WordCamp Europe 2016 is now on track to be the largest WordPress conference to date. The event, which will be held in Vienna June 24-26, has expanded its capacity to 2200 attendees (including micro-sponsors.) 400 additional tickets will be made available this week. The first 1700 seats sold out six months in advance, causing organizers…
Last year WordPress developer Hardeep Asrani and the folks at ThemeIsle released Custom Login Customizer, a plugin that allows users to design their own login pages in the customizer. Since that time core developers have made more progress on the customizer roadmap, allowing for more varied uses outside of a theme-related context. Last week the…
Today Andrew Ozz, one of the maintainers on WordPress’ core Editor component, announced some major improvements coming to the links modal in the 4.5 release. Currently, when adding a link to text in the visual editor, a modal launches where you can paste in the URL, add link text, and set the target to open…
Gary Pendergast is looking to bring WordPress users a new way of giving feedback on posts that goes beyond simple text-based comments. A core committer and emoji aficionado, Pendergast spearheaded the effort to add emoji support to WordPress and is now working on an emoji reactions feature plugin. The plugin is being developed to offer…
Today the WordPress.com VIP team released a plugin for Facebook’s Instant Articles, which will be open to any publisher starting April 12, 2016. Automattic partnered with Facebook and VIP-Featured-Partner agency Dekode to produce a plugin that outputs a compliant feed of posts wrapped in the required markup for Facebook. Instant Articles for WordPress is now…
Magnus is a beautiful new photoblogging theme that landed in the WordPress Theme Directory last week. It was created by Hugo Baeta, whose work you may have seen in the WordPress.com design handbook and last year’s subtle refinements to the default admin color scheme. Magnus is Baeta’s first theme to be approved for the official…
This week the Roots development team released wp-password-bcrypt, a plugin that uses bcrypt instead of MD5 password hashing. MD5’s known and exploited weaknesses have rendered it “cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use,” according to the CMU Software Engineering Institute. In a post announcing the plugin, Scott Walkinshaw explained why WordPress’ default MD5 hashing function…
The inaugural WordCamp Belfast and WordCamp Dublin are now in the early stages of planning. Members of the WordPress Northern Ireland meetup group are collaborating with the Dublin meetup to organize an event in Belfast in September 2016 and one in Dublin in April 2017. The dates have not yet been set in stone but…
BuddyPress 2.5.0 “Medici” was released today, named for Medici on 57th, a Chicago restaurant famous among BP contributors for its “Garbage Pizza.” The new BP Email API is the highlight of the release. It allows users to edit BuddyPress emails in the admin and change their appearance in the customizer. The placeholder text in curly…
The team behind the TGM Plugin Activation Library (TGMPA) is working to propose it as a feature plugin for WordPress. Last July contributors on the project opened the discussion on a post calling for feature plugins, and the upcoming 3.0 version is being developed with this path in mind. Developers use TGMPA to manage dependencies…
Today the WordPress plugin review team issued a reminder for what they said is a long-standing, unwritten rule: frameworks are not allowed in the official directory. In a post tiled “Please do not submit frameworks,” Mika Epstein outlined the reason behind the rule: At this time, we are not accepting frameworks as we don’t feel…
Poetica announced today that its team and technology have been acquired by Condé Nast. The technology provided realtime “Google-docs style collaboration” in the WordPress post editor as well as a non-WordPress editor available via the public Poetica.com service. As of June 1, 2016, the service will be shut down. The Poetica team will continue to…
In June 2015 Deque, an accessibility consultancy, open sourced aXe, its accessibility rules engine for automated web UI testing. aXe is a compact JavaScript library (~100 KB) that executes automated accessibility tests inside your testing framework or browser. Deque outlined a number of advantages that the aXe library has over previous approaches to automated testing…
Last week WooCommerce announced on Twitter that its Stripe payment gateway is now a free product. Prior to this decision, it was priced at $79 for a single license, $99 for up to five sites, and $199 for up to 25 sites. Exciting product announcement from @stripe (which is also now free for WooCommerce, woo!)…
This week Mandrill announced that it will be discontinuing its free tier for transactional emails. As of March 16th, new Mandrill users will create their accounts through MailChimp and existing users will be required to merge their accounts with a MailChimp account where they will be charged $20+/mo for transactional emails. The deadline for merging…