Let’s Encrypt announced that the project is exiting beta this week. The initiative, which aims to encrypt 100% of the web by making trusted certificates available to everyone at no cost, launched its beta seven months ago. Since our beta began in September 2015 we’ve issued more than 1.7 million certificates for more than 3.8…
WordPress.com is finally adding sharing buttons for some of the world’s most widely used messaging apps. Users can now add WhatsApp, Telegram, and Skype to the lineup by editing the sharing buttons for their sites. Private groups and messaging are rapidly overtaking social networking. This was the driving factor behind Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp in…
The “A Day of REST” conference, an event devoted to the WordPress REST API, is expanding to the US. The first edition, held in London in January, was a success, with the majority of participants indicating they would attend again. Last month, Human Made announced that the organization team is planning an expanded “Week of…
WordPress 4.5 was released today, named in honor of Coleman Hawkins, an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Hawkins was one of the first musicians to establish the tenor saxophone as a jazz horn. Compared to other major releases, this one is short on show-stopping features but keeps WordPress on the path of steady, incremental improvements. Most…
Yesterday, prolific WordPress plugin developer Takayuki Miyauchi launched a JSON API for the Wapuu archive via GitHub Pages. The new API allows developers to easily build applications that fetch the wapuus with their images and details: [html light=”true”] [ { "name": "original-wapuupng", "wapuu": { "name": "Wapuu", "url": "https://ja.wordpress.org/", "repository": "https://github.com/jawordpressorg/wapuu", "src": "https://jawordpressorg.github.io/wapuu/wapuu-archive/original-wapuu.png", "mime_type": "image/png" },…
WordPress.com announced today that it has turned on encryption for custom domains. The network’s subdomains have been HTTPS-enabled since 2014 as part of the Reset the Net campaign against mass surveillance. Today Automattic expanded HTTPS coverage to more than one million custom domains hosted on the network. Last April the company joined Mozilla, Cisco, EFF…
After six months in the theme review queue, Silk Lite was approved for the WordPress.org directory and also passed the extra requirements to be counted among the accessibility-ready themes. This magazine theme was designed with fashion bloggers in mind and features a masonry style grid of posts on the homepage. The basic color scheme for…
The team behind AffiliateWP is celebrating its second anniversary today. The plugin and its suite of add-ons has rapidly become one of the most successful products in the WordPress ecosystem under the leadership of Pippin Williamson and his team. Williamson, who is known for his yearly transparency reports, shared that AffiliateWP was the fastest of…
Last year WordCamp London introduced “Wapuunk,” its 1970’s punk style wapuu, to the world, igniting a new wapuu craze for WordCamps held in the Western hemisphere. The 2015 event had commemorative stickers printed along with a Wapuunk-embroidered scarf for attendees. Shortly thereafter, nearly every WordCamp organization team began designing their own custom wapuu mascots. WordCamp…
Authorities have not yet identified the hacker behind the Panama Papers breach, nor have they isolated the exact attack vector. It is clear that Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that protected the assets of the rich and powerful by setting up shell companies, had employed a dangerously loose policy towards web security and communications.…
Today GitHub announced a new feature that allows project owners to block abusive users from public repositories. Users who are blocked will no longer be able to open or comment on issues or pull requests, nor will they will not be able to add or edit any of the project’s wiki pages. Blocked users are…
During the 2015 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg shared a few stats that demonstrate the growth of the global WordPress community. A total of 89 WordCamps with 21,000 attendees were held across 34 countries in 2015. This week WordPress community organizer Andrea Middleton published a more thorough breakdown of 2015 stats. She noted…
The WP REST API team released version 2.0 beta 13 of the feature plugin today. This release includes a couple of breaking changes, JavaScript client updates, and many other fixes and improvements. Developers who use the plugin in their projects can expect it to follow a more stable release cycle in the future, as beta…
Last month WordPress contributors approved accessibility coding standards for the core handbook. All new and updated code will need to conform with WCAG 2.0 level AA guidelines. With WordPress core moving firmly in the direction of accessibility, its new guidelines set the bar for themes, plugins, and websites built on top of the platform. Text…
Development on BuddyPress 2.6 began this week with a meeting to set the schedule and scope for the release. The BuddyPress project recently moved to adopt release leads as part of the core development process. “The release lead gets a sense at the beginning of the dev cycle what he/she would like to accomplish, as…