In the two years since WP Rollback launched on WordPress.org, the plugin has racked up more than 30,000 active installations with nearly all 5-star reviews. It allows users to roll back any WordPress.org plugin or theme to a previous version with just a few clicks and also supports beta versions of plugins. It’s easy to…
The Apache Software Foundation issued a notice over the weekend, indicating that it has added Facebook’s BSD+Patents license to its Category X list of disallowed licenses for Apache PMC members. This is the license that Facebook uses for most of its open source projects. A representative from Facebook’s RocksDB team commented on the Apache Foundation’s…
If you’re looking for an easy way to display weather conditions on your site, check out the new Weather Atlas Widget by Yu Media Group d.o.o. Once activated, browse to Appearance > Widgets, and add the Weather Atlas widget to a sidebar. As you begin typing, a drop-down list of cities is displayed. This helps choose…
Gutenberg is still in beta but developers are already getting ready for creating their own custom blocks. Over the weekend Ahmad Awais released a new project called Gutenberg Boilerplate For Third-Party Custom Blocks. Awais’ introductory post includes a rundown of his thoughts on the current pros and cons of developing for the Gutenberg project. Although…
Another round of Gutenberg updates was released today. Last weekend brought version 0.4.0, which didn’t have too many noteworthy visible changes on the frontend but introduced an API for handling pasted content. Gutenberg developers are aiming to have specific handling for converting pasted content from applications like Word, Markdown, and Google Docs to native WordPress…
Automattic has been teasing its plan to add commercial themes to Jetpack for several months after introducing theme installation for self-hosted users from WordPress.com. In March, the plugin opened up access to all of WordPress.com’s free themes via the Jetpack Manage interface. All signs pointed to Automattic developing the infrastructure to offer commercial themes via…
Open source software has made its way into nearly every industry, but a recent open source security and risk analysis shows widespread license compliance risks, with 75% of the audited applications including GPL license conflicts. Although most violations are unintentional, there are some cases where companies do not comply with the license in order to…
In 2013, iThemes released Exchange, an e-commerce platform that aimed to make selling online as simple as possible. Today, the company announced that AJ Morris, Product Manager at Liquid Web, has taken over the project. “When approached about taking over iThemes Exchange early this year, we wanted to be sure the project and our customers went into…
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…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Ben Meredith. Over the past few years, Ben has established a friendly and professional relationship with Jesse Petersen, who passed away due to complications from Cystic Fibrosis. Ben shares his unique perspective on who Petersen was as a person and describes the challenges of…
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…
VersionPress 4.0 beta is available for testing. It includes a number of improvements, most notably, the ability to load plugin definitions from a user-defined location within the wp-content directory. Plugin definitions are files used to understand data, actions, shortcodes, and other things plugins do in order to automatically provide version control for them. According to…
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…
