five or six years with more than 62,566 people attending in 58 different countries. Meetups are the seeds of future WordCamps. These local gatherings help users further their WordPress skills and underpin the community’s growth across the globe. Funding a local meetup…
Promotion for WordCamp US 2017 in Nashville, December 1-3, is now in full swing, as organizers have ramped up social media efforts to stimulate ticket sales. Instead of releasing batches of tickets in stages, all WordCamp US tickets are on sale at once. “Our goal is to sell between 2,000 and 2,500, but we could…
Open source software usage is growing across all industries, but this year’s Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report from Black Duck shows the pervasiveness of security vulnerabilities and license compliance risks. Black Duck conducted audits on more than 1,000 commercial applications in 2016 and analyzed the anonymized data. The audits were primarily related…
WordCamp Europe 2017 organizers are counting down 50 days until the largest planned WordPress event to date. Speaker announcements continue to roll out and the recommended hotels are getting booked up at the height of tourist season. As of yesterday, more than 300 of the 500 tickets for Contributor Day have been claimed. This year…
Over the weekend, Matt Mullenweg announced that the upcoming WordPress 4.8 release will drop support for IE versions 8, 9, and 10. Core contributors have been discussing browser support for the past two months in relationship to setting technical requirements for the new editor. Microsoft discontinued support for IE 8, 9, and 10 in January…
If you work with WordPress every day you may have learned to tune out the recommended plugins in the admin by now, but the “Add Plugins” screen is an important part of the new user experience. WordPress developers Joey Kudish and Nick Hamze have released a plugin that brings better recommendations to the admin. Hamze…
After the controversial changes to Twitter’s @reply feature, which no longer counts usernames towards the 140-character limit, Mastodon registrations rose sharply. Mastodon is a free, open source, decentralized network that has many similarities to Twitter. The software, named in honor of its creator’s favorite metal band, was launched in October and registered 24,000 users in…
Checathlon is new business theme on WordPress.org that was designed to seamlessly integrate with Easy Digital Downloads. The name is a combination of the words checkout and decathlon, according to its creator Sami Keijonen. Checathlon combines elegant typography with a bold, pink accent color to showcase products and services on a business or e-commerce website.…
Last month the WordPress Plugin Directory relaunched with a new design and improvements to the search algorithm. The new design replaced the plugin pages’ previous tabbed interface with a wall of text, truncated by numerous “read more” links. The outpouring of negative community feedback on the new design overshadowed many of the helpful improvements. Removal…
WordCamp Europe 2017 has been rolling out speaker announcements over the past week, slowly building what appears to be a strong lineup of both European and international WordPress experts. Speaker names are being released in thematic groups, the first dedicated to development topics, followed by business and content/marketing groups. Registration for Contributor Day, which will…
The results of the BuddyPress 2016 survey have been published. This year the survey received feedback from 302 respondents in 61 different countries, a 43% increase in responses from 2015. The top five countries represented in the survey include the United States (27.15%), India (7.62%), United Kingdom (6.95%), Germany (6.29%), and Canada (3.64%). English remains…
Open Collective is a new service that aims to make it easy for individuals, groups, and organizations to raise money in a transparent way. Although many projects have communities ready to offer financial support, the paperwork, taxes, and accounting involved in collecting money under the proper legal entity can be a nearly insurmountable hurdle. “So…