Jetpack 4.2 is a combination release with performance improvements and fixes for a couple of security vulnerabilities. These updates secure Contact Form submission exports from potential formula injections and fix a general XSS vulnerability in the misuse of the add_query_arg() function. The majority of enhancements in this release are centered on speeding up communication between…
Let’s Encrypt, the open Certificate Authority, passed 5 million active (unexpired) certificates this week. The project came out of beta in April and has grown rapidly in the past few months. At the end of June, Let’s Encrypt reported that it had 3.8 million active certificates covering more than 7 million unique domains. In a…
WP Site Care announced that it will soon be entering the WordPress products business with a commercial recipe plugin. Co-founder Ryan Sullivan said the company is partnering with Feast Design Company to launch Cookbook, a full-featured recipe plugin that is mobile and SEO friendly. “A good chunk of our current customers are food bloggers and…
Last week WordPress plugin developer Rachel Carden released wA11y, a new plugin that offers comprehensive feedback on web accessibility issues. wA11y was created to provide a toolbox of resources for site owners and currently includes support for two well known web accessibility evaluation tools: Tota11y and WAVE. “You know that saying ‘Information wants to be…
Earlier this year we tested the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, which allows users to draft and preview customizer states. For the past several months Weston Ruter and his team at XWP have been working on adding the ability to schedule Customizer changes. This would allow users to stage content as a set of customizer changes,…
WordPress.com launched browser notifications this week, a feature that delivers instant notifications of site activity to Chrome and Firefox users. Notifications are opt-in, so users will need to enable them before they will be active. Fortunately, they are also configurable on a per-site and per-activity basis, otherwise users with a larger volume of notifications might…
Layers, the WordPress page builder that installs as a theme, has ended the exclusive arrangement it had with Envato for more than a year. David Perel, co-founder of Obox and Layers, announced that any new Layers themes and plugins will be sold within their own marketplace, instead of through Envato. “Our exclusivity agreement meant we…
PHP 7 Release Manager and Core Developer Kalle Sommer Nielsen has been watching the usage statistics of the latest version rise on W3Techs’ market share assessment. PHP is currently used by 82.1% of all the websites for which W3Techs can detect a server-side programming language. The site also collects data on the breakdown of major…
Nearly every WordPress user has experienced the frustration of dismissing an admin notice and having it pop up again on page refresh or upon navigating to a new page. WordPress 4.2 made it possible for plugin and theme developers to create dismissible admin notices using the classes .notice and .is-dismissible, but left it up to…
Listings is a new plugin that is aiming to be the “One Listings Plugin to Rule Them All.” The Look and Feel, a team led by Scott Basgaard and Coen Jacobs, created Listings to provide a generic platform that will support niche extensions for things like a job board, real estate, cars, and kittens. “We…
In 2008, while working for an Irish company under contract with the Irish Parliament, Bogdan Fireteanu was called into a meeting and told that he needed to build 50 blogs as soon as possible. That was the day he discovered WordPress. Over the next eight years, Fireteanu would become more deeply involved with the WordPress…
In a post titled, “The People’s Code,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott announced the release of the new Federal Source Code policy. The period for public comment ended in April after which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) analyzed the feedback on GitHub. The new policy primarily concerns custom-developed source code…
A couple years ago, we published a tutorial for setting up a quick WordPress development environment using Koding’s free cloud-based IDE. The platform allows users to use popular applications or build their own using languages like Python, Java, Perl, PHP, Node.js, Go, and Ruby. Users have access to an Ace code editor and Linux terminal…
In 2013, BuddyPress introduced its first template pack, BP Legacy, in the 1.7 release along with theme compatibility. This major project milestone made BuddyPress compatible with nearly every WordPress theme, freeing sites from the requirement of using a BuddyPress-specific theme. BP Legacy has served theme developers well in customizing BuddyPress, but contributors are working on…
When Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in February 2016, the open source initiative was targeted at improving the experience of the mobile web for publishers. Up until recently, AMP pages were only featured in the “Top Stories” carousel, but adoption of the technology has now spread to other industries such as e-commerce, entertainment, travel,…