The University of Wisconsin is offering a free self-paced course on Creating WordPress Websites for students through its Stevens Point branch. It is one of ten free courses offered to the general public in a catalog that includes courses on management, communication, personal finance, customer service, and small business marketing. Creating WordPress websites has become…
One year ago developers at Google and Yoast began collaborating with other contributors on a proposal to add XML sitemaps to WordPress core. The XML Sitemaps feature plugin went into testing in late January and the feature is now on deck for inclusion in WordPress 5.5. This week contributors merged a basic version of sitemaps that plugin developers…
BuddyPress broke into the world of blocks last month with its 6.0 release. Group and Member blocks were the first blocks to make it into the core plugin and next up are block versions of the existing widgets. Contributors are also working on block requests based on community feedback. Today, BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet…
Review Signal founder Kevin Ohashi has published the site’s annual WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks for 2020, along with a smaller set of benchmarks for WooCommerce hosting. For the past seven years Ohashi has been using sentiment analysis to capture consumer reviews of hosting companies on Twitter. He also performs a set of tests to measure peak…
Late last week WordPress made major progress towards the goal of getting users to adopt newer versions of PHP. The ServeHappy API has been updated to set the minimum acceptable PHP version to 7.2, while the WordPress downloads page recommends 7.3 or newer. Sergey Biryukov committed this change on the meta trac after Marius Jensen…
Like many tech conferences, OpenJS World 2020 was forced to go virtual for its upcoming event scheduled for June 23-24, in Austin. The global conference was designed to be representative of all 32 projects hosted with the OpenJS Foundation. This includes Node.js, webpack, jQuery, Mocha, ESLint, Lodash, Grunt, and other popular projects. The Foundation is also…
The Gutenberg team is currently immersed in bringing full-site editing capabilities to the block editor as part of Phase 2 in the project’s longterm roadmap. Meanwhile, Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella has been experimenting with ideas for the collaboration features coming in Phase 3, which aims to deliver a more intuitive way to co-author content. Today,…
A fake ransomware scam is going around that targets website contact forms. It sends an email to the site owner with the subject “Your Site Has Been Hacked.” The body of the email claims the hackers have exploited a vulnerability to gain access to the site’s database and “move the information to an offshore server.”…
This week the web is celebrating 25 years since Rasmus Lerdorf released version 1.0 of his “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools).” PHP is now used by 78.9% of all the websites whose server-side programming language W3Techs can detect. (This includes sites in the Alexa top 10 million or in the Tranco top 1 million list.)…
One of the most exciting parts of Matt Mullenweg’s session at WordCamp Europe 2020 Online was the live demo of the new image editing tools that will land in the next release of the Gutenberg plugin. The video is already available on WordPress.tv (and embedded below). At the 8:30 mark, Mullenweg and Matías Ventura, lead…
WordCamp Europe 2020 Online kicked off yesterday with a record-breaking contributor day. More than 2,500 people signed up to participate. The pandemic may have forced the event to go virtual but an enthusiastic flock of contributors, both seasoned and brand new, joined from their homes to carry on supporting the open source project that connects…
Automattic has invested $4.6M in New Vector, a company founded by the creators of Matrix, an open standard that powers decentralized conversations with end-to-end encryption. Matrix.org is home to the open source project that offers HTTP APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to create their own communication clients on top of the Matrix open standard with…
WordPress’ Executive Director, Josepha Haden, announced the names of the leaders who will be coordinating releases for the remainder of 2020. Version 5.5, expected to be released in August, will be led by Matt Mullenweg, with Jake Spurlock as the coordinator and David Baumwald on Triage. Haden also named tech and design leads for the…
Google is preparing to introduce a new ranking signal for Search, based on page experience as measured by Core Web Vitals metrics. This includes factors like page speed, responsiveness, and the stability of content as it loads. The upcoming update will combine these signals with previously announced UX-related signals for mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS security,…
As part of an ongoing initiative to convert the plugin’s existing shortcodes to blocks, WooCommerce core developers are testing a new block-based cart and checkout experience. This major architectural change has also been redesigned to improve conversion rates for stores. An initial preview release of the blocks can be tested using the WooCommerce Blocks feature…