Spam is one of the most discouraging things about managing a BuddyPress-powered social network. Since WordPress itself is already a magnet for spam signups and comments, BuddyPress is subject to the same and then some. With an ordinary WordPress site you can block most of it fairly well, but with BuddyPress you often have to…
W3 Total Cache is a free, caching WordPress plugin created by Frederick Townes that’s active on more than one million sites. While the plugin’s core functionality is free to use, there’s a handful of services users can buy from within the plugin such as enhanced support to server and site configurations. A recent post by…
Last month GitHub introduced issue and pull request templates in response to the “Dear GitHub” letter of complaints from open source project maintainers. The new templates let maintainers streamline contributions to be more structured and meaningful for the project. Creating issue and pull request templates could be a boring addition to your project’s task list,…
Getting a theme approved for the WordPress directory can sometimes take months, depending on the number of corrections required and reviewers available to handle the queue. As part of a larger plan to make things more efficient, the WordPress Theme Review Team is making progress towards automating many of the time-consuming checks involved in reviewing…
When Matt Mullenweg asked the audience who has used Git and/or GitHub during his 2014 State of the Word address, the response was almost unanimous. “Whoah, that’s all the hands!” he exclaimed before announcing that core contributors will soon be able to submit pull requests on GitHub. Two years later, an official patch workflow has…
The Accessibility Team announced today that the WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards have been approved for the core handbook. The team sought feedback on the draft of the guidelines earlier this year and, after a few revisions, the coding standards are out of draft status. Contributors will now be required to meet these guidelines in order…
WP Engine announced today that two-factor authentication (2FA) is now available to its 42,000 customers. The security measure will help combat increasing attempts on the host’s user portal. “As we grow, almost everything about the company changes, and security is one of them,” said WP Engine founder Jason Cohen. “For example, we see things like…
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. Human Made Hires Siobhan McKeown Development firm, Human Made Ltd., announced that…
WordPress introduced oEmbed support for tweets in its 3.4 release, but recent changes to Twitter’s API requires updates to core. On May 1, Twitter will be removing the XML response format from the single Tweet oEmbed endpoint. Twitter engineer Niall Kennedy opened a ticket to change the oEmbed URL for single tweets from api.twitter.com to…
In the latest episode of Office Hours, a WordPress business podcast, host Carrie Dils interviewed Cory Miller and Pippin Williamson to discuss the importance of personal wellness. The episode is titled “Taking Care of Your Business Means Taking Care of Yourself” and the video is now available on OfficeHours.fm. Both Miller and Williamson are successful…
WPForms Lite is a new plugin developed by Syed Balkhi and Jared Atchison that aims to be the most beginner friendly form creation plugin in the market, “We made simple tasks EASY rather than letting the complex tasks define how hard simple will be,” Balkhi told the Tavern. I took the plugin for a test…
Stack Overflow published the results of its 2016 Developer Survey, summarizing responses from 56,033 developers in 173 countries. The 45-question survey collected answers from more than twice as many developers as the previous year. The results were published along with a disclaimer recognizing that the survey is “biased against devs who don’t speak English, or…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the symptoms of burnout and share tips on how to prevent it. We provide a status update on WordPress 4.5 and discuss my experience hooking up a site to Apple News Publisher. To round out the show, Marcus shares his experience using Shopify’s new…
Fight for the Future, a non-profit organization that works to preserve freedom of expression on the web, launched its new “Save Security” campaign today in support of Apple. The FBI has requested that the company hack into an iPhone recovered from one of the terrorists involved in the San Bernardino mass shooting to assist in…
When Apple News Publisher launched in September, 2015, it partnered with 20 publishers including, ESPN, The New York Times, and CNN. Today, publishers large and small are able to sign up to Apple’s News Publisher program which delivers content from sites to devices running iOS 9 or above. Since its launch, the service has garnered…