News

  • GitHub Launches Community Forums to Connect Developers

    GitHub Launches Community Forums to Connect Developers

    GitHub launched its new community forums this week as another way for the platform’s 24 million developers to stay connected. The company built them on top of the Lithium SaaS community platform, a popular choice for enterprise customers, including Sony, Cisco, HP, Skype, Barclaycard, Symantec, Google, and PayPal. The first iteration of the forums includes…

  • Gutenberg 1.6 Improves Writing Experience, Moves Block Toolbar to the Top of the Editor

    Gutenberg 1.6 Improves Writing Experience, Moves Block Toolbar to the Top of the Editor

    The Gutenberg plugin’s Halloween release (version 1.6) includes major updates to the writing experience and many performance improvements. The block toolbar has been relocated to the top of the editor, a suggestion that was mocked up and described in detail in a post on the Yoast SEO blog proposing an alternative approach for Gutenberg. Prior…

  • Scotch School Offers Free Course on Getting Started with JavaScript for Web Development

    Scotch School Offers Free Course on Getting Started with JavaScript for Web Development

    The Scotch School, a developer resource with video training and tutorials, is offering its Getting Started with JavaScript for Web Development course for free through the end of this week. If you’re just now getting started on your journey to learning JavaScript deeply, this 23-lesson video course from Chris Sevilleja offers a quick foundation on…

  • GDPR for WordPress Project Seeks to Provide a Standard for Plugin Compliance

    GDPR for WordPress Project Seeks to Provide a Standard for Plugin Compliance

    WordCamp Denmark organizer Kåre Mulvad Steffensen and WP Pusher creator Peter Suhm are working on a GDPR for WordPress project that aims to provide an industry standard for getting plugins compliant with EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation. The deadline for compliance is May 28, 2018, approximately 200 days from now. The Danish duo…

  • New Dispensary Details Plugin for WooCommerce Adds Cannabis Details to Products

    New Dispensary Details Plugin for WooCommerce Adds Cannabis Details to Products

    Two years ago, WordPress developer Robert DeVore launched WP Dispensary, a free marijuana dispensary menu plugin for WordPress, and has since built an accompanying theme, additional free add-ons, and six commercial extensions. DeVore is aiming to make WP Dispensary a complete online menu software solution for dispensaries and delivery services. The business has grown enough…

  • Patreon Launches App Directory and Free WordPress Plugin for Membership Sites

    Patreon Launches App Directory and Free WordPress Plugin for Membership Sites

    Patreon was founded in May 2013 as a service with business tools that allow content creators to crowdfund their work through donations and subscriptions. The service is now expanding to help users connect their accounts to more third-party tools that make patron management easier. Patreon launched its new App Directory and Developer Portal today, featuring…

  • WordPress 4.9 Will Support Shortcodes and Embedded Media in the Text Widget

    WordPress 4.9 Will Support Shortcodes and Embedded Media in the Text Widget

    WordPress 4.8 brought TinyMCE to the core Text widget, along with brand new Image, Video, and Audio media widgets. The upcoming 4.9 release builds on this progress and will introduce some long-awaited improvements to Text widget. Users will finally be able to use shortcodes in the Text widget without the help of additional code from…

  • Goodnight Firebug

    Goodnight Firebug

    Twitter is lighting up with sentimental Firebug remembrances today after Mozilla announced it will reach end-of-life in the Firefox browser next month. Firebug was the first browser-based tool that allowed developers to easily inspect HTML and debug JS. It was discontinued as a separate add-on and merged into Firefox DevTools in 2016 where it will…

  • WooCommerce Retires Canvas Theme, Recommends Customers Migrate to Storefront Theme

    WooCommerce Retires Canvas Theme, Recommends Customers Migrate to Storefront Theme

    WooCommerce is retiring its Canvas Theme after seven years. Canvas was one of the most innovative themes on the market when it first launched in 2010, giving customers the ability to modify their sites’ design and layout through an extensive options panel. It sold for $99 before the product URL was redirected to a retirement…

  • Gutenberg 1.5 Adds Initial Support for Meta Boxes, Makes Gutenberg the Default Editor

    Gutenberg 1.5 Adds Initial Support for Meta Boxes, Makes Gutenberg the Default Editor

    Gutenberg 1.5 was released this morning and introduces several major changes to the plugin. This version takes the new editor off the back burner and makes it the default for creating new posts. The team has also included a way for users to create posts with the Classic Editor, but this requires knowing where to…

  • Facebook is Testing a “Pay to Play” Requirement for Publishers in the News Feed

    Facebook is Testing a “Pay to Play” Requirement for Publishers in the News Feed

    Last week Facebook began rolling out its new Explore feed, which is now available for users globally on both desktop and mobile. The new Explore feed encourages discovery by including posts from people and pages that the user doesn’t follow. Over the weekend, Filip Struhárik, a journalist and editor at Denník N, published data from…

  • Postman SMTP Plugin Forked after Removal from WordPress.org for Security Issues

    Postman SMTP Plugin Forked after Removal from WordPress.org for Security Issues

    In early October the popular Postman SMTP plugin was removed from WordPress.org due to security issues. The plugin had not been updated in two years and also contained a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that was made public in June and left unfixed. The security researcher’s attempts to contact the plugin’s author, Jason Hendriks, were…

  • Camp Press is Coming to Iceland April 19 – 22, 2018

    Camp Press is Coming to Iceland April 19 – 22, 2018

    The next installment of Camp Press will be held in Iceland at the Volcano Huts located in Húsadalur Valley in the Þórsmörk Nature Reserve April 19 – April 22, 2018. It will be the first time a Camp Press event will be held in Europe. The Camp Press organization was founded to help attendees detox…

  • AMP Project Turns 2,  Automattic Partners with Google to Improve WordPress Plugin

    AMP Project Turns 2, Automattic Partners with Google to Improve WordPress Plugin

    Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project is two years old today and the company published data demonstrating its growing adoption across the web. More than 4 billion AMP pages have been published by 25 million domains. AMP performance has also increased and Google reports that the median time for loading AMP pages from its search…

  • Google Chrome v62 Adds Support for OpenType Variable Fonts, Expands HTTP Warnings

    Google Chrome v62 Adds Support for OpenType Variable Fonts, Expands HTTP Warnings

    Google Chrome version 62 was pushed to the stable channel for Windows, Mac, and Linux today and will be rolling out to users over the next few days. The browser is continuing to put the pressure on website owners to migrate to HTTPS. As expected from the roadmap laid out earlier this year, a “Not…