Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt published a post yesterday, addressing the controversy that dominated the #YoastCon hashtag on Twitter in the days leading up the the event. Several parties from the SEO industry began circulating old tweets, along unsavory videos depicting Joost de Valk partying with promotional models. de Valk issued a public apology…
Bootstrap has released versions 4.3.1 and 3.4.1 to patch an XSS vulnerability (CVE-2019-8331) that was reported to the Bootstrap Drupal project by a developer and then responsibly disclosed to the Bootstrap development team. The vulnerability specifically affects usage of the tooltip and popover features: Earlier this week a developer reported an XSS issue similar to…
Last week Amazon launched Alexa Skill Blueprints that allow anyone to publish new skills to the Alexa Skills Store without having to have any coding knowledge. The blueprints are templates that provide a starting point where users can create a new skill by filling in the blanks and then publish it to the store for…
Matt Mullenweg is teasing out a new website at distributed.blog with the tagline “The future of work is here.” It’s not clear yet whether subscribers to the mystery blog will be on board for blog posts, a new podcast, or a book promotion, but the site has piqued curiosity. This should be fun… (take 2…
WPBrigade, the developers behind the Simple Social Buttons plugin, have patched a critical privilege escalation vulnerability. The security issue was discovered by the team at WebARX. Developer and researcher Luka Šikić summarized the vulnerability in a post published this week: Improper application design flow, chained with lack of permission check resulted in privilege escalation and…
Ultimate Blocks, one of the many Gutenberg block collections that have sprouted up, launched before WordPress 5.0 with eight blocks. The collection has since doubled in size, adding features like accordions, social sharing buttons, tabbed content, a progress bar, and star-ratings. Many block collections are loosely organized around serving a specific user demographic. This one…
Last year Zac Gordon organized a free virtual JavaScript for WordPress conference and the event drew 1,200 live attendees. With attendance numbers higher than most WordPress conferences and hundreds more views on the videos published afterwards, Gordon considered it a success and committed to organize another event this year. The next edition is set for…
WordCamp Nordic, a new regional WordCamp taking place in Helsinki, is just 23 days away. Organizers have published a list of 26 speakers and their sessions this week. Topics include content design, entrepreneurship, security, leveraging AMP, WooCommerce, internationalization, Gutenberg, and general WordPress development. The event’s organizers are also embracing a growing trend of hosting a…
Gutenberg Blocks Design Library is a new plugin that provides pre-built page designs, including demo content, using only the default core blocks that come with WordPress. The free version comes with 50 different designs that users can import from the growing Gutenberg Blocks Design Library. These include simple designs for all kinds of page building…
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) took a strong, unequivocal stance on its definition of open source this week, encouraging organizations to sign a public affirmation of its role in maintaining and stewarding the definition. The organization has been instrumental in combatting issues caused by license proliferation, as many open source licenses cannot be legally combined…
The third edition of YoastCon kicked off today in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, but for those following remotely the conference has been overshadowed by a discussion that erupted on the #yoastcon hashtag prior to the event. Several parties began circulating tweets and unsavory videos involving Joost de Valk, for which he has since publicly apologized. The…
Version 5.0 of the Gutenberg plugin was released yesterday with a new RSS block. Riad Benguella, the project’s technical lead for phase 2, published a demo of the block and its settings. Users can set the number of items displayed and also toggle on/off the author, date, and excerpt. RSS is still relevant today as…
During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg acknowledged lessons learned in the process of releasing WordPress 5.0. One of those was the need for various teams across the project to work together better. The friction during the 5.0 development cycle was beneficial in that it surfaced areas where the project can grow…
This week marks the first public release of WooCommerce’s new mobile app for Android and the improved version for iOS. WooCommerce began beta testing the Android app late last year and the original iOS app has been updated to offer the same features. This first release should be considered a basic start that is mostly…
Gutenberg phase 2 development is underway and one of the first orders of business is porting all existing core widgets to blocks. This task is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg outlined for 2019, along with upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and adding support for blocks in the Customizer. Contributors on phase…