In December, Mapbox shocked its open source contributor community with the news that Mapbox GL JS version 2.0 would be released under a proprietary license. The JavaScript library powers interactive, customizable vector maps on many high profile websites like CNN, The New York Times, Ancestry, Strava, Shopify, Facebook, and more. Older versions remain open source…
If you haven’t yet tested the Gutenberg team’s progress on the full site editing (FSE) project, WordPress developer Carrie Dils has created a blueprint for Local that makes it easy to jump right in. Full site editing is phase 2 on the Gutenberg roadmap and is one of the main focuses for WordPress core development…
WPScan, a security company that maintains a database of WordPress vulnerabilities, has been officially designated as a CVE (Common Vulnerability and Exposures) Numbering Authority (CNA). The company joins 151 organizations from 25 countries that participate in the CVE Program as CNAs. These organizations are authorized to assign CVE Identifiers (CVE IDs) to vulnerabilities within their own distinct scopes of work,…
Google has launched a new Search Console performance report for sites that appear in Google News. Publishers can now track clicks, impressions, and CTR for traffic coming from news.google.com and the Google News apps for Android and iOS. The report helps publishers see how often their articles appear to users in Google News and which…
WordPress’ block editor, colloquially still widely known as Gutenberg, is making inroads into the segment of users who have heavily relied on page builders for years. For the most part, page builder plugins have either declined in growth or stagnated in 2020, with the exception of Elementor. In contrast, block collections with page builder features…
WordPress’ Community Team has been discussing the return to in-person events since early December 2020, and has landed on an idea that would allow local meetup organizers to determine readiness using a COVID-19 risk-assessment checklist. This would enable organizers to restart meetups when it is safe for their communities, instead of applying a blanket global…
JetBrains, makers of Phpstorm, one of the most popular IDEs for PHP developers, has published a statement denying any involvement in the SolarWinds attack, which compromised multiple US federal agencies and private companies. The company stated that it has not been the subject of an official investigation: JetBrains has not taken part or been involved…
Buried in the changelog of a series of minor releases that dropped before the Christmas holiday, All in One SEO plugin users were given the surprise gift of automatic updates. After a seemingly endless run of releases (12 updates during a span of six weeks at the end of 2020), the plugin’s developers decided to…
WordPress.com launched a new website building service today with prices starting at $4,900. Automattic has been beta testing the service since the last quarter of 2020. The product announcement invites customers to let WordPress.com’s professional team “translate your vision into a compelling and modern website” but does not specify pricing for more customized websites: Whether you…
GitHub has published its annual Octoverse report for 2020. The code hosting platform currently serves more than 56 million developers who created 60+ million new repositories this past year. The volume of work pumping through GitHub’s pipes and its preeminence as the world’s largest developer platform gives the company access to a trove of data…
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open source initiative that originated with Google, is coming under greater scrutiny at the tail end of 2020, as the company is facing a rash of antitrust lawsuits beginning in October. The second suit is the one most pertinent to the AMP project. (A third suit brought by 38 state…
Google’s Rich Results Test came out of beta in July with support for all Google Search rich result features like carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. At that time, Google announced it would be deprecating the Structured Data Testing Tool, which SEOs, developers, and site owners have relied on for testing structured markup and troubleshooting…
Jonathan Desrosiers, a WordPress core committer and software engineer at Bluehost, has published a new workshop titled “How to Use Trac” on the Learn WordPress platform. The 20-minute video offers a crash course on the ticket tracking software that WordPress relies on to manage core development. Trac is also used for contributing to WordPress’ meta…
Shutterstock has released an official plugin for WordPress. The 17-year old company is as old as WordPress itself but this is the first time it has provided convenient access to its library inside the admin. Seven years ago, Shutterstock released a plugin for affiliates using a third-party development company, but it failed to gain much…
If the 2020 State of the Word address was any indication, WordPress is moving full steam ahead to land full site editing in 2021. The 5.7 release cycle kicked off this week with the proposed scope centered around full site editing via Gutenberg. Matt Mullenweg will be leading the release and the rest of the team…