In this episode, John James Jacoby and I reflect on Alex Mill’s latest blog post where he announced that he’s ending his battle with Leukemia. We highlight some of the impacts he’s had on people’s lives and the contributions he’s made to open-source software. Stories Discussed: Leukemia Has Won Alex’s WordPress Plugins WPWeekly Meta: Next…
Gutenberg development continues ploughing ahead with new blocks and steady improvements to performance and accessibility. Version 5.1 was released this week with new Search, Calendar, and Tag Cloud blocks. All widgets have now been ported over to blocks, a major Phase 2 milestone. The next phase of that project will explore how the widgets screen…
The makers of the annual State of JavaScript survey have launched a new survey for developers who work with CSS. In September 2018, Sacha Greif and his collaborators sent out the State of JS survey for the third year running but dropped the CSS libraries category in favor of keeping it from getting too long.…
Wapuu Dashboard Pet is a new plugin from Kayleigh Thorpe and the team at WordPress hosting company 34SP.com. It is essentially a WordPress Tamagotchi, or digital pet, that resides in your dashboard and monitors the health of the site. The plugin checks to make sure WordPress has been updated (plugins, themes, and core) and backups…
Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt published a post yesterday, addressing the controversy that dominated the #YoastCon hashtag on Twitter in the days leading up the the event. Several parties from the SEO industry began circulating old tweets, along unsavory videos depicting Joost de Valk partying with promotional models. de Valk issued a public apology…
Today, we are reminded that life is fleeting and that plugins, themes, and WordPress itself is built and maintained by humans. Alex (Viper007Bond) Mills announced that he is ending his fight with Leukemia. Due to liver inflammation and GvHD, the liver is too damaged to continue with treatment and there are no further options. I don’t…
Bootstrap has released versions 4.3.1 and 3.4.1 to patch an XSS vulnerability (CVE-2019-8331) that was reported to the Bootstrap Drupal project by a developer and then responsibly disclosed to the Bootstrap development team. The vulnerability specifically affects usage of the tooltip and popover features: Earlier this week a developer reported an XSS issue similar to…
Last week Amazon launched Alexa Skill Blueprints that allow anyone to publish new skills to the Alexa Skills Store without having to have any coding knowledge. The blueprints are templates that provide a starting point where users can create a new skill by filling in the blanks and then publish it to the store for…
Matt Mullenweg is teasing out a new website at distributed.blog with the tagline “The future of work is here.” It’s not clear yet whether subscribers to the mystery blog will be on board for blog posts, a new podcast, or a book promotion, but the site has piqued curiosity. This should be fun… (take 2…
WPBrigade, the developers behind the Simple Social Buttons plugin, have patched a critical privilege escalation vulnerability. The security issue was discovered by the team at WebARX. Developer and researcher Luka Šikić summarized the vulnerability in a post published this week: Improper application design flow, chained with lack of permission check resulted in privilege escalation and…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss a thought-provoking post published by Morten Rand-Hendriksen that takes a deep look at equity in open source software. Morten suggests that the mantra of decisions are made by those who show up be changed to decisions are made by those who can afford to show up.…
Ultimate Blocks, one of the many Gutenberg block collections that have sprouted up, launched before WordPress 5.0 with eight blocks. The collection has since doubled in size, adding features like accordions, social sharing buttons, tabbed content, a progress bar, and star-ratings. Many block collections are loosely organized around serving a specific user demographic. This one…
Last year Zac Gordon organized a free virtual JavaScript for WordPress conference and the event drew 1,200 live attendees. With attendance numbers higher than most WordPress conferences and hundreds more views on the videos published afterwards, Gordon considered it a success and committed to organize another event this year. The next edition is set for…
WordCamp Nordic, a new regional WordCamp taking place in Helsinki, is just 23 days away. Organizers have published a list of 26 speakers and their sessions this week. Topics include content design, entrepreneurship, security, leveraging AMP, WooCommerce, internationalization, Gutenberg, and general WordPress development. The event’s organizers are also embracing a growing trend of hosting a…
Gutenberg Blocks Design Library is a new plugin that provides pre-built page designs, including demo content, using only the default core blocks that come with WordPress. The free version comes with 50 different designs that users can import from the growing Gutenberg Blocks Design Library. These include simple designs for all kinds of page building…