Wix is taking direct aim at WordPress in a new cryptic marketing campaign that began over the weekend with shipments of Bose noise-canceling headphones landing in the mailboxes of prominent WordPress users. At the end of December, 2020, Wix sent out the following Twitter DM to a group of people it deemed “influencers from the…
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is hemorrhaging board members and management following the reinstatement of Richard Stallman. The GPL author and founder of the FSF announced last week that he had rejoined the board and is not planning to resign a second time. An open letter signed by more than 3,000 people called for the removal…
WordPress contributors began discussing the possibility of a block pattern directory in October 2020, an idea that garnered enthusiastic support. The directory would offer a place to browse user-submitted patterns, as well as one-click installation of patterns from the block inserter inside the editor. Interface designer Shaun Andrews published the initial designs for the pattern…
Open Collective has launched Funds, a new funding infrastructure for funneling contributions to open source projects. Any open source project can receive contributions from a Fund, even those that are not listed on Open Collective due to having their own foundation or working with another fiscal host. The new feature was added to Open Collective’s…
In early March, WordPress contributors began discussing the possibility of dropping support for IE11 in the near future after usage fell below ~1%. This week, the discussion’s facilitator, Héctor Prieto, confirmed the majority of participants are in agreement to move forward and set a timeline for discontinuing support. Contributors are now considering either the 5.8.…
GPL author Richard Stallman announced this week that he has rejoined the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which he established in 1985, and is not planning to resign a second time: “I have an announcement to make. I’m now on the Free Software Foundation Board of Directors once again. We were working on…
Chrome’s upcoming version 90 will use https:// by default in the address bar, bringing a significant improvement to security and loading speed. HTTPS adoption has shot up significantly over the past six years after Google announced in 2014 that HTTPS would be used as a ranking signal in search results. In February 2021, W3Techs found that 82.2% of websites…
Anders Norén’s new Eksell theme is now available for download from the WordPress Themes directory. Eksell was inspired by Swedish graphic designer Olle Eksell. It arrives a year and a half after Norén’s popular Chaplin theme was released. Last week Justin Tadlock published a preview of the theme while it was still making its way…
Ulysses, the writing app for Mac, iPad and iPhone, released version 22 this week with support for updating WordPress posts as the headline feature. The app aims to provide a distraction-free writing experience and has offered the ability to export to WordPress for years. Ulysses began alpha testing the highly requested WordPress post updating feature…
As part of an experiment designed to improve coordination of contributor teams, WordPress has launched a new Slack channel for full-time sponsored contributors. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the project’s executive director, announced the new closed Slack channel on Friday evening in a post that drew critical feedback from contributors who pushed for more clarification. “2020 was…
Elementor users who haven’t updated recently will want to get on the latest version 3.1.4 as soon as possible. Researchers at Wordfence disclosed a set of stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the plugin to its authors in February, which was partially patched at that time and additional fixes were released the second week of March.…
WooCommerce Live Africa is hosting its first online meetup on Thursday, March 18, 2021, from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM GMT+1. The new regional group is part of the WooCommerce network of more than 100 meetups with nearly 30,000 members across 40 countries. Events will be focused on topics pertinent to store owners and entrepreneurs with a…
Last week, security researchers at Seravo and WP Charged reported a critical zero-day vulnerability in The Plus Addons for Elementor on March 8, 2021. WPScan categorized it as an authentication bypass vulnerability: The plugin is being actively exploited to by malicious actors to bypass authentication, allowing unauthenticated users to log in as any user (including…
Just before the weekend, Google published a caustic statement on Microsoft’s public support of Australia’s new law that forces Google and Facebook to pay publishers for their content. The law requires the companies to negotiate licensing agreements with publishers in order to include news articles in both search and news feeds, including snippets. Last month,…
The world of Gutenberg blocks is expanding. WordPress’ official block directory launched in June 2020 with just 60 single-block plugins. Today, it has grown to more than 480 blocks. As users incorporate more blocks into their websites, the block inserter can become a very long list to scroll when browsing. Block management capabilities were added…