WordPress.com is venturing into the realm of social media management applications with its latest feature that allows users to schedule Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn updates for individual posts. This goes beyond the basic Publicize functionality that automatically shares posts to connected accounts as soon as they are published, giving users the ability to automate their…
More than 100 open source project maintainers and industry leaders gathered at the GitHub headquarters in San Francisco last month to discuss the long-term sustainability of open source software. The Sustain event, put on by a relatively new organization called SustainOSS, did not follow a traditional conference format with talks and keynotes but was intentionally…
Automattic announced its intent to protest the FCC’s attack on net neutrality today by making a way for the millions of WordPress.com users to join in. The company’s logo has been listed on the Save Net Neutrality event website for some time but it had yet to announce how it would be participating. WordPress.com users…
10up, a leading WordPress design and development agency, has acquired Lift UX, a smaller user experience design-driven agency that will bolster the company’s existing Experience design team. Lift founders Chris Wallace and Brad Miller will join 10up’s 120+ person distributed team, along with Lift’s director of technology, Christian Chung, and front-end developer Anthony Garand. 10up…
Major internet websites, companies, and organizations are banding together on Wednesday, July 12, to protest the FCC’s attack on net neutrality. These include Amazon, GitHub, Kickstarter, Vimeo, reddit, Mozilla, Twitter, Etsy, Spotify, Netflix, and many others. Automattic is joining these tech companies in the protest, as it has several times in the past, including the…
Let’s Encrypt, the free and open certificate authority that launched in 2016, has issued more than 100 million certificates as of June 2017 and is currently securing 47 million domains. Earlier this year, the web passed a major milestone of getting more than 50% of traffic encrypted. Let’s Encrypt has been a major contributor to…
After seven years of developing and supporting the WangGuard/SplogHunter service, José Conti has shut down the server permanently due to the stress and trauma associated with maintaining it. Conti is a WordPress plugin developer and consultant, and a member of the WordPress España translation team. His WangGuard plugin identifies and blocks sploggers, unwanted users, and…
Yesterday Sakin Shrestha announced that WordCamp Asia is now in the preliminary planning stages. Shrestha is a key reviewer on the Theme Review Team, translates WordPress to Nepali, and organizes meetups and WordCamps in Nepal. He and other members of the WordPress community in Asia, including representatives from India, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Singapore,…
Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers recently joined Sonal Chokshi for an episode of the a16z Podcast to discuss the changing culture of open source. Eghbal works in community programs at GitHub to better support people doing open source work. Rogers is the community manager at the Node.js Foundation. The episode focuses on the human aspect…
WordCamp Europe 2017 organizers have posted attendance and budget data compiled after the conclusion of the event. Despite being promoted as “the largest WordPress event to this day” with more than 3,000 expected attendees, WCEU 2017 fell short with 1,900 people on the ground. Attendees were 5% fewer than last year’s 2,000 in Vienna. Expectations…
The new Gutenberg editor has an open ticket for allowing users to sort blocks via drag and drop. Blocks can currently be sorted with up and down arrows located to the left of the content but the beta only allows for single-column stacking. One of the goals for Gutenberg is to provide “a page building…
Gutenberg development is marching ahead with version 0.3.0 released today. New releases are shipping out on a weekly basis, so testers will get to discover another round of new additions after updating to the latest. The changelog has a full list of the 50 additions and improvements included in this release, but here’s a quick…
At WordCamp Europe I had the opportunity to speak with WordCamp Netherlands organizers Marcel Bootsman and Luc Princen, along with WordPress Global Community Team members Josepha Haden and Andrea Middleton. The group has had several conversations about the future of WordCamp Netherlands, which was shut down earlier this year in favor of city-based WordCamps, and…
WooCommerce 3.1 was released today after four weeks of beta and RC testing. Although it is just a minor update, the release was a large undertaking with 1,600 commits from 84 contributors. The most exciting feature in 3.1 is the new built-in product importer/exporter that supports CSV files, a feature previously offered through extensions. The…