The Obama Foundation launched its new WordPress-powered website today. The future presidential center, which will be located in Chicago, will manage projects both in the city and other places around the world. “More than a library or a museum, it will be a living, working center for citizenship,” President Obama said. “That’s why we want…
Jetpack is starting 2017 with a major release that is heavy on enhancements and improvements. Version 4.5 includes more than a dozen new shortcodes and widgets, along with revamped support for VideoPress. One of the most intriguing new features announced in this release, however, is the integration with WordAds, WordPress.com’s advertising program. Jetpack users are…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch recaps his trip to Affiliate Summit 2017 held in Las Vegas, Nevada last weekend. Based on the vendors that were on the expo floor, mobile is the e-commerce platform of the future. We discuss the news of the week and share how you can get involved in…
On a site I’m working on that runs BuddyPress, I created a new group and wanted to add nearly 400 registered users to it. Unfortunately, adding users to BuddyPress groups in bulk is not a core feature. I searched Google for a solution and while the BuddyPress Members Import plugin is recommended in many of…
SiteGround is now auto-issuing Let’s Encrypt certificates for every domain hosted on its shared servers. The company has also begun issuing and installing certificates on new accounts automatically after customers register domains or direct new domains to SiteGround’s servers. This also includes add-on domains added in cPanel. The certificates are also auto-renewed as long as…
Postmatic is rebranding its WordPress.org Postmatic Basic plugin as Replyable and pushing the two-way email commenting feature into a new SaaS product. After discovering that many users simply want email commenting, without additional post delivery and newsletter features, Postmatic launched Replyable to offer this starting at $3/month. “Replyable was born out of user feedback,” founder…
Aaron D. Campbell, WordPress Core Contributor at GoDaddy, is replacing Nikolay Bachiyski as WordPress’ Security Czar or WordPress Core Security Team Lead. The role was created in 2015 to provide more structure and focus around incident responses. “The responsibilities of the position include, organizing the security team and making sure all security concerns and reports…
Yesterday Automattic released a new free plugin the makes it easy for Lightroom users to export their photos to WordPress. Lightroom is an Adobe product for managing and editing photos, and the plugin works with the software on MacOS and Windows. It is compatible with both WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites. The Lightroom plugin requires a…
For those who failed to “learn JavaScript deeply” last year, 2017 offers a clean slate for restarting your JavaScript learning goals. Wes Bos, a developer and educator known for his high quality video tutorials, recently launched a free 30-day vanilla JS coding challenge course that provides structure for developing a new habit of daily learning.…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I recap the news that made headlines during the second half of 2016. I explain why there wasn’t a show last week and we close out the episode with our predictions for 2017. We’ll be back to our regular show format on Wednesday, January 18th. WPWeekly Meta: Next Episode:…
The second edition of Karl Fogel‘s “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” is now available for download. Fogel, a partner at Open Tech Strategies and OSS contributor since 1997, was a founding developer in the Subversion project. He has worked for more than a decade as an open source…
Daily blogger and plugin author Tom McFarlin has found a new maintainer for five of his WordPress.org plugins. Within two days of putting the plugins up for adoption, McFarlin announced that Philip Arthur Moore will be taking over Category Sticky Post, Comment Tweets, Single Post Message, Tag Sticky Post, and Tipsy Social Icons. Moore, who…
WordPress 4.7.1 is available for download and fixes eight security issues that affect WordPress 4.7 and below. The PHPMailer library was updated to patch a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. WordFence reported the vulnerability last month as critical and that it affects WordPress core. However, in the announcement post for 4.7.1, Aaron Campbell, WordPress’ new…
After taking heat for the proliferation of “fake news” and misinformation on its platform during the US presidential election, Facebook is aiming to strengthen its ties with the news industry. “We care a great deal about making sure that a healthy news ecosystem and journalism can thrive,” Facebook director of product Fidji Simo said in…
Year In WP is a new site by Jesper van Engelen that creates a personalized review of a user’s contributions to WordPress in 2016. Entering the WordPress.org username of a plugin or theme author or a WordPress core contributor into the field generates a list of statistics that includes: Profile information Number of times their plugins and themes…