This week Nick Halsey published his new Featured Audio plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory. Halsey, a WordPress core contributor and a musician, created the plugin to provide a solution that would associate audio files with posts in the same way that WordPress supports featured images out of the box. The plugin works with any…
Development for the BuddyPress 2.7 release cycle kicked off this week led by @mercime. Contributors chimed in during this week’s meeting to identify their wishlist items for 2.7. Beta 1 is expected September 21 and the official release is scheduled for October 12. During last week’s meeting, lead developers John James Jacoby, Boone Gorges, and…
Codeable.io, an outsourcing marketplace for WordPress projects, announced a new partnership with Automattic today, along with a share buyback from some of the company’s early investors. Tomaž Zaman and Per Esbensen bootstrapped the company for the first couple of months after founding it in 2012, prior to receiving a $75K investment from three business angels.…
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This is a common mindset among WordPress users who don’t regularly update their themes and plugins. The fear of an update breaking something is often stronger than the desire to gain enhancements and security fixes. Why improve something that already works perfectly well? Antti Kuosmanen, founder of Seravo.com,…
In a recent interview on the WordPress Weekly podcast, when asked about his comments at WordCamp US regarding customization being the biggest opportunity to improve the WordPress experience, Matt Mullenweg said, “The Customizer is everything.” He followed it up by saying that customizing sites via both the Customizer and themes is currently the platform’s weakest…
The WordPress community team announced today that the next Community Summit will be held in Paris, France at WordCamp Europe 2017. Last year the Summit was held at WordCamp US in Philadelphia and the event’s website published a post requesting that those interested save the dates for June 2017 in Europe. The Summit brings together…
WordPress 4.6 will introduce some exciting updates that give plugin and theme authors a standardized way of registering metadata. This refers to the additional data that is attached to WordPress’ main content types (posts, users, and comments), which users often interact with via custom fields or metaboxes when editing posts. Anytime WordPress can standardize an…
Last year the WordPress Stats page was updated to provide more sophisticated methods of collecting and processing the data, causing some dramatic shifts in the data reported. As of last week, the pie charts have been redesigned to display that information with a more pleasant color scheme and new data for languages is now available…
Last week, Dan Cameron, creator of Sprout Invoices, received an email from the WordPress.org plugin review team stating that his plugin was in violation of the repository guidelines. Sprout Invoices was promptly removed from the directory and all of its 5-star reviews were also removed. Cameron had been discounting the professional license of his plugin…
Jetpack 4.1 was released today with performance improvements that make calls to the database more efficient, reducing what Jetpack does on each page load. Slideshows should load faster now that the Carousel module has been tweaked to no longer load full-size images in the previous and next previews. Using Photon in dev mode has also…
During the week following WordCamp Europe 2016, session videos from the event started trickling onto WordPress.tv. The uploading is complete and every single session recording is now available. One of the most unforgettable pieces of swag from the event was a 15-page coloring book that includes wapuus and illustrations designed around this year’s WCEU theme.…
The Bulgarian government has just passed an amendment to its Electronic Governance Act that mandates all custom software created for the government must be open source. The amendment was voted on in the Bulgarian parliament and put into effect July 1, 2016. According to Bozhidar Bozhanov, a 27-year-old software engineer and advisor to the deputy…
When Adii Pienaar, Magnus Jepson, and Mark Forrester created WooThemes in 2008, they never envisioned a future where the lion’s share of the company’s revenue would be derived from e-commerce. After establishing WooThemes as a major player in the WordPress themes marketplace, the company’s founders launched WooCommerce with the goal of increasing revenue by selling…
During Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A session at WordCamp Europe, an unidentified Google employee asked about making WordPress sites more mobile-friendly: I work at Google with search and we think the web and mobile are important, but one thing that we noticed is that 28% of the new sites that choose WordPress and come online (that we’ve…
The WordPress Theme Review Team published an action plan today, summarizing the team’s consensus on moving forward to address bottlenecks in the review process. The queue is currently backed up with hundreds of themes waiting to be approved. “The Theme Review Team is aware that we currently have problems,” Tammie Lister said before introducing the…