After leading the do_action( ‘wordpress-charity-hackathon’ ); event in 2014 and 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa, Hugh Lashbrooke is bringing the event to Texas with the help of Austin local David Cole. The Austin WordPress Meetup Group will be hosting the hackathon on April 8th, which will coincide with WooConf. Participants will spend the day…
In February 2015, the WordPress Theme Directory launched a new design. Konstantin Obenland worked with Samuel “Otto” Wood and the WordPress meta team to update the design and move the directory off of bbPress. Today Obenland announced that the Plugin Directory will be getting a similar treatment. Version 3 of the Plugin Directory will focus…
In October 2014, Jetpack 3.2 introduced a new site logo feature for theme developers. As Jetpack is widely used, it provided a way for theme developers to easily build in logo support, thereby increasing data portability across themes. After discussion in yesterday’s core development meeting, WordPress 4.5 is now set to introduce theme support for…
Today WordPress.com announced support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Google’s open source project to improve the experience of the mobile web for publishers. When visitors arrive to a WordPress.com site via a mobile search, posts will load faster than ever before. Each post is dynamically generated according to the AMP spec, with /amp/ added to…
One of the challenges of organizing a WordCamp is coming up with general swag for the event that will delight attendees, as opposed to filling swag bags with cheap plastic junk. Organizers are also tasked with arranging a gift for speakers. WordCamp Miami, which will be entering its ninth year running in 2017, is well…
WooCommerce is currently the most popular way to add a store to WordPress. Its usage is on the rise and seems to be growing in tandem with global WordPress usage. Wappalyzer estimates a 31% marketshare in the e-commerce category and BuiltWith has WooCommerce at roughly 29% among other shopping cart technologies. Either way you slice…
In a SMB trust index survey conducted by Alignable in the fourth quarter of 2015, WordPress ranked as the most trusted of 25 nationally recognized brands used by small business owners. The results were ranked using the (Net Promoter System), a trademarked customer loyalty metric that measures promoters against detractors to produce a net trustworthiness…
Over the weekend, Jeremy Felt released Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.3.0. Although VVV uses VirtualBox as its default virtualization provider, this release adds support for Parallels, VMWare Fusion, VMWare Workstation, and Hyper-V in the default Vagrantfile. Version 1.3.0 also adds MailCatcher to the default provisioning. When working in a development environment, you generally don’t want want…
Hack.summit() is a unique event for developers that is set to be live-streamed February 22-24, 2016. It is the world’s largest virtual conference ever assembled, with 64,000 developers registered for last year’s event. hack.summit() will feature an impressive array of programming language creators and open source contributors and all ticket sales/donations go to support programming…
During the 2015 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg shared a few stats about the growth of WordPress events around the globe. Last year there were 89 WordCamps with 21,000 attendees across 34 countries. A surprising 60% of the 601 WordCamp organizers were doing it for the first time. More people are getting involved…
Happy Joe founder James Dalman announced this week that the non-profit organization will be shutting down. Dalman started the organization to help veterans find employment opportunities in WordPress and other web technologies. He plans to continue with a modified version of the Happy Joe mission set up as a for-profit venture. After operating for the…
Last week GitHub responded to a letter from open source project maintainers with apologies for the lack of communication and lack of attention to feedback regarding issue management. Because contributions are the lifeblood of open source projects, maintainers are requesting additional features for issues and pull requests that would help make contributions more meaningful. The…
Elegant Themes emailed its customers last night to inform them of a critical security vulnerability affecting a large segment of its product line. An information disclosure vulnerability was found in the Divi Builder (included in our Divi and Extra themes, as well as our Divi Builder plugin) which resulted in the potential for user privilege…
WP Pusher is on a relentless mission to make it effortless for WordPress developers to connect their plugin and theme repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. Version 2.1.0 of the plugin eliminates the requirement to manually create a token with GitHub and introduces 1-click authentication via OAuth. This update makes setting up the plugin on…
The development team behind TGM Plugin Activation released its new generator last week. The popular tool is a PHP library that allows WordPress developers to require or recommend plugins for a theme or plugin. It essentially helps walk WordPress users through installation and activation of plugin dependencies in the admin. Bundling a bunch of plugin-type…