WooCommerce has launched Woo Express, a new managed hosting product that uses WordPress.com’s infrastructure and relieves store owners of the responsibilities of hosting and maintenance. The company soft-launched Woo Express in early March with a small selection of visitors but has concluded that phase and opened it up to the public. Woo Express provides a…
Atarim is hosting its 4th annual Web Agency Summit from April 25-28. The virtual event is geared towards web agencies and WordPress professionals, with topics focused on web trends, scaling an agency or freelance business, attracting high-paying clients, and building recurring revenue. Web Agency Summit was born out of the organizers’ frustration with the first…
In early 2023, WordPress and Matrix contributors proposed a new Meta team subproject to explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. After the team’s most recent meeting, Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk published an update on the status of recent experiments in migration. After researching more on migrating public messages, Kirk said the team…
Preparations for WordCamp Europe (WCEU) 2023 in Athens are moving forward as the team will soon be contacting speakers selected for the event. Organizers have launched a Speaker Support Program aimed at encouraging more diversity on stage by connecting speakers with companies that are willing to financially support them. WCEU has also opened registration for…
Representatives of the BuddyPress core team will be hosting a contributor day alongside the French WordPress Community Contributor Day in Paris on April 20, 2023. This in-person event has filled up its registration and posted its schedule already, but BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet is inviting people to join online to contribute to BuddyPress. “As we’re…
WooCommerce 7.6 was released today with two new blocks merged from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. The Single Product Details block and the “Add to Cart” Form block are now available to store owners who want to use the Site Editor to design their own Single Product Templates. Along with the button, the “Add to Cart”…
Yoast SEO 20.5 was released this week with several security fixes and an improved Google SERP preview. The preview shows mobile and desktop snippets with Google’s current styling so users can see exactly how their snippets will look and tweak how they optimize them for Google Search results. Another highlight of this release is that…
WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is coordinating a second women and nonbinary release squad for the 6.4 release, which is anticipated to land in November 2023. In 2020, WordPress 5.6 “Simone” was led by an all-women and non-binary identifying release squad, a first in WordPress’ history, and Haden Chomphosy is proposing the project go…
Wordfence has published a security advisory about a severe unauthenticated stored Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability in the Limit Login Attempts plugin, which is active on more than 600,000 WordPress sites. The security issue was discovered by Wordfence security researcher Marco Wotschka in January 2023. It was submitted to the WordPress Plugin Security Team, which acknowledged receipt…
In February 2023, James Giroux founded TeamWP, a project that aims to advocate for open, people-first workplaces in the WordPress ecosystem. His first initiative was to launch the Team Experience Index, a benchmark employee engagement survey designed specifically for people working in the world of WordPress. “The distributed nature of WordPress companies means they often…
As more WordPress plugins for AI-generated content and images, chatbots, and assistants, are landing in the official directory, developers are beginning to explore even deeper integration with the block editor. Moving beyond the prototypical content generators that are cobbled together into a plugin, the tools developers are experimenting with today will provide a more deeply…
Gutenberg 15.5 was released this week with more new features and refinements to WordPress’ full-site editing capabilities. The project will soon be moving on to Phase 3 with real-time collaboration on the roadmap, but there are still many improvements on the way for the Site Editor and core blocks. This release introduces experimental support for…
Support for the WordPress mobile apps is moving to the WordPress.org forums. Previously, users were routed to WordPress.com, even those who were self-hosted, and Automattic employees handled support tickets related to the mobile apps. This move to WordPress.org is part of an effort to disentangle the official WordPress mobile apps from Automattic’s services. In July…
The Preferred Languages project is gaining some momentum with this week’s 2.0 release of the feature plugin. In 2017, WordPress Core Committer Pascal Birchler released a prototype that lets users select multiple preferred languages in their settings so that WordPress will load the first translation available, falling back to the next language in the list.…
ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) version 6.1 was released this week with support for creating Custom Post Types and Taxonomies. This is a long-awaited feature that users have been asking for since the earliest days of the plugin when it was still developed by its original author, Elliot Condon. When Delicious Brains acquired the plugin, the…