WordPress 6.4 Beta 1 was released today on schedule, led by an underrepresented gender release squad. It includes the last five releases of the Gutenberg plugin (16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6) along with the upcoming 16.7 release and 190 tickets for core. If you are following Gutenberg development, many of these features have already been released in the plugin.…
WordPress.org began testing two-factor authentication (2FA) as an opt-in feature in May 2023. The interface and functionality are still in beta but it’s operational. This week contributors have expanded support for 2FA with a new interface for adding security keys, which are more secure than the one-time passwords. A logged in user can set up…
WordPress developer Corey Maass has sold his Social Link Pages plugin to Matthaus Klute, an independent WordPress consultant and developer with Alpha Particle. It’s another story of small plugins changing hands, where developers get the opportunity to test ideas and business models. Even the most modest creations have value in a thriving marketplace where business…
When WordPress contributor and developer Nick Diego released version 3.0 of his Block Visibility plugin earlier this year in March, he made all the Pro features available in the free version, with the exception of a few that would take more time. The plugin, which is used on more than 10,000 WordPress sites, allows users to…
WordPress’ Plugin Review Team continues to dig out from under a massive backlog that has grown to 1,260 plugins awaiting review. Developers submitting new plugins can expect to wait at least 91 days, according to the notice on the queue today. “Currently there are 1,241 plugins awaiting review,” Automattic-sponsored Plugin Review team member Alvaro Gómez…
WP Accessibility Day (WPAD), an independent 24-hour virtual conference, has published its schedule for the upcoming event on September 27, 2023. Co-lead organizer Amber Hinds reports that more than 1,248 people have registered for the event so far with attendees across 30 different countries. Approximately 50% of attendees are from the U.S. WPAD has attracted…
WordPress’ Community team is evolving the WordCamp format to promote adoption, training, and networking for professionals, leaving the flagship events to focus more on connection and inspiration. This change opens the door for more creative concepts around the events’ new mission: WordPress events spark innovation and adoption by way of accessible training and networking for users,…
WordPress.com plugin pages have been updated to include a download link for WordPress.org plugins listed in the .com directory. These are the listings that are scraped from WordPress.org. The plugins are available for free on WordPress.org for self-hosted sites but can only be used on WordPress.com with a paid subscription. The text in the sidebar…
WP Tavern is launching forums today. If you have ever sat up all night with a feverish infant, searching for answers on a mommy messaging board, hunted down solutions for obscure bugs, or wasted an entire afternoon on a subreddit, then you know that forums are not dead. Since the early days of BBSes (Wikipedia…
Openverse has landed an Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Open Education Global (OEG) is a non-profit organization that supports the use of open education to expand education access and affordability. Its annual awards recognize outstanding contributions to the Open Education community and its network of resources. Openverse is one of…
Citations is a new plugin created by WP Munich and the team at Luehrsen // Heinrich, a German WordPress agency. It makes it easy to create in-text citations and assign them a specific source. Most of the existing plugins that do this are for older versions of WordPress. This one is created specifically for those using the…
The WordPress community is ending two days of heated discussions that rapidly descended into a mire of unbridled emotional confrontations across multiple social channels, following a tweet from John Blackbourn that raised concerns about WordPress.com plugin listings outranking WordPress.org on Google Search. Developers expressed concerns about the SEO impact of the practice of cloning WordPress.org’s…
WooSesh 2023, the virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders, will be broadcast live on October 10-12. This year’s theme is “Next Generation Commerce.” Registration is not yet open, but the speaker lineup and broadcast schedule have just been published. Over the course of three days, WooSesh will feature 31 speakers across 23 sessions. The event…
Version 1.0.0 of the ActivityPub plugin was released this week with major updates that make it possible to have a blog-wide account, instead of just individual author accounts, where followers receive updates from all authors. This new feature allows people to follow blogs on decentralized platforms like Mastodon (and many others) with replies automatically published…
WordPress core developer John Blackbourn sparked a heated discussion yesterday when he posted an image of his WordPress User Switching plugin ranking higher for the WordPress.com listing than the page on WordPress.org. Blackbourn later apologized for the inflammatory wording of the original post, but maintains that .com plugin listings being displayed higher in search results…