The popular themes page on the WordPress theme directory usually displays a mix of default themes and those that meet a certain criteria. While the criteria to reach the page is not publicly known, download counts are one form of measurement. Since September, the Swift theme has routinely shown up on the popular themes page.…
If you use ManageWP, you may have noticed a new dashboard design. That’s because the company released Orion, a completely redesigned dashboard for managing sites. To give users a chance to alter workflows and explore the Orion dashboard, ManageWP linked the original dashboard to Orion. Actions performed in one dashboard are mirrored to the other.…
This is a guest post contributed by Matthew Sparrow who is a young, self-taught developer with minimal coding knowledge that loves to use WordPress. He mostly uses WordPress for personal projects although he has completed a couple of projects for others. In addition to maintaining a few plugins, he’s an active translations contributor. Automatic translations…
Over the weekend at WordCamp Portland, Oregon, Drew Jaynes, a WordPress core developer who also led the 4.2 development cycle presented on the topic of beta testing WordPress. In the presentation, Jaynes highlights the pros and cons of using the WordPress Beta Testing plugin on a testing site and a production site. However, he also…
VersionPress, a version control plugin for WordPress, has raised $400K in seed funding from five investors, led by Credo Ventures based in Prague. In July of 2014, VersionPress conducted a crowdfunding campaign to raise $30K. However, the team raised only 45% of the $30,000 funding goal. The team pressed on and released the first version…
Nikhil Vimal, who runs Techvoltz.com, a WordPress development agency, is the new owner of the Front End Registration and Login Forms Plugin created by Pippin Williamson. Earlier this month, Williamson put the plugin up for sale and noted that it needed some development work. I would like to sell my Frontend Registration and Login Forms…
After more than eight weeks in development, WordPress 4.4. beta 1 is available for testing. With over 1,600 commits since WordPress 4.3’s release, it’s important that 4.4 be tested by as many people as possible. Commits are bug fixes, additional functions or filters, new features, corrected typos, and anything inbetween. As a rule of thumb,…
In this time travel inspired episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I catch you up on the news of the week. I start the show by sharing my experience attending the first WordCamp Hampton Roads in Virginia Beach, VA. While in Virginia Beach, I visited and worked from the Rocketgenius office and observed how…
A year after WordPress 4.1 introduced a new way to display titles in themes, WordPress 4.4 will deprecate wp_title(). With the change, plugin authors will be able to check for theme support and use a few new filters to manipulate the title. The new filters are as follows: ‘pre_get_document_title’ short-circuits wp_get_document_title() if it returns anything…
Back in August, the WordPress Foundation began accepting applications for the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship not only serves as a memorial, but gives one woman in the WordPress community an opportunity to attend WordCamp US with financial assistance from the foundation. The WordCamp US website announced Anyssa Ferreira, a Brazilian designer, feminist, and…
This post was contributed by Jesse Nickles. He is the founder of LittleBizzy, a managed WordPress hosting company, and a part-time blogger at CollegeTimes, where he gets into trouble exploring controversial issues. Two weeks ago, I announced that all current and future domains hosted at LittleBizzy would have XML-RPC permanently blocked due to the non-stop…
If you use Akismet to battle comment spam, make sure it’s running version 3.1.5 as it patches a critical security vulnerability. Due to the nature of the bug, the Akismet team pushed out auto updates to sites that can accept them. According to Sucuri, sites using Akismet 3.1.4 and lower and that have the Convert…
If you’ve noticed an influx of brute force attacks on your site, you’re not the only one. Sucuri is reporting that brute force amplification attacks are targeting WordPress sites with XML-RPC enabled. In a nutshell, XML-RPC contains a system.multicall method which allows developers to execute multiple methods and commands inside a single request. What is…
The WordPress.tv team is requesting feedback on what features you’d like to see in a website redesign. Jerry Bates, volunteer moderator for WordPress.tv, says one of the goals for 2016 is to update the site to better showcase content from WordCamps around the world. While plans are underway, the team wants to know what you…
A few hours ago, Ryan McCue, one of the lead developers of the WordPress REST API project who recently received guest commit access for WordPress 4.4, committed a patch that adds the REST API infrastructure to WordPress core. In his commit message, McCue referred to the infrastructure as a baby API: REST API: Introduce baby…