The WordCamp Asia organizing team has extended its call for sponsors until Thursday, November 30, 2023. In an update on the official website, organizers explained that they received feedback from multiple potential sponsors regarding why they had been unable to apply before the original deadline. Some of the reasons included the following: WordCamp Asia’s organizers…
Brainstorm Force, makers of the popular Astra theme, has invested in LatePoint, a commercial booking and appointment scheduling plugin for WordPress. LatePoint is used on 21,000 websites to enable bookings for small businesses, such as salons, therapists, doctors, spas, and fitness studios. It also supports a growing library of add-ons for further customizing the booking…
Moog is one of the latest free block themes to be released on WordPress.org. It features a minimal and bold layout with a responsive, masonry style grid on the homepage. Moog is well suited to blogs or even small magazine websites, with options to radically change the style with the click of a button. Moog’s…
WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy has published a proposed schedule for 2024 that includes three major core releases. The dates have not yet been set in stone but have been planned to avoid major holidays and WordPress events. The first release of the year, WordPress 6.5, is scheduled for March 26, followed by 6.6…
Wordfence launched a bug bounty program today to provide financial incentive for security researchers reporting high risk vulnerabilities to the company’s program. After researchers disclose vulnerabilities to Wordfence, the company triages them and confidentially discloses them to the vendors to fix. When the fix is released, the vulnerability will be included in Wordfence’s public database,…
WordPress contributors have worked quickly over the past 24 hours to prepare a 6.4.1 maintenance release after a critical bug emerged from a change in the Requests library, causing problems with updates on servers running older versions of cURL. Hosting companies began reporting widespread impact of the bug. Tom Sommer, from one of Denmark’s largest…
WordPress’ Performance team is proposing merging Performant Translations into core in time for the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release. After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translations can significantly impact server response times, the team discussed various solutions and landed on one that requires no configuration from users. More than 2,000 WordPress sites have tested…
WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” was released today, named for famed American jazz pianist and singer Shirley Horn. This release introduces a new batch of writing and design tools that give users more powerful customization capabilities inside the editor. We covered most of the changes as they were released in the Gutenberg plugin and added to core,…
Jetpack 12.8 was released this week, introducing Jetpack Creator, a new product under the Growth category that sits alongside the recently launched Newsletter product. Jetpack Creator is aimed at users who want to monetize their content and subscribers. It supports e-books, courses, paid newsletters, advertising, paywalled access, and other content monetization options. The market size…
Adam Schweigert, an independent media and technology consultant, has released a plugin called Newspack Plugin Update Checker that enables self-hosted Newspack users to keep their plugins up-to-date. The Newspack project was launched in 2019 by WordPress.com, with support from the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, and The Lenfest Institute. It provides local news organizations…
WordPress contributors have updated the Theme Handbook to include a new chapter on block templating. The chapter covers how the WordPress block template system works, how to build custom templates and parts and include them in a theme. This is critical documentation designed to provide a learning path for those who are building their first…
Nick Diego, a developer advocate at Automattic and core contributor, is the author of the popular Icon Block plugin that enables users to add custom SVG icons and graphics to the WordPress block editor. He is often asked if the plugin can add icons to the core Button block, but that is outside the scope…
Wordfence CLI 2.0.1 introduced free vulnerability scanning this week. The new CLI product was launched at WordCamp US two months ago with malware detection capabilities, but the latest update brings in the most highly requested feature – vulnerability scanning at scale. Wordfence is most well-known for its Web Application Firewall, malware scanner, and login security…
WooCommerce is rebranding to “Woo,” a shorter, more playful version of the company name that many customers are already using. Automattic acquired WooCommerce in 2015, along with WooThemes. The open source commerce platform now powers more than 4.4 million live websites, including 33% of the top 1 million online stores. The rebranding extends to the Woo…
Munich-based digital agency owner Hendrik Luehrsen has been tracking the usage of themes with the FSE tag (block themes) using a spreadsheet that pulls in data from the WordPress.org API. Wrangling the data in a spreadsheet became too cumbersome, so Luehrsen launched WP Data Dashboard over the weekend as a “centralized hub for exploring, analyzing,…