Over the weekend, many WPML customers received an unauthorized email from someone who claimed to have hacked the company’s website and gained access to customer emails. WPML founder Amir Helzer suspects that the attacker is a former employee. “The customer is an ex-employee who left an exploit on the server (not WPML plugin) before leaving.…
On Saturday, January 19, WPML customers started reporting having received an email from someone who seems to have hacked the plugin’s website and gained access to customer information. https://twitter.com/gytisrepecka/status/1086753453429481473 The hacker claims to be a disgruntled customer who had two websites hacked due to vulnerabilities in the WPML plugin: WPML came with a bunch of…
WordPress.com has announced plans to create a new, open source publishing platform that caters to small and medium-sized news organizations. The Google News Initiative has contributed $1.2 million towards the development of “Newspack” on top of WordPress.com’s infrastructure. Automattic and Google have joined with other contributing partners from the broader world of journalism for a…
WooCommerce Blocks 1.3.0 was released yesterday with six new blocks. Previously, the plugin allowed users to display a grid of products by category. The new version introduces a Featured Product Block with design options for customizing nearly everything about the display, including color overlay, price and description, text alignment, call-to-action button, and the product photo.…
CoBlocks, one of the earliest block collections for Gutenberg, has added new page building blocks and tools in the latest 1.6 release. ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor and plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang partnered together on this iteration of CoBlocks to bring users new Row and Columns blocks and a Typography Control Panel. The Row and Column…
The WordPress Support forums have been updated to include Twitter/GitHub style auto-completion for usernames. As users begin typing @username in the forum’s TinyMCE editor, it will begin to suggest usernames, narrowed further by characters typed. Hitting tab or enter will complete the username and link it to the user’s profiles.wordpress.org page. This will trigger a…
WPCampus announced that Tenon LLC, a leading accessibility firm founded by Karl Groves, has been selected to perform its Gutenberg accessibility audit. More than $10,000 has come in through WPCamps’ crowdfunding campaign. Shortly before WordCamp US 2018, Automattic pledged to fund the remainder of the audit. The final cost for the chosen vendor is $31,200.…
WordPress 5.0.3 was released this week with more than a dozen fixes related to the block editor. The automatic background update has gone out and 23.2% of sites are currently running on 5.0+, with 47.2% hanging back at 4.9. Meanwhile, work on WordPress 5.1 charges forward and Beta 1 is now available. One of the projects…
Jetpack 6.9 was released today with three new blocks for the editor. Subscriptions, Related Posts, and Tiled Galleries are now available as blocks under Jetpack in the block inserter tool. The most exciting thing for both Related Posts and the Subscription form is that they can now be placed anywhere within post or page content…
Google has launched a new educational site at opensource.dev that offers a succinct and approachable introduction to open source software and licensing. WordPress is cited as one of the more well-known examples in the opening paragraphs: It’s in your phone, your car, your TV, and your wifi-connected light bulbs. Open source components enable engineers to…
Elementor has acquired Layers WP, a WordPress site builder that was previously marketed as an all-in-one theme solution for getting a business online. Layers co-founders David and Marc Perel identified Gutenberg as the main reason for the sale in their farewell announcement: With the arrival of Gutenberg we realized that a big change was required…
WordPress 5.1 will replace the “Happy blogging” language in wp-config-sample.php with “Happy Publishing.” The next major release also cleans up a few other “blog” references by replacing them with the word “site.” A lot of tutorials and documentation will need to be updated. WordPress contributors are continuing to fine-tune the wording in various files to…
GitHub users no longer have to pay to keep code private. The company is now offering unlimited private repositories to Free account users, with up to three collaborators. Developers have different reasons for wanting to keep their code private – it may not be ready, they may be working on a side project, or may…
The WordPress Governance Project is a new community initiative, led by Rachel Cherry and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, that will host its first meeting Tuesday, January 15 2019. The purpose of the project is to address two objectives: The governance of the WordPress open source project and its various community components, and WordPress’ role in the governance…
At WordCamp US I had the opportunity to chat with Beaver Builder co-founder Robby McCullough about how the page builder is navigating the Gutenberg era. The proliferation of blocks for the new editor has made it easy for non-technical WordPress users to add things like pricing tables, maps, tabs, accordions, and other UI elements. Future…