When WP Rocket entered the market three years ago, the product was positioned against established solutions like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, Hyper Cache, and a raft of other free plugins. WP Media, the product’s parent company, was the first to explore a completely commercial model of monetizing a WordPress caching plugin, with no…
Fans of artist Dennis Cooper are concerned about Google’s mysterious removal of his 14-year-old blog approximately two weeks ago. Cooper, a novelist and performance artist known for his controversial subject material, fears that Google may be censoring his work but hasn’t received an explanation. After contacting Google via multiple channels, Cooper received a statement about…
Codeable.io, an outsourcing marketplace for WordPress projects, announced a new partnership with Automattic today, along with a share buyback from some of the company’s early investors. Tomaž Zaman and Per Esbensen bootstrapped the company for the first couple of months after founding it in 2012, prior to receiving a $75K investment from three business angels.…
WordPress 4.6 will introduce some exciting updates that give plugin and theme authors a standardized way of registering metadata. This refers to the additional data that is attached to WordPress’ main content types (posts, users, and comments), which users often interact with via custom fields or metaboxes when editing posts. Anytime WordPress can standardize an…
Last year the WordPress Stats page was updated to provide more sophisticated methods of collecting and processing the data, causing some dramatic shifts in the data reported. As of last week, the pie charts have been redesigned to display that information with a more pleasant color scheme and new data for languages is now available…
Last week, Dan Cameron, creator of Sprout Invoices, received an email from the WordPress.org plugin review team stating that his plugin was in violation of the repository guidelines. Sprout Invoices was promptly removed from the directory and all of its 5-star reviews were also removed. Cameron had been discounting the professional license of his plugin…
Jetpack 4.1 was released today with performance improvements that make calls to the database more efficient, reducing what Jetpack does on each page load. Slideshows should load faster now that the Carousel module has been tweaked to no longer load full-size images in the previous and next previews. Using Photon in dev mode has also…
During the week following WordCamp Europe 2016, session videos from the event started trickling onto WordPress.tv. The uploading is complete and every single session recording is now available. One of the most unforgettable pieces of swag from the event was a 15-page coloring book that includes wapuus and illustrations designed around this year’s WCEU theme.…
The Bulgarian government has just passed an amendment to its Electronic Governance Act that mandates all custom software created for the government must be open source. The amendment was voted on in the Bulgarian parliament and put into effect July 1, 2016. According to Bozhidar Bozhanov, a 27-year-old software engineer and advisor to the deputy…
When Adii Pienaar, Magnus Jepson, and Mark Forrester created WooThemes in 2008, they never envisioned a future where the lion’s share of the company’s revenue would be derived from e-commerce. After establishing WooThemes as a major player in the WordPress themes marketplace, the company’s founders launched WooCommerce with the goal of increasing revenue by selling…
The WordPress Theme Review Team published an action plan today, summarizing the team’s consensus on moving forward to address bottlenecks in the review process. The queue is currently backed up with hundreds of themes waiting to be approved. “The Theme Review Team is aware that we currently have problems,” Tammie Lister said before introducing the…
If your job involves working with WordPress, you probably switch between front and backend countless times every day while getting things done. Kellen Mace, a developer at WebDevStudios, has just released a handy Google Chrome Extension that will save you a few clicks while switching back and forth. WordPress Admin Switcher offers a keyboard shortcut…
During a recent NerdWallet hackathon, WordPress plugin developer Mickey Kay and his colleague John Lee came up with an idea for creating a visual archive for the site’s content that would allow them to look back at previous versions and associate SEO and performance shifts with content changes. WordPress powers a large portion of NerdWallet…
If you missed out on attending WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna or were not able to attend all the sessions you wanted to see, check out the raw livestream feeds now available on the event’s website. Each day’s sessions are broken down into recordings for morning and afternoon, separated by track: Track 1 Livestream Track…
For the past few months, members of the WordPress Meta team have been hard at work redesigning the WordPress Plugin Directory. That’s why I was surprised to hear a rumor that the project was shut down. I reached out to Konstantin Obenland, WordPress core contributor, who confirmed a number of items. The first is that…