Philadelphia welcomed 1,923 attendees to WordCamp US this weekend with an additional 2,028 enthusiasts watching via live stream. Matt Mullenweg delivered his 11th annual State of the Word address to a rapt audience ready to celebrate WordPress’ progress over the past year and hear the project leader’s vision for 2017. He began by thanking sponsors…
DigitalCube launched Shifter at WordCamp US today, the first serverless hosting product for WordPress. The Japanese development company specializes in WordPress and AWS integrations. Shifter was built by the same team behind the company’s Amimoto cloud hosting platform. Shifter converts WordPress sites into a series of static HTML files and serves them up via a…
Flywheel has acquired Pressmatic, a local WordPress development application for OS X. The application was created by Clay Griffiths, who will be joining Flywheel to support the product as part of the acquisition. Pressmatic launched in July 2016 with a $129 price tag but Flywheel is opening it up for free for all users. The…
WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the internet, up from 25% last year. While it may seem that WordPress is neatly adding 2% of the internet every year, its percentage increase fluctuates from year to year and the climb is getting more arduous with more weight to haul. In January 2015, Mullenweg said…
The second Global WordPress Translation Day was held November 12 and the stats released this week show the event was an even greater success than the first one. In April, WP Translation Day connected 448 participants through both online and in-person translation events. The second event brought 780 translators together, a 74% increase in participation.…
WordCamp US attendees are counting down the days until the event kicks off in Philadelphia in two weeks but preparations for 2017 and 2018 are already underway. Yesterday Matt Mullenweg announced that Nashville has won the bid to host WordCamp US for the next two years. According to Randy Hicks, one of the organizers, the…
Upvato creator Freddy Lundekvam has confirmed that all user files entrusted to the service have been permanently lost, as his previous storage provider is unable to recover them. After receiving a series of emails from the provider reminding him that payment was due, the provider terminated his account seven days after the invoice was overdue.…
Wedding Bride is a new theme from Alex Itsios, co-founder of Ketchup Themes. The Cyprus-based theme company has 16 themes on WordPress.org. Wedding themes are a relatively small niche in the directory with fewer than 20 listings. This new arrival stands out from the pack with its bold colors and customizability. Many WordPress wedding themes…
Upvato, the service that specializes in backing up Envato Market files, has shut down without warning. Freddy Lundekvam, a full time programmer and frequent user of Envato products, created the service after losing 10 files to Envato’s policy of reserving the right to take down and remove any file at its or the author’s sole…
WordPress emoji are served from s.w.org, but they are not compressed. This impacts the SVG loading time, depending on how many emoji you are using, and can even throw warnings on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Turkey-based WordPress developer Mustafa Uysal has just released Compressed Emoji, a plugin that makes use of the emoji_svg_url filter introduced…
After 14 years of blogging with MovableType, Andy Baio has relaunched Waxy.org on WordPress. Baio’s media and technology blog has been a continual source of original content about life on the internet and how it affects our culture. The migration includes 472 posts and 15,891 entries from his sideblog Waxy Links. Waxy.org played a small…
WordCamp Europe 2017 is set to host the next community summit in Paris. This will be the first time the event has been held outside of the United States, a change that makes it more accessible for contributors who are unable to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. Attaching the summit to WordCamp Europe…
Development for BuddyPress 2.8 kicked off during last week’s meeting and the target release date was set for January 25. In line with the project’s recent change of course, the upcoming release will be another one focused on developers and site builders. Long time contributor Slava Abakumov is leading 2.8 with a focus on reducing…
WordCamp US is less than a month away and attendees are finalizing their travel plans. In August, organizers were estimating 3,000 attendees on the ground but official numbers are not yet available as tickets continue to sell. A maximum capacity has not been published, because organizers have a great deal of flexibility to expand the…
Two months ago, revised guidelines for the WordPress Plugin Directory were opened up on GitHub for public feedback. This transparent and open process of updating the guidelines resulted in more than a dozen contributors submitting pull requests with improvements to the language and content. The revamped guidelines have now replaced the previous ones with language…