Now that WordPress 5.3 Beta 1 is open for testing and with the official release slated for November 12, it’s time for theme authors to begin making sure their themes are ready for several changes. Most work will revolve around the block editor. WordPress 5.3 will include versions 5.4 – 6.5 of the Gutenberg plugin,…
Secure the News is a project that was created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2016 to track HTTPS encryption across major news organizations’ websites. It lists the publications and automatically scores them on a scale of 0-100, based on HTTPS implementation according to best practices, as defined by General Services Administration (GSA)…
After tracking exploits of a zero day XSS vulnerability in the Rich Reviews plugin for WordPress, Wordfence is recommending that users remove it from their websites. The company estimates that there are 16,000 active installations vulnerable to unauthenticated plugin option updates: Attackers are currently abusing this exploit chain to inject malvertising code into target websites.…
Gatsby Inc. CEO Kyle Mathews announced a $15M Series A funding round today, just one year after creating the company with GatsbyJS core contributors. The open source Gatsby project started in 2015 to provide a framework for developers to quickly build websites with React. As the project soared in popularity, Mathews formed a company to…
After more than a year and several WordPress updates, an overhaul of the core Date/Time component concluded. WordPress 5.3 will ship with fixes for long-standing bugs and new API functions. Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko spearheaded this project and worked through most of the issues in his WP Date fork of WordPress. Much of his work toward…
Hacktoberfest has started back up again for its sixth year running, sponsored by DigitalOcean and DEV. The annual event brings together open source communities from all over the world for virtual and local collaboration. Organizers are expecting approximately 150,000 participants this year. The first 50,000 participants who make four pull requests to any GitHub-hosted repositories…
Human Made has created a Publication Checklist plugin built specifically for the block editor. It was developed as a headline feature of Altis, the company’s enterprise publishing platform based on WordPress, but is also available as a standalone plugin that developers can customize for their own particular use cases. Ryan McCue, Human Made’s Director of…
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) restructured its administrative duties and laid out its new team organization after yesterday’s semimonthly team meeting. This is not the first time the TRT has restructured to meet the growing demands of the official theme directory over the years. The team is moving toward a flat structure that spreads…
WordPress 5.3 is set to introduce an admin email verification screen that will be shown every six months after an admin has logged in. The feature was proposed seven months ago in a ticket that contributor Andrei Draganescu opened as part of the Site Health component improvements. Draganescu said the idea came from discussions in…
Twenty Twenty, the upcoming default WordPress theme, was committed to core and shipped with WordPress 5.3 Beta 1 yesterday. Like most core themes, Twenty Twenty is simple in function. It comes packaged with a handful of custom features and options, but it remains true to the mission of being an easy-to-use default theme. The theme…
WordPress core contributors worked together today to package up 5.3 Beta 1 for release on schedule. The Core slack channel was abuzz this afternoon as developers pushed through last-minute commits and fixed issues ahead of shipping the beta. Iterations on the block editor are a major part of of this release. WordPress 5.3 will include…
Google recently announced a new Breadcrumbs report available in the Search Console to inform site owners about markup issues. In 2015, Google introduced support for schema.org structured data, including the breadcrumbs URL structure, in order better present URLs in search results. The Search Console’s new report uses this data to help site owners fix any…
PHP developers everywhere can rejoice as GitHub adds the long-awaited dependency graphs feature for PHP repositories that use Composer. The feature provides security alerts, shows dependency insights, and displays the dependents of a given repository. If enabled, it can also automatically send security fixes to the repository via pull requests. GitHub initially added support for…
WordCamp US will debut a new Community Track in November that will feature sessions and workshops on topics like meetups, WordCamps, diversity and inclusion, and kids/youth. Jill Binder, Allie Nimmons, Aurooba Ahmed, and David Wolfpaw will be hosting a workshop called “Creating a Welcoming and Diverse Space” at the event. In order to adequately prepare…
Automattic announced another round of funding today, a $300 million Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures, giving the company a $3 billion valuation post-funding. The last time Automattic raised money was $160 million in a Series C round in 2014. Since that time the company has grown to more than 950 employees and made strategic…