WooSesh, the virtual WooCommerce conference, is now less than two weeks away. The two-day event will be held October 18-19 and is free for all attendees who join the livestream. Organizers Patrick Rauland and Brian Richards published the schedule this week with descriptions for each session. Day 1 will feature speakers on a variety of…
The WordPress 5.0 release schedule has been published and not everyone is excited about the expected November 19th release. November 19th is three days before Thanksgiving, a major holiday in the U.S. Historically, WordPress has shipped major versions in early to mid December rather than November. Holidays were considered because of the sharp drop-off in…
Many WordPress theme shops started out with themes as their only products but over the years have moved into selling plugins that enhance their core products. This came about partially because theming standards evolved to encourage developers to put non-presentational functionality into plugins. For many, the revenue from plugins quickly eclipsed that of their theme…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss the headlines making the rounds in the WordPress community. This includes the start of the WordPress 5.0 release cycle, the 5th annual Hacktoberfest, and theme developers marketing their themes as Gutenberg-compatible. Near the end of the show, I describe how much of the press surrounding WordPress…
A tentative 5.0 release schedule was published during today’s core dev chat. The official release is targeted for November 19, 2018 with beta 1 expected October 19 and RC 1 released October 30. In addition to getting Gutenberg merged into core, the scope for 5.0 includes a few new items that Gary Pendergast outlined in…
Mike Schroder known at GetSource on Twitter and Mike on WordPress’ Slack instance is joining Aaron Campbell at GoDaddy to contribute to WordPress full-time. Since 2011, Schroder has contributed to nearly every version of WordPress. In 2014, Schroder co-led the release of WordPress 3.9. In 2016, he lead the release of WordPress 4.5. He’s also…
Matt Mullenweg has announced a plan for releasing WordPress 5.0 with a tentative estimate for a release candidate to ship in November. “With known knowns and known unknowns, I believe we will be at RC in about a month,” Mullenweg said. “However, I’ll be keeping a close eye on feedback during the beta process and…
DigitalOcean, along with GitHub and new partner Twilio, are sponsoring the 5th annual Hacktoberfest. The event was created to encourage participants to make meaningful contributions to open source projects. Last year 31,901 completed the challenge, opening 239,164 pull requests in 64,166 repositories. In previous years, participants were required to submit four pull requests to GitHub-hosted…
The first batch of tickets for WordCamp Europe 2019 were released early this morning and all 250 standard tickets sold out within three hours and nine minutes. Berlin won out as the next city to host the camp, in part due to the region’s strong local WordPress community. The city is international, diverse, and easily…
WordCamp Tokyo 2018 was held two weeks ago on September 14-15 and recordings of the sessions should be published to WordPress.tv soon. The theme of the WordCamp was “Challenge!”, a celebration of the challenges the WordPress project has overcome over the past 15 years, as well as a rallying call for embracing the challenges introduced…
WordPress theme developers are starting to advertise their themes as being compatible with Gutenberg, ahead of the new editor’s imminent merge into core. Work on the 5.0 release may be ramping up sooner than expected after yesterday’s announcement that 4.9.9 may be a quick release for PHP 7.3 compatibility or possibly cancelled altogether. Themeforest, the…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Gary Pendergast, Gutenberg and WordPress core contributor to get an update on Gutenberg’s progress. We discuss its rollout on WordPress.com, the feedback and sentiment shared thus far, and when we can expect to see it merged into WordPress 5.0. We also talk about what…
Lyft has open sourced its color algorithm for creating an accessible color system. The company’s design team also packaged the algorithm as a web tool called ColorBox. It makes it easy for anyone to produce color sets with accessible contrast ratios, as outlined in the WCAG 2.0 standards. “We made accessibility a cornerstone of our…
Matias Ventura, Gutenberg’s technical lead, published an update on the progress of Gutenberg 4.0 and what users can expect. This version will mark the project’s 40th release. Ventura outlined a number of tasks that have been completed up to this point. These include, Full Screen, Unified Toolbar, and Spotlight modes to adapt to a user’s…
The plans for WordPress 4.9.9 are currently in limbo after today’s core developers’ chat. Here’s what we know right now: Discussions are underway regarding making it a quick PHP 7.3 compatibility release or cancelling it in favor of moving ahead with the 5.0 release cycle. “Progress and communication on 4.9.9 has been very vague as…