The Open Source Initiative (OSI) took a strong, unequivocal stance on its definition of open source this week, encouraging organizations to sign a public affirmation of its role in maintaining and stewarding the definition. The organization has been instrumental in combatting issues caused by license proliferation, as many open source licenses cannot be legally combined…
The third edition of YoastCon kicked off today in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, but for those following remotely the conference has been overshadowed by a discussion that erupted on the #yoastcon hashtag prior to the event. Several parties began circulating tweets and unsavory videos involving Joost de Valk, for which he has since publicly apologized. The…
Version 5.0 of the Gutenberg plugin was released yesterday with a new RSS block. Riad Benguella, the project’s technical lead for phase 2, published a demo of the block and its settings. Users can set the number of items displayed and also toggle on/off the author, date, and excerpt. RSS is still relevant today as…
Based on requests from listeners, I purchased a transcription of episode 344 of WordPress Weekly where we discussed the WordPress Governance Project. I purchased the transcription from Rev, a well-known service devoted to captions, subtitles, and audio transcriptions. For an 87 minute podcast, the turn-around time was 25 hours and cost $87. The transcription came…
Alex Mills, the author of several plugins, including the popular Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, published an update on his fight with cancer and it’s not looking too good. The blood test had been showing a fraction of a percent and then later 3%. That was obviously trending in the wrong direction but the hope was increasing…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Morten Rand-Hendriksen and Rachel Cherry to discuss the WordPress Governance project. We discover why it was created, its goals, and how it aims to help govern the systems and processes that make up the WordPress project. Stories Discussed: WPML Alleges Former Employee Breached Website…
During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg acknowledged lessons learned in the process of releasing WordPress 5.0. One of those was the need for various teams across the project to work together better. The friction during the 5.0 development cycle was beneficial in that it surfaced areas where the project can grow…
This week marks the first public release of WooCommerce’s new mobile app for Android and the improved version for iOS. WooCommerce began beta testing the Android app late last year and the original iOS app has been updated to offer the same features. This first release should be considered a basic start that is mostly…
Gutenberg phase 2 development is underway and one of the first orders of business is porting all existing core widgets to blocks. This task is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg outlined for 2019, along with upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and adding support for blocks in the Customizer. Contributors on phase…
Over the weekend, many WPML customers received an unauthorized email from someone who claimed to have hacked the company’s website and gained access to customer emails. WPML founder Amir Helzer suspects that the attacker is a former employee. “The customer is an ex-employee who left an exploit on the server (not WPML plugin) before leaving.…
On Saturday, January 19, WPML customers started reporting having received an email from someone who seems to have hacked the plugin’s website and gained access to customer information. https://twitter.com/gytisrepecka/status/1086753453429481473 The hacker claims to be a disgruntled customer who had two websites hacked due to vulnerabilities in the WPML plugin: WPML came with a bunch of…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss Automattic’s quest to create a new service tailored to journalists. We discuss what’s next for Cory Miller as his chapter at iThemes ends later this month. Near the end of the show, we talk about recent leadership changes in the WordPress project and share our opinions…
WordPress.com has announced plans to create a new, open source publishing platform that caters to small and medium-sized news organizations. The Google News Initiative has contributed $1.2 million towards the development of “Newspack” on top of WordPress.com’s infrastructure. Automattic and Google have joined with other contributing partners from the broader world of journalism for a…
WooCommerce Blocks 1.3.0 was released yesterday with six new blocks. Previously, the plugin allowed users to display a grid of products by category. The new version introduces a Featured Product Block with design options for customizing nearly everything about the display, including color overlay, price and description, text alignment, call-to-action button, and the product photo.…
CoBlocks, one of the earliest block collections for Gutenberg, has added new page building blocks and tools in the latest 1.6 release. ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor and plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang partnered together on this iteration of CoBlocks to bring users new Row and Columns blocks and a Typography Control Panel. The Row and Column…