The application for WordCamp Netherlands 2017 has been denied. The camp, which held its sixth edition in Utrecht last year with more than 425 attendees, was one of the most well-established WordPress events in Europe. Yesterday lead organizer Marcel Bootsman published a post on the Dutch WordPress community site to explain why the camp has…
Automattic’s mobile engineers released a major update to WordPress for Android this week. Last year the app’s users saw a growing disparity between the features available to self-hosted sites and those available to WordPress.com users. Not having the WP REST API in core was holding the app back from providing the same site management features…
WordPress.org relaunched the plugin directory this week with a new design and improvements to the search algorithm. The redesign spent more than six months in beta for feedback and testing, but many contributors on the project said they felt their feedback was not taken into account. The result is that the new design shipped but…
Just when you think all the best domain names have been gobbled up by bots and squatters, Poopy.life emerges as the fastest new way to spin up a WordPress test install. Joe Guilmette, team lead at WP All Import, opened up Poopy.life to the public today, offering free unlimited WordPress installs for anyone who needs…
Poedit 2 was released today after two years in development. The app has a refreshed interface for translating .PO files, which Poedit creator Václav Slavík said was created by a professional designer. It is also the first paid upgrade for Pro users since the app added support for WordPress theme and plugin translations in 2013.…
The new WordPress Plugin Directory went live today. Contributors have been working for the past year on rebuilding the directory with a new design and better capabilities for searching through the 45K+ available plugins. The new landing page displays a search bar prominently at the top, followed by sections for featured plugins, popular plugins, and…
UK government officials are targeting online service providers after terrorist Khalid Masood killed four people and injured more than two dozen in an attack in Westminster last week. In an article published on the Telegraph Sunday morning, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd called on Google, Twitter, and Facebook to take action on extremist content. She…
WordCamp Miami kicked off today with its ancillary workshops for beginners, freelancers, and BuddyPress enthusiasts. The WordCamp is entering its 9th year and organizers are expecting more than 800 attendees. Tickets are once again sold out, but latecomers hoping to attend can sign up for the wait list. WordCamp Miami is one of the most…
Nearly three months after laying off a third of its staff and publicly admitting that its previous ad-based revenue model was broken, Medium has introduced a new $5 per month subscription program. The internet speculated freely about Medium’s next move after CEO Ev Williams said the company would be taking “a different, bolder approach” to…
PHP 5.6 usage has steadily increased over the past year and has now overtaken versions 5.3 and 5.4 to be the most widely used version, according to W3Techs’ stats. PHP is used by 82.6% of all the websites for which W3Techs can detect a server-side programming language. PHP 7 accounts for 3.1% of these websites…
Foxhound made its debut on WordPress.org yesterday. The React-based theme is the first in the directory to use the REST API endpoints included in WordPress 4.7. Foxhound sports a tasteful blog design with single-page app functionality that loads posts instantly. Check out the live demo to see how fast the content loads. The theme was…
The WordPress Theme Review team (TRT) has turned a corner and is approaching a major milestone of getting the review queue under 100 themes. As of today, 189 themes are lined up in what was previously a 1,000+ backlog. Key reviewers are confident that number will be closer to zero in the near future. Emil…
Yoast SEO 4.5 was released today with a handful of improvements and, most notably, a big push for users to upgrade to PHP 7. “In Yoast SEO 4.5, we are urging site owners whose sites run on servers with an outdated version of PHP to update to a more recent version,” Joost de Valk said.…
Last week Steve Burge and the team at PressShack released PublishPress, a fork of Automattic’s Edit Flow plugin. PressShack is operated by the same team behind OSTraining with a focus on creating publishing plugins for larger organizations. Edit Flow has more than 10,000 active installs but is updated sporadically and is not very well supported.…
GitHub took another step towards beefing up its support for open source projects this week with a new feature that makes it easier to understand a project’s license. If the project is using a popular open source license, GitHub will automatically add a short, plain-English description of the license and its permissions, conditions, and limitations.…