Last year WordCamp London introduced “Wapuunk,” its 1970’s punk style wapuu, to the world, igniting a new wapuu craze for WordCamps held in the Western hemisphere. The 2015 event had commemorative stickers printed along with a Wapuunk-embroidered scarf for attendees. Shortly thereafter, nearly every WordCamp organization team began designing their own custom wapuu mascots. WordCamp…
Authorities have not yet identified the hacker behind the Panama Papers breach, nor have they isolated the exact attack vector. It is clear that Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that protected the assets of the rich and powerful by setting up shell companies, had employed a dangerously loose policy towards web security and communications.…
Borek Bernard and Jan Voráček, creators of VersionPress, announced that they’re transitioning the plugin into a free, open source project hosted on GitHub. In addition, they are releasing VersionPress 3.0 Beta, the first version released under the new model. Open Source Is the Way Forward In a post on the product’s site, Bernard explains that…
Keeping up and monitoring the progress of WordCamps in and around your area is now a lot easier thanks to a new WordCamp Application status page. The page indicates a WordCamp’s city, applicant’s name, recent milestone, status, and the last time it was updated. The application status page is the result of efforts by Ian…
Today GitHub announced a new feature that allows project owners to block abusive users from public repositories. Users who are blocked will no longer be able to open or comment on issues or pull requests, nor will they will not be able to add or edit any of the project’s wiki pages. Blocked users are…
During the 2015 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg shared a few stats that demonstrate the growth of the global WordPress community. A total of 89 WordCamps with 21,000 attendees were held across 34 countries in 2015. This week WordPress community organizer Andrea Middleton published a more thorough breakdown of 2015 stats. She noted…
Vladimir Garagulya, developer of the User Role Editor has patched a critical security vulnerability. User Role Editor is used to edit, manage, and create user roles and capabilities and is active on more than 300K sites. User Role Editor 4.24 and below allows any registered user to gain administrator access. Wordfence, a popular security plugin…
The WP REST API team released version 2.0 beta 13 of the feature plugin today. This release includes a couple of breaking changes, JavaScript client updates, and many other fixes and improvements. Developers who use the plugin in their projects can expect it to follow a more stable release cycle in the future, as beta…
Last month WordPress contributors approved accessibility coding standards for the core handbook. All new and updated code will need to conform with WCAG 2.0 level AA guidelines. With WordPress core moving firmly in the direction of accessibility, its new guidelines set the bar for themes, plugins, and websites built on top of the platform. Text…
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. Jen Mylo Moves on From Automattic Jen Mylo, formerly known as Jane…
Last year, I identified key factors that suggested the features-as-plugins first model was falling apart. A lack of communication, direction, buy-in from core developers, and synchronized development between plugins on Github and WordPress.org were some of the contributing factors highlighted. Features-as-Projects WordPress lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí has outlined a new strategy for the model transitioning…
There hasn’t been a lot of news about bbPress lately but earlier this week on the project’s development blog, John James Jacoby provided a status update on the progress of 2.6 and what to expect for 2.7. According to the post, the team has worked hard on 2.6 since 2.5’s release in 2013. Unfortunately, two…
Development on BuddyPress 2.6 began this week with a meeting to set the schedule and scope for the release. The BuddyPress project recently moved to adopt release leads as part of the core development process. “The release lead gets a sense at the beginning of the dev cycle what he/she would like to accomplish, as…
Jetpack 3.9.5 was released yesterday with compatibilities for the upcoming WordPress 4.5 release and a handful of enhancements/bug fixes. Shortly after issuing the routine maintenance update, the Jetpack team began receiving reports of random, unwanted videos being added to the comments of posts. Any number string in the comments was automatically converted into a Vimeo…
WordPress.org is second only to WordPress.com in Google search results for “WordPress,” followed by the project’s download, about, and featured themes pages. Unfortunately, visitors to WordPress.org land on an outdated website that doesn’t accurately represent the vibrance of the WordPress project and its strong community. As the face of the open source project, WordPress.org is…