Automattic has acquired Prospress and its flagship WooCommerce Subscriptions product, along with the company’s entire suite of e-commerce plugins and automation tools. Prospress’ 20 employees will be joining Automattic to continue developing and supporting their products. There are no immediate changes planned for current WooCommerce Subscriptions customers. Automattic will begin working on a roadmap for…
WP&UP is a mental health and well-being charitable organization founded by Dan Maby in 2018, whose mission is to promote positive mental health throughout the WordPress ecosystem. The organization is currently hosting a survey to better understand the needs of the community. The questions cover the general work environment, general mental health and well-being, and…
Google is rolling out an update to mobile search results that includes website branding. The new design displays a website’s name and icon at the top of the listing so users can easily scan results. If the result is an ad, it will be indicated in bold next to the website’s address. Below is a…
Elementor launched its Hello theme on WordPress.org this week. After just a few days in the directory, the theme already has more than 10,000 active installations. It is essentially a blank starter theme that offers 100% compatibility with Elementor. Page builders with a large user base are in a unique position to influence the WordPress…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss an article published by Vox on how Slack is not improving productivity, especially in large team environments. We highlight what’s new in WordPress 5.2.1, why libraries are important to the communities they serve, and new security features in WordPress 5.2. At the end of the show,…
Public libraries are one of the few remaining community centers where people freely pass on valuable skills to neighbors young and old. In addition to offering free access to books, computers, and the internet, libraries often host educational classes as a public service, with an emphasis on teaching fundamental skills for navigating the digital world.…
WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang continues to plough forward with new features for EditorsKit, a collection of page building block options for Gutenberg. What began as a block visibility management plugin has grown to include more features aimed at tweaking various settings in the editor. Version 1.5 adds some text, heading, and paragraph styling and…
CoBlocks, a collection of page builder blocks that was recently acquired by GoDaddy, has added four new blocks in version 1.9.5. This is the first major release since the plugin was acquired from Rich Tabor and his co-creators. Tabor now heads up a WordPress Experience team at GoDaddy where CoBlocks’ development continues. This release merges…
WordPress 5.2, released earlier this month, added the first step towards fully secure updates with offline digital signatures. Scott Arciszewski, Chief Development Officer for Paragon Initiative Enterprises, explains how it works and how developers can migrate away from mcrypt to libsodium. When your WordPress site installs an automatic update, from version 5.2 onwards, it will…
Jetpack has opened a signup for the beta of its upcoming Membership feature in order to collect feedback from potential testers. The changelog for version 7.3, released two weeks ago, hinted at a new Membership block coming to the plugin. The work in progress was added behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant, presumably in preparation for wider…
Jetpack 7.3 was released last week and if you didn’t read the changelog, you may have missed that the spelling and grammar checking module that uses After the Deadline has been retired. “Grammar and Spelling: Remove from Jetpack. We’ve chekced the spelling alot over the years, but now time to retire.” From the Jetpack 7.3…
VVV 3.0 was released this week, introducing a new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box. The project’s previous versions used Ubuntu 14, which has now reached end of life (EOL). Support for VVV 2 is now discontinued, due to an unforeseen complication with its PHP dependencies. Ondřej Surý, who maintains all the PHP packages VVV uses, deleted…
Not everyone is able or willing to build blocks in JavaScript just yet, and sometimes you have to install three or four block collections until you find the blocks you would like. There is a third way: plugins that create the blocks for you from a set of specific custom fields, with a template to…
HostCamp is a small, semi-informal, invitation-only, event with an unconference style that is bringing leaders together from within the hosting industry to discuss and share ideas on how to advance the WordPress infrastructure across the web. The organizing team is comprised of, Jonathan Wold, Ecosystem Consultant, Formerly VP of Strategy at XWP, Mile Rosu, Co-founder…
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has launched a new blog and podcast at Distributed.blog where he will be sharing what he has learned over the past 15 years of managing a distributed workforce. In 2019, Automattic now employs more than 900 people from 68 countries who have all worked in a distributed fashion since day one.…