The Obama Foundation launched its new WordPress-powered website today. The future presidential center, which will be located in Chicago, will manage projects both in the city and other places around the world. “More than a library or a museum, it will be a living, working center for citizenship,” President Obama said. “That’s why we want…
Jetpack is starting 2017 with a major release that is heavy on enhancements and improvements. Version 4.5 includes more than a dozen new shortcodes and widgets, along with revamped support for VideoPress. One of the most intriguing new features announced in this release, however, is the integration with WordAds, WordPress.com’s advertising program. Jetpack users are…
SiteGround is now auto-issuing Let’s Encrypt certificates for every domain hosted on its shared servers. The company has also begun issuing and installing certificates on new accounts automatically after customers register domains or direct new domains to SiteGround’s servers. This also includes add-on domains added in cPanel. The certificates are also auto-renewed as long as…
Postmatic is rebranding its WordPress.org Postmatic Basic plugin as Replyable and pushing the two-way email commenting feature into a new SaaS product. After discovering that many users simply want email commenting, without additional post delivery and newsletter features, Postmatic launched Replyable to offer this starting at $3/month. “Replyable was born out of user feedback,” founder…
Aaron D. Campbell, WordPress Core Contributor at GoDaddy, is replacing Nikolay Bachiyski as WordPress’ Security Czar or WordPress Core Security Team Lead. The role was created in 2015 to provide more structure and focus around incident responses. “The responsibilities of the position include, organizing the security team and making sure all security concerns and reports…
Yesterday Automattic released a new free plugin the makes it easy for Lightroom users to export their photos to WordPress. Lightroom is an Adobe product for managing and editing photos, and the plugin works with the software on MacOS and Windows. It is compatible with both WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites. The Lightroom plugin requires a…
For those who failed to “learn JavaScript deeply” last year, 2017 offers a clean slate for restarting your JavaScript learning goals. Wes Bos, a developer and educator known for his high quality video tutorials, recently launched a free 30-day vanilla JS coding challenge course that provides structure for developing a new habit of daily learning.…
The second edition of Karl Fogel‘s “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” is now available for download. Fogel, a partner at Open Tech Strategies and OSS contributor since 1997, was a founding developer in the Subversion project. He has worked for more than a decade as an open source…
Daily blogger and plugin author Tom McFarlin has found a new maintainer for five of his WordPress.org plugins. Within two days of putting the plugins up for adoption, McFarlin announced that Philip Arthur Moore will be taking over Category Sticky Post, Comment Tweets, Single Post Message, Tag Sticky Post, and Tipsy Social Icons. Moore, who…
After taking heat for the proliferation of “fake news” and misinformation on its platform during the US presidential election, Facebook is aiming to strengthen its ties with the news industry. “We care a great deal about making sure that a healthy news ecosystem and journalism can thrive,” Facebook director of product Fidji Simo said in…
Year In WP is a new site by Jesper van Engelen that creates a personalized review of a user’s contributions to WordPress in 2016. Entering the WordPress.org username of a plugin or theme author or a WordPress core contributor into the field generates a list of statistics that includes: Profile information Number of times their plugins and themes…
WordPress core doesn’t make it easy to edit text strings, but a little plugin called Say What? has been quietly gaining a solid user base by providing this functionality. It allows users to edit text strings without editing WordPress core or plugin code. Lee Willis released Say What in 2013, but the plugin had a…
This opinion piece was contributed by guest author Peter Suhm. Peter is a web developer from the Land of the Danes. He is the creator of WP Pusher and a huge travel addict, bringing his work along with him as he goes. Laravel Forge is a server and application provisioning tool that was originally…
Let’s Encrypt has just closed out its first full year as a certificate authority with more than 20 million active certificates. The free and open certificate authority focuses on lowering the complexity of setting up TLS encryption by making the process more automated. It came out of beta in April 2016 and the number of…
This post was contributed by guest author Taylor Lovett. Lovett is based in the Washington DC area, is the Director of Web Engineering at 10up, creator of ElasticPress, and general open source enthusiast. In February 2016, the WordPress Foundation announced the WordCamp incubator program, focused on spreading WordPress and open source values to remote…