NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) today kicks off its 18th year helping writers achieve their creative goals. The online event is organized by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that encourages participants to work towards writing a 50,000-word novel. Writers commit to posting their word counts to their profiles each day during the event, which runs from…
Over the weekend WordPress co-creator and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called out Wix for copying GPL code from the WordPress mobile app and distributing it in its proprietary app. He identified two repositories that Wix forked in order to bring the GPL-licensed WordPress Rich Text Editor into its app. “If I were being charitable, I’d…
WordPress 4.7 Beta 1 was released this evening with a long list of highlighted features that are certain to delight both end users and developers. Core contributors are asking for testing and feedback on some of the larger items ahead of the official release, slated for December 6. Twenty Seventeen and its support for atmospheric…
WordPress 4.7 will introduce support for post type templates, an exciting new feature for theme and plugin developers. Page templates, which allow developers to specify a different layout or design for a page, are nearly as old as WordPress itself. For years developers have coveted that same functionality for other post types. In fact, a…
If you’ve ever wondered how the WordPress Theme Directory identifies and ranks the themes that display under the popular tab, you might be surprised to learn that it has nothing to do with ratings. Popularity is a somewhat subjective quality to measure in the first place, but WordPress.org has an algorithm in place to give…
Augustin Prot and Rémy Berda, co-founders the Weglot multilingual plugin for WordPress, started their operation in a small apartment in September 2015. Weglot was originally a simple JavaScript project that offered a language switcher so that users could view websites in different languages. After testers started asking for a solution that could be used with…
WordPress 4.7 will allow users to select a language to use in the admin. Prior to this change, using a different language for the admin required installing the necessary translations and editing the wp-config.php file or using a plugin. A user-specific language setting makes it possible to run a WordPress site in one language on…
iOS 10 was released last month with support for stickers in the the iMessage apps for iPhone and iPad. If you want to add a little WordPress flavor to your mobile communications, check out the new free WordPress World iMessage sticker app from Automattic. The app includes some of the company’s mascots and logos, such…
BuddyPress 2.7 “Migliaccio” was released yesterday, named after the family who runs Sam’s Restaurant in Brooklyn. The sign in front of the establishment features steaks and chops, but the restaurant’s pizza is “one of the great under-appreciated pies in all of NYC,” according to BuddyPress core developers. This release is heavy on features for developers,…
WordPress 4.7 will ship with a new default theme in December. David Kennedy merged Twenty Seventeen into core yesterday as his first commit to WordPress. Any remaining development issues for the project will now be managed via Trac. In the merge proposal, Kennedy described Twenty Seventeen as “an ambitious theme that focuses on a creative…
After a lengthy and impassioned meeting in the WordPress #core Slack channel on Monday evening, the WP REST API content endpoints were conditionally approved for merge into 4.7. Since that time Brian Krogsgard published a document with input from the team on how they plan to measure the success of the API. The conditions included…
Customize Changesets, the technical term for the infrastructure in the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, was merged into WordPress 4.7 yesterday. The project, formerly known as Customizer Transactions, brings the underlying architecture required for the ability to save a session as a draft. It enables WordPress to save a set of changes made in the Customizer…
This post was contributed by guest author Sami Keijonen. Sami is a math teacher who enjoys learning about the web, accessibility, and WordPress. He juggles between freelancing, building themes at Foxland, and teaching. Several theme authors have been experimenting with new pricing on ThemeForest. But PixelGrade took it to the next level by raising…
The WP REST API team and WordPress core contributors met tonight to decide whether to merge the content endpoints in 4.7. After the merge proposal was published a week ago, several core developers expressed concern regarding the brokered authentication scheme and the team has since decided to remove it from the proposal in favor of…
In Rainmaker.fm’s recent interview with Matt Mullenweg, StudioPress founder Brian Gardner confirmed that the company has put WooCommerce compatibility on the roadmap for its themes, starting with new products first. The “unofficial announcement” was not a secret, as Gardner has been hinting at it on social media and also posted a sneak peak on Dribbble…