Awesome Motive, makers of popular plugins like OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights, acquired WP Charitable this week. The plugin is used by more than 10,000 non-profits for creating fundraising campaigns and collecting online donations. It does not charge any transaction fees and currently has a 4.9/5-star average rating on WordPress.org. “Wes and I launched Charitable in…
On Thursday Matt Mullenweg responded to an inquiry on Twitter from Jeff Matson, a Pagely employee, about whether Automattic’s Newspack platform had all open open source components or some proprietary elements. In his response, he formally identified GoDaddy as “an existential threat to WordPress’ future.” The response raised more than a few eyebrows on Twitter…
Gutenberg 13.5 is now available. The release comes two weeks after the plugin introduced support for button elements in theme.json, axial spacing in the Gallery block, and a redesigned Publish popover in 13.4. The latest release includes 12 enhancements and 15 bug fixes with the most notable changes landing in the Cover block. Prior to 13.5, the…
At the risk of spoiling the answer to a clue included in the image below, WordPress made an appearance in the New York Times crossword puzzle today. Likely nobody reading this post would struggle to answer the clue “popular blogging platform” with nine letters. New York-based digital consultant and media co-founder Matt DeSiena tweeted a…
GitHub has announced that Copilot, its new AI pair programming assistant, is now available to developers for $10/month or $100/year. Verified students and maintainers of open source projects will have free access to Copilot. The assistant is available as an extension for popular code editors, including Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.…
With inflation rising and the unemployment rate falling, economic forecasters are predicting an impending recession in 2023. A few major WordPress companies are tightening their belts ahead of what many believe will be an unavoidable economic downturn. Elementor announced that it is laying off 60 employees, 15% of its workforce, in a tightly controlled release…
In light of a recent German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts, WordPress.org’s themes team is updating its recommendations for hosting webfonts. Most theme authors have been enqueuing Google Fonts from the Google CDN for better performance, but this method exposes visitors’ IP addresses. “The themes…
Late last week, Ninja Forms users received a forced security update from WordPress.org for a critical PHP Object Injection vulnerability. This particular vulnerability can be exploited remotely without any authentication. It was publicly disclosed last week and patched in the latest version, 3.6.11. Patches were also backported to versions 3.0.34.2, 3.1.10, 3.2.28, 3.3.21.4, 3.4.34.2, and…
WordCamp Europe 2022 concluded last weekend in Porto, Portugal. The event sold 2,746 tickets and had 2,304 people attend. It kicked off with a record-setting Contributor Day that coordinated the efforts of 800 participants giving back to WordPress and its related projects. WCEU featured 70 speakers across 26 sessions and 18 workshops, made possible by…
One of the most thought-provoking statements to come out of WordCamp Europe 2022, was when Matt Mullenweg said, “I believe that Gutenberg can be a bigger contribution to the world than WordPress itself.” This isn’t the first time Mullenweg has cast this vision of Gutenberg’s preeminence as an open source project. In the Q&A following…
Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura has identified refinements to experiences introduced in 5.9 and 6.0 as the main goal for the upcoming 6.1 release. He published the roadmap for 6.1 ahead of the closing session at WordCamp Europe in Porto, where he was scheduled to join Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomphosy for a demo.…
Elementor, a popular website builder plugin that is active on more than five million websites, has acquired Strattic, a static and headless WordPress hosting company. Strattic will continue operating as “Strattic by Elementor” and the team will remain as its own unit within the company. Elementor founders Yoni Luksenberg and Ariel Klikstein met Strattic founder and…
If you have been navigating the WordPress plugin ecosystem for years, you may instinctively know how to examine and compare two or more plugins’ details pages to select the right solution for your needs. This task can be a big hurdle for newcomers to the platform. The prospect of narrowing down the right plugin from…
WordPress’ Five for the Future program, an initiative that encourages organizations to contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development, is poised to adopt an official definition for what constitutes pledges and contributions. Two weeks ago, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy proposed the program make a clear distinction between ecosystem contributions and core…
InstaWP has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Automattic. The service launched in July 2021 as a quick way to set up testing or disposable WordPress sites and users frequently commented on remarkable speed of the tool, which spins up a site in less than a second. Founder Vikas Singhal said the investment gives…