Contact Form 7, one of the oldest and most popular WordPress plugins, passed 40 million downloads this week. Takayuki Miyoshi uploaded the plugin on WordPress.org 10 years ago and it’s now active on more than a million sites. Over the years, other developers have created hundreds of add-ons to extend Contact Form 7 beyond its…
The first WordCamp in Oklahoma took place this past weekend in Oklahoma City at the Francis Tuttle Technology Center. Although organizers had originally planned for 50 attendees, demand was higher than expected and the event sold more than 100 tickets. Lynn Dye, lead organizer for WordCamp OKC, has been attending the city’s local meetup group…
Last week Jeff Chandler and I had a meetup before WordCamp OKC where we discussed new ideas and projects for the Tavern. One quick item on the agenda was to create a Telegram bot and public channel where we can broadcast to those who want to receive news via mobile messaging. In February, Telegram passed…
WordPress 4.6 is set to introduce a broken link checker in the editor, a handy new feature which lead developer Andrew Ozz dubbed “spellcheck for URLs.” Ella Van Dorpe, who is co-maintainer with Ozz on WordPress’ editor component, opened a ticket three months ago to begin work on detecting broken URLs. She proposed that bad…
WordPress professionals have demonstrated a decent appetite when it comes to listening to and supporting podcasts on a wide variety of topics, including industry news, development, e-commerce, marketing, and startups. Cory Miller, founder of iThemes, and Matt Danner, the company’s COO, are adding a new business podcast to the mix with the launch of Leader.team.…
Version 5.6 of the WordPress for Android app was released today with expanded features for WordPress.com sites. The previous release added user management capabilities under a new ‘People’ menu and 5.6 introduces the ability to invite new users. This release also adds a related posts section to posts found in the Reader. It appears directly…
TechCrunch is the latest victim in OurMine’s summer hacking rampage. The site, which is powered by WordPress and hosted via WordPress.com VIP, was hacked this morning and defaced with a message from the attackers who identify themselves as an “elite hacker group.” TechCrunch’s news ticker was updated to display: “Hello guys it’s OurMine Team, we…
WooCommerce, which powers more than 37% of all online stores, announced today that the plugin now integrates with the millions of offline stores that use Square for payment processing. The new Square for WooCommerce extension tracks and syncs payments and inventory for products sold via online and offline stores. Before agreeing to work with Square…
BuddyPress lead developers have decided to bump the minimum PHP requirement for version 2.8 of the plugin to 5.3+. The new guidelines for BuddyPress’ PHP version support, authored by Boone Gorges on behalf of the team, states that the plugin will offer full support for all stable versions of PHP officially supported by the PHP…
Building on the success of its Q&A communities, Stack Overflow announced that its new Documentation product is now in beta. For the past eight years, the site has rewarded expert advice by floating high quality answers to the top and allowing users to earn reputation points. This formula has turned out to be more successful…
Last week the Ford Foundation published a white paper titled “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure.” The foundation, established in 1936 by Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company, is currently working to challenge inequality and advance human welfare. This new document in the foundation’s library, written by Nadia Eghbal,…
Summer of Pwnage, a Dutch community program for anyone interested in software security, is focusing on WordPress for its current open source security bug hunting event. The community program hosts meetups and workshops on the weekend where anyone from “enthusiastic beginners to the 1337est hackers” is welcome to share findings and demonstrate skills and exploits.…
WP-CLI GUI is a new tool from WordPress developer Tim Brugman, created to speed up the creation of new WordPress sites when using WP-CLI. The tool captures the details required to configure the database, site info, admin user, and password. It outputs one long command that WP-CLI users can copy and paste. At first it…
When WP Rocket entered the market three years ago, the product was positioned against established solutions like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, Hyper Cache, and a raft of other free plugins. WP Media, the product’s parent company, was the first to explore a completely commercial model of monetizing a WordPress caching plugin, with no…
Fans of artist Dennis Cooper are concerned about Google’s mysterious removal of his 14-year-old blog approximately two weeks ago. Cooper, a novelist and performance artist known for his controversial subject material, fears that Google may be censoring his work but hasn’t received an explanation. After contacting Google via multiple channels, Cooper received a statement about…