WordCamp Europe 2016 had 500 attendees sign up for contributor day, which was held on Sunday at the University of Vienna. For the first time ever, the event hosted a plugin review workshop led by Mika Epstein where attendees learned about how the repository and review system works. Epstein announced a new #pluginreview channel on…
WordPress for Android version 5.5 was released today and introduces a completely rewritten visual editor. The new editing experience offers the same styling tools as the web version of WordPress but places them in a thumb-friendly toolbar at the bottom. The visual editor is the default when you open the app to create a new…
Last week, we mentioned that the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group is giving away more than $40K worth of WordPress related prizes away to celebrate crossing the 20,000th member milestone. This past weekend, the prize value jumped to more than $70K after Automattic contributed 100 one-year long Jetpack Pro licenses to the prize pool. Jetpack Professional…
During the first day of WordCamp Europe, Brian Krogsgard interviewed Matt Mullenweg on stage before his Q&A session with the audience. Mullenweg opened up about his multi-decade vision for WordPress and spoke frankly about some of WordPress’ competitors that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising. Here are a few of the highlights.…
Udacity, an online education site, has launched a free web accessibility course built by Google. The site previously provided university-style courses, but is now focusing on its “Nanodegree programs,” offering courses and tracks created in partnership with industry leaders. The new “Web Accessibility: Developing with Empathy” course lasts for approximately six weeks and students can…
Last month Daniel Bachhuber, maintainer of WP-CLI, opened up a discussion on how to create a more sustainable future for the project. He asked users the following question: How do I reduce WP-CLI’s bus factor, and more generally lay a foundation for WP-CLI’s long-term organizational stability? The bus factor is a term sometimes used in…
In 2011, Michael Bastos created the Advanced WordPress Group on Facebook to provide a place for people to gather and discuss advanced WordPress topics. After being featured on the Tavern in the Summer of 2014, membership skyrocketed from 7,400 members to over 10,000. Nearly two years later, the group has surpassed 20,000 members. To celebrate…
BuddyPress 2.6.0 “Espejo” was released today, named for the owners of an obscure restaurant named Pizza & Subs in Rock Island, IL. Pizza & Subs is known for its excellent pizza and taco calzones, a Quad-City original. Introducing Activity Embeds One of the most visible and exciting new features of 2.6 is the ability to…
The wheels are already turning for WordCamp US 2016, which will be held in Philadelphia, PA, December 2-4. Tickets went on sale just days after the 2015 event concluded and today organizers opened speaker applications. Speakers should be prepared to present to a large audience. The inaugural WordCamp US sold 1,788 tickets and 865 people…
Deborah Donnier and Emilie Lebrun, creators of ThinkWP, are producing a 50-minute documentary to promote the WordPress community and its ecosystem in France. The team plans to interview entrepreneurs and enthusiasts in several French cities, including Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Biarritz. ThinkWP has titled its upcoming documentary “Why WordPress?” and will ask participants…
Last week we featured Ahmad Awais’ WordPress package for Sublime Text that adds a snippet-based library for creating customizer options. Yesterday WordPress developer Chris Wilcoxson published a similar package for the free and open source Atom Text editor. Atom is developed by GitHub to be a “hackable text editor for the 21st Century,” thanks to…
WordPress 4.5.3 was released today to fix seven important security issues that affect 4.5.2 and prior versions. Automatic background updates are already rolling out and all users are advised to update immediately. The release patches the following security issues: Redirect bypass in the customizer (reported by Yassine Aboukir) Two different XSS problems via attachment names…
Endurance International Group or EIG owns a number of popular webhosting companies, including Bluehost, HostGator, and A Small Orange. It’s also an investor in Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com. While I’ve read and heard a number of complaints from people in the WordPress community about EIG owned companies, I’ve never looked into how EIG started.…
For the past three years, WP-CLI has loaded a modified copy of WordPress’ wp-settings.php. The reason behind this, according to Cristi Burcă, the project’s original maintainer, is that “WordPress does several things that don’t make sense in a CLI context.” Keeping that modified copy up-to-date was a small chore, but it offered WP-CLI far more…
Earlier this year James Dalman, founder of Happy Joe, announced that he would be shutting down the non-profit organization in favor of creating a for-profit venture. Although he said he enjoyed helping veterans find employment opportunities in WordPress, Dalman cited lack of funding as the primary reason for discontinuing the non-profit. Happy Joe relaunched its…