Sarah Gooding

  • AMP Project Joins OpenJS Foundation Incubation Program

    AMP Project Joins OpenJS Foundation Incubation Program

    Last week at the AMP Contributor Summit 2019 in New York City, the AMP project announced that it will be joining the OpenJS Foundation incubation program. OpenJS was formed by a recent merger between the JS Foundation and the Node.js Foundation. AMP will join webpack, jQuery, Mocha, Node.js, ESLint, Grunt, and other open source projects…

  • Edit Flow Future in Flux: Here Are 5 Alternative Plugins

    Edit Flow Future in Flux: Here Are 5 Alternative Plugins

    After years of unpredictable development and support, it seemed the Edit Flow plugin had finally given up the ghost last week when an Automattic support representative confirmed that it is no longer being actively developed and recommended users switch to an alternative. Nick Gernert, head of WordPress.com VIP, has since commented on our post to…

  • WordPress 5.3 Improves Large Image Handling

    WordPress 5.3 Improves Large Image Handling

    WordPress 5.3 Beta 3 was released this week and RC 1 is right around the corner, expected October 15. Core contributors have been publishing developer notes on new features landing in this release. One exciting enhancement that hasn’t received much attention yet is WordPress’ updated handling of large images. Many WordPress users don’t consider the…

  • ExpressionEngine Under New Ownership, Will Remain Open Source for Now

    ExpressionEngine Under New Ownership, Will Remain Open Source for Now

    EllisLab founder Rick Ellis announced yesterday that ExpressionEngine has been acquired by Packet Tide, the parent company of EEHarbor, one of the most successful EE add-on providers and development agencies in the community. A year ago EllisLab, the developers of EE core, was acquired by Digital Locations but Ellis said the company ended up not…

  • GNU Project Maintainers Move to Oust Richard Stallman from Leadership

    GNU Project Maintainers Move to Oust Richard Stallman from Leadership

    GNU Project maintainers are working to oust Richard Stallman from his position as head of the organization. In a joint statement published yesterday morning, a collection of 22 GNU maintainers and developers thanked Stallman for his work and declared that he can no longer represent the project: We, the undersigned GNU maintainers and developers, owe…

  • Google Chrome Announces Rollout Plan for Blocking Mixed Content Beginning January 2020

    Google Chrome Announces Rollout Plan for Blocking Mixed Content Beginning January 2020

    The Google Security Team has announced a timeline for when Chrome will begin blocking mixed content by default in order to ensure that HTTPS browsing is more secure. Mixed content refers to HTTPS pages that load resources, such as images, videos, stylesheets, and scripts, over HTTP. The gradual rollout will begin with Chrome 79, which…

  • WooSesh 2019 Scheduled for October 9 and 10: Registration Now Open

    WooSesh 2019 Scheduled for October 9 and 10: Registration Now Open

    WooSesh is happening next week on October 9 and 10, and registration is now open. This is the second edition of the virtual WooCommerce event hosted by WPSessions. In addition to presentations focused entirely on e-commerce, the event will include a “Hallway Track” that offers opportunities for attendees to connect with each other, along with…

  • Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson Discuss WordPress Market Share, Monopolies, and Power in Open Source Communities

    Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson Discuss WordPress Market Share, Monopolies, and Power in Open Source Communities

    In what began as a heated conversation on Twitter, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson took to the airwaves to debate opposing viewpoints on market share, monopolies, and power in open source communities. Hansson reacted to a statement Mullenweg made in an interview after Salesforce Ventures…

  • BuddyPress 5.0 Introduces BP REST API, Paving the Way for Blocks

    BuddyPress 5.0 Introduces BP REST API, Paving the Way for Blocks

    BuddyPress 5.0.0 “Le Gusto” was released this week with the long-awaited BP REST API, a new Invitations API, and BuddyPress info on the Site Health screen. The release was named for a favorite pizza restaurant in Fortaleza, Brazil, where BP REST API contributor and core committer Renato Alves resides. The new REST API is fully…

  • Gatsby Days London Features Multiple WordPress Presentations

    Gatsby Days London Features Multiple WordPress Presentations

    Gatsby Days London kicked off yesterday with a lot of momentum after Gatsby Inc. announced a $15M Series A funding round last week. The one-day conference drew 200 attendees and was the third in a series of Gatsby Days that have been held in other cities. They are designed to give the community an opportunity…

  • Automattic Has Discontinued Active Development on Edit Flow Plugin

    Automattic Has Discontinued Active Development on Edit Flow Plugin

    Edit Flow, the modular editorial plugin that enables collaboration inside the WordPress admin, is no longer being actively developed. After no updates for nine months, Mark Warbinek, a frustrated user, contacted Automattic to ask if they have abandoned the plugin or still plan to update it. A support representative from Automattic confirmed the company will…

  • Secure the News Project Finds 93% of Major Publishers Offer HTTPS Encryption by Default

    Secure the News Project Finds 93% of Major Publishers Offer HTTPS Encryption by Default

    Secure the News is a project that was created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2016 to track HTTPS encryption across major news organizations’ websites. It lists the publications and automatically scores them on a scale of 0-100, based on HTTPS implementation according to best practices, as defined by General Services Administration (GSA)…

  • Rich Reviews Plugin Discontinued after Vulnerabilities Exploited in the Wild

    Rich Reviews Plugin Discontinued after Vulnerabilities Exploited in the Wild

    After tracking exploits of a zero day XSS vulnerability in the Rich Reviews plugin for WordPress, Wordfence is recommending that users remove it from their websites. The company estimates that there are 16,000 active installations vulnerable to unauthenticated plugin option updates: Attackers are currently abusing this exploit chain to inject malvertising code into target websites.…

  • Gatsby Raises $15M, Plans to Invest More Heavily in WordPress and CMS Integrations

    Gatsby Raises $15M, Plans to Invest More Heavily in WordPress and CMS Integrations

    Gatsby Inc. CEO Kyle Mathews announced a $15M Series A funding round today, just one year after creating the company with GatsbyJS core contributors. The open source Gatsby project started in 2015 to provide a framework for developers to quickly build websites with React. As the project soared in popularity, Mathews formed a company to…

  • Hacktoberfest 2019 Registration is Now Open

    Hacktoberfest 2019 Registration is Now Open

    Hacktoberfest has started back up again for its sixth year running, sponsored by DigitalOcean and DEV. The annual event brings together open source communities from all over the world for virtual and local collaboration. Organizers are expecting approximately 150,000 participants this year. The first 50,000 participants who make four pull requests to any GitHub-hosted repositories…