Let’s Encrypt, the open Certificate Authority, passed 5 million active (unexpired) certificates this week. The project came out of beta in April and has grown rapidly in the past few months. At the end of June, Let’s Encrypt reported that it had 3.8 million active certificates covering more than 7 million unique domains. In a…
WP Site Care announced that it will soon be entering the WordPress products business with a commercial recipe plugin. Co-founder Ryan Sullivan said the company is partnering with Feast Design Company to launch Cookbook, a full-featured recipe plugin that is mobile and SEO friendly. “A good chunk of our current customers are food bloggers and…
WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” is now available and is named after Pepper Adams who played the Baritone saxophone and the clarinet. This release doesn’t have any jaw-dropping features, but rather a collection of incremental improvements. Managing Plugins and Themes is Faster Building on the work introduced in WordPress 4.2, this release makes updating, installing, and deleting…
If you can’t attend any WordCamps this weekend, watching WordSesh live is the next best thing. WordSesh, the free 24 hour-long virtual WordPress conference, is hosting its fourth event Saturday, August 20, 2016, at 00:00 – 24:00 UTC+0. There is one session per hour for 24 hours starting with The Brad and Scotty B Show. Speakers…
Last week WordPress plugin developer Rachel Carden released wA11y, a new plugin that offers comprehensive feedback on web accessibility issues. wA11y was created to provide a toolbox of resources for site owners and currently includes support for two well known web accessibility evaluation tools: Tota11y and WAVE. “You know that saying ‘Information wants to be…
Earlier this year we tested the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, which allows users to draft and preview customizer states. For the past several months Weston Ruter and his team at XWP have been working on adding the ability to schedule Customizer changes. This would allow users to stage content as a set of customizer changes,…
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Terrible Software John James Jacoby explains why he thinks today’s software is…
WordPress.com launched browser notifications this week, a feature that delivers instant notifications of site activity to Chrome and Firefox users. Notifications are opt-in, so users will need to enable them before they will be active. Fortunately, they are also configurable on a per-site and per-activity basis, otherwise users with a larger volume of notifications might…
In this unconventional episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Cory Miller, founder of iThemes and a mental health advocate. Normally we discuss the news of the week but both Marcus and I had some things we wanted to get off our chest. We started the show by reviewing my trip…
Layers, the WordPress page builder that installs as a theme, has ended the exclusive arrangement it had with Envato for more than a year. David Perel, co-founder of Obox and Layers, announced that any new Layers themes and plugins will be sold within their own marketplace, instead of through Envato. “Our exclusivity agreement meant we…
PHP 7 Release Manager and Core Developer Kalle Sommer Nielsen has been watching the usage statistics of the latest version rise on W3Techs’ market share assessment. PHP is currently used by 82.1% of all the websites for which W3Techs can detect a server-side programming language. The site also collects data on the breakdown of major…
Nearly every WordPress user has experienced the frustration of dismissing an admin notice and having it pop up again on page refresh or upon navigating to a new page. WordPress 4.2 made it possible for plugin and theme developers to create dismissible admin notices using the classes .notice and .is-dismissible, but left it up to…
Headway Themes, founded in 2009 by father-son duo Grant Griffiths and Clay Griffiths, is one of a handful of companies that helped pioneer the WordPress commercial theme market. Headway is not a page builder but rather a visual drag-and-drop layout builder for WordPress. In the past few weeks, several readers have contacted us wanting to…
Listings is a new plugin that is aiming to be the “One Listings Plugin to Rule Them All.” The Look and Feel, a team led by Scott Basgaard and Coen Jacobs, created Listings to provide a generic platform that will support niche extensions for things like a job board, real estate, cars, and kittens. “We…
In 2008, while working for an Irish company under contract with the Irish Parliament, Bogdan Fireteanu was called into a meeting and told that he needed to build 50 blogs as soon as possible. That was the day he discovered WordPress. Over the next eight years, Fireteanu would become more deeply involved with the WordPress…