The security team at Sucuri has issued an advisory for WordPress users who have the WP Super Cache plugin activated on their sites. The popular caching plugin contains a dangerous persistent XSS vulnerability that was promptly patched in its 1.4.4 release. Sucuri ranks the risk as “Dangerous” with a DREAD score of 8/10. Exploiting the…
The FBI issued a public service announcement today, warning concerning WordPress website attacks being carried out by individuals sympathetic to the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL) a.k.a. Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). The perpetrators of these attacks are defacing sites across various platforms such as news organizations, businesses, government sites, and religious…
WordPress 3.8 marked a major milestone for the admin with the inclusion of “MP6,” a brand new responsive design and color scheme. By now many users have become accustomed to the color scheme, but 4.2 will introduce subtle changes to create a more harmonious color palette. Over the past several months, Hugo Baeta has been…
When ModernThemes launched its site with a dozen free WordPress themes last year, founders Robbie Grabowski and Mike Driscoll committed to getting all of their themes listed on WordPress.org following positive feedback from the community. At that time many of their themes had issues that would preclude them from being hosted in the official directory.…
ThemeReview.co partners Emil Uzelac and Justin Tadlock announced over the weekend that the service is expanding to include plugin reviews. The professional theme review service launched at the beginning of January and has been growing steadily, thanks in part to strategic recommendations from Envato and StudioPress. Uzelac and Tadlock are both senior reviewers at WordPress.org,…
When a social network is filled with mystery man avatars, it can give the impression that the site is a ghost town, overrun with spam users. Sometimes members are too lazy to upload a profile photo, no matter how many friendly prompts you try to offer. Missing profile images makes for ugly directory pages and…
Twitter users have often asked the question: “What does it mean to favorite a tweet?” The act of favoriting can communicate any number of things depending on the context, such as bookmarking, agreeing, showing support, or responding to a mention. UK researchers studying the favoriting feature on Twitter discovered that users could identify more than…
The PHP UK Conference celebrated its 10th annual event this year at the end of February. More than 700 participants gathered in London to share knowledge and experiences surrounding PHP and related web technologies. WordPress community members Jenny Wong and Aaron Jorbin both spoke at the conference and the videos have just been released today.…
Hew is Automattic’s 67th free theme release on WordPress.org. The new theme, designed by Ola Laczek, was inspired by Ryu, a classic among personal blogging themes. Ryu was released two years ago and for awhile it seemed like everyone was using it. Hew brings that same clean, identity-focused design that features the author’s Gravatar at…
The trend of WordCamps creating their own custom wapuu design is starting to catch momentum. The GPL-licensed creature originated in Japan and variations have been used to personalize branding for Japanese meetups and WordCamps for years. Last week we featured WordCamp London’s custom wapuu design, which is fondly dubbed “Wapuunk.” That same weekend WordCamp Philly…
WordCamp London 2015 was packed full of excellent presentations, lightning talks, and panels. For several of the more technical sessions, attendees were actually turned away at the door due to the rooms being filled to capacity. This was the case for Jack Lenox’s presentation on Building Themes with the WP REST API. “I was overwhelmed…
WordPress.org launched a new design for the Theme Directory just over a month ago and the meta team has continued to fix bugs and add enhancements. Preliminary stats and feedback indicate that the directory improvements have had a positive impact on users’ ability to hunt for themes. WordPress.org contributor Konstantin Obenland reports that user engagement…
For the past two years, the DerpPress Twitter account has been cranking out tweets to amuse followers with clever puns and subtle commentary on WordPress news and development. Of all the anonymous accounts devoted to tweeting WordPress-related humor, DerpPress is the most consistent and dependable source of timely wise cracks. You’ll find the account tweeting…
Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers of WordPress, released Cache Buddy on WordPress.org over the weekend. His new plugin works alongside caching solutions, such as WP Super Cache, Batcache, and W3 Total Cache, to enable WordPress to better serve cached pages to logged-in users. Jaquith knows just about everything there is to know about…
The WordPress Theme Review team is encouraging all theme authors to take notice of Google’s upcoming change to its ranking algorithm, which will be put in place at the end of April: Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all…