Awesome Motive, the company behind OptinMonster, WPForms, MonsterInsights, and other popular WordPress plugins, has acquired Sandhills Development. The deal includes all of the company’s WordPress products and services: Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, WP Simple Pay, Sugar Calendar, WP Simple Pay, and the Payouts Service. The majority of the development team will be joining Awesome Motive to continue supporting the products.…
It’s no secret that companies are making loads of cash using open source technology. A 2021 survey of 1,250 IT leaders commissioned by Red Hat found that 90% are using enterprise open source software. Following the trail of major acquisitions (Red Hat at $34B, GitHub at $7.5B, and MuleSoft $6.5B), it’s becoming more common to…
The Five for the Future program, an initiative Matt Mullenweg proposed in 2014, may soon be addressing the problem of spam and outdated pledges that appear on the program’s dedicated website. The idea behind the program is that organizations and individuals will contribute five percent of their resources back to WordPress development, ensuring the future…
Gravity Forms has launched a new YouTube channel and podcast called INPUT, which will focus on sharing the stories and experiences of people inside and outside the WordPress ecosystem. James Giroux, a Rocketgenius employee who joined the company in 2020, is the host of the show and will be interviewing guests from various industries and…
WP Engine has launched Faust.js, a new headless framework that is open source and designed to work in any Node hosting environment. The framework is built on Next.js, which can handle both static site generation and server side rendering. It uses GraphQL for data fetching and is the only framework that allows developers to query…
WordPress is restarting its in-person WordCamp program after more than six weeks of discussion on a proposal for how the WordPress community can return to hosting events. Applications are now open for in-person WordCamps, provided they meet the Community Team’s updated guidelines for organizing WordCamps during the pandemic. Local communities that have hosted meetups prior…
Pipe Wrench, an online publication that dissects different topics through longform stories, reactions, interpretations, and asides, has released a free WordPress plugin called Native Land Search. The publication commissioned the plugin from Alex Gustafson, a subscriber and contributor to the magazine. Native Land Search offers a search block or “Native Lands Aside” block pattern that…
Automattic has acquired the Social Image Generator plugin, a commercial product that automatically creates social share images for WordPress content from a set of fully customizable templates. The plugin launched in February 2021, with a starting price of $39/year but is now closed to new sales. Daniel Post, the plugin’s creator, is joining Automattic to…
WordPress 5.9 is starting to take shape as Josepha Haden Chomphosy published a planning roundup at the end of last week with a tentative schedule and scope. This will be the last major release of the year, which Haden Chomphosy said will require “a slightly larger release squad,” considering the proposed scope. The squad leads…
Automattic is organizing its 2nd annual Worldwide WordPress 5K during the month of October this year. Registration for the race is free and participants will have the opportunity to donate to a charity of their choice, with Automattic matching donations up to $50,000. Just like the first Worldwide WP 5K that was held in 2015,…
Wordfence has published two vulnerabilities that affect users of the Redux Framework plugin, which has more recently come to be know as the “Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework” on WordPress.org. Extendify purchased the plugin from its creator, Dōvy Paukstys, in November 2020, in a deal that was not highly publicized. It is currently active…
WordPress Translation Day kicked off today, and the event has been expanded to run from September 1-30 this year. WordPress Polyglots contributors from all over the world will be hosting mini-events throughout the month where they will be translating themes, plugins, apps, meta, docs, and other important projects. Events will also focus on recruitment, virtual training…
The block-based Navigation editor screen got a status check last week as part of a Hallway Hangout meeting aimed at identifying what needs to happen to bring the screen out from behind the “experimental” flag. Once the Navigation screen is available by default in the Gutenberg plugin, the team working on the feature will be able to gather…
Automattic has acquired Frontity, the company behind an open source framework for building WordPress themes with React. The acquisition comes more than a year after the company raised €1M in funding in a round led by K Fund, with Automattic covering 22%. Frontity co-founders Pablo Postigo and Luis Herranz and their team will no longer be…
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) has released version 5.10, the first major release since the plugin was acquired by Delicious Brains. It introduces several new features that were previously experimental, closing out tickets that were started by previous owner Elliot Condon. The release enables HTML escaping by default, which helps prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. It…