Last week GitHub responded to a letter from open source project maintainers with apologies for the lack of communication and lack of attention to feedback regarding issue management. Because contributions are the lifeblood of open source projects, maintainers are requesting additional features for issues and pull requests that would help make contributions more meaningful. The…
Elegant Themes emailed its customers last night to inform them of a critical security vulnerability affecting a large segment of its product line. An information disclosure vulnerability was found in the Divi Builder (included in our Divi and Extra themes, as well as our Divi Builder plugin) which resulted in the potential for user privilege…
WP Pusher is on a relentless mission to make it effortless for WordPress developers to connect their plugin and theme repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. Version 2.1.0 of the plugin eliminates the requirement to manually create a token with GitHub and introduces 1-click authentication via OAuth. This update makes setting up the plugin on…
The development team behind TGM Plugin Activation released its new generator last week. The popular tool is a PHP library that allows WordPress developers to require or recommend plugins for a theme or plugin. It essentially helps walk WordPress users through installation and activation of plugin dependencies in the admin. Bundling a bunch of plugin-type…
Last month a group of open source project maintainers confronted GitHub with an open letter of complaints regarding issue management. They were frustrated by a lack of communication from GitHub and a lack of features for managing issues. More than 1700 maintainers of open source projects, including several projects related to WordPress, have signed the…
Last week the feature plugin decision deadline closed and WordPress core contributors approved Responsive Preview and Selective Refresh for merge. The merge deadline is Wednesday, February 17, followed by the first beta next week. Both feature approved for 4.5 extend the customizer to improve live previews. A new version of the Customize Partial Refresh plugin…
After two years in business, Jami Gibbs is selling Rescue Themes. The niche theme shop specializes in products for nonprofits, politics, breweries, and e-commerce websites. Gibbs did not publicly disclose how much revenue the shop is generating, but Rescue Themes has seven products available on Themeforest ranging in price from $16-$59. She also has several…
During the 2015 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg highlighted Bluehost‘s recent efforts to update its customers’ outdated WordPress sites. After finding that 80% of their WordPress installations were not on the latest version, Bluehost wrote a Perl script that uses WP-CLI to update sites, even those running on versions as old as 1.0.2.…
The call for volunteers for WordCamp Europe closed this week and organizers announced that they have assembled a team of more than 100 people to help run the event. The 130 applicants represent 33 countries from Europe and beyond, with the highest numbers from the United States, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, and Romania. The event…
BuddyPress 2.5 beta 1 was released this week with a list of new features and improvements to test, including a brand new BP Email API. The new API allows users to easily customize any email that BuddyPress sends, without having to leave the admin or write any code. The ticket to overhaul BuddyPress emails was…
Testing patches is one way that both developers and non-developers can contribute to WordPress without writing any code. It’s a valuable service that keeps things moving along in tickets and helps patches make their way into core. The most challenging part of testing patches is getting your testing environment set up properly. The WordPress core…
Automattic’s team of theme developers announced the release of Components today along with a suite of themes that extend the popular Underscores starter theme for specific use cases. These include a classic blog, modern blog, portfolio, magazine, and business theme. The new Components website lets theme authors download a theme that includes reusable components tailored…
The WP REST API team released version 2 beta 12 today. Daniel Bachhuber highlighted the breaking changes in the release that developers will want to digest before updating. This includes the removal of meta endpoints from the primary plugin into its own feature plugin, now available on WordPress.org. In a comment on our coverage of…
Last April, WordPress Theme Review Team member Jose Castaneda proposed that the team adopt a standard change log format. Theme authors are not yet required to keep a change log but the general consensus is that it’s a good practice that benefits users. Castaneda revived the topic of change logs during the team’s most recent…
Over the weekend, discussion continued surrounding the direction of the WP REST API, as both Matt Mullenweg and Ryan McCue took to their WordPress blogs to clarify statements from last week’s status meeting. Differences of opinion are driving a heated debate about what constitutes a goalpost for the API’s readiness for core. In a post…