News

  • WordPress Plugin Review Team to Add New Members

    WordPress Plugin Review Team to Add New Members

    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 5.5 Debuts New Visual Editor, Adds User Management

    WordPress for Android 5.5 Debuts New Visual Editor, Adds User Management

    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…

  • Automattic Pushes the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group Giveaway to More Than $70K in Prizes

    Automattic Pushes the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group Giveaway to More Than $70K in Prizes

    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…

  • Highlights of Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A at WordCamp Europe 2016

    Highlights of Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A at WordCamp Europe 2016

    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 Launches Free Web Accessibility Course Built by Google

    Udacity Launches Free Web Accessibility Course Built by Google

    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…

  • WP-CLI Contributors Work Towards a More Sustainable Future for the Project

    WP-CLI Contributors Work Towards a More Sustainable Future for the Project

    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…

  • Advanced WordPress Facebook Group is Giving $40K Worth of Prizes Away

    Advanced WordPress Facebook Group is Giving $40K Worth of Prizes Away

    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…

  • WordCamp US 2016 Speaker Applications Now Open

    WordCamp US 2016 Speaker Applications Now Open

    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…

  • ThinkWP Releases First Trailer of Upcoming 50-Minute Documentary on the French WordPress Community

    ThinkWP Releases First Trailer of Upcoming 50-Minute Documentary on the French WordPress Community

    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…

  • New Atom Editor Package Offers Code Snippets for WordPress Plugin and Theme Developers

    New Atom Editor Package Offers Code Snippets for WordPress Plugin and Theme Developers

    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 Fixes 7 Security Issues

    WordPress 4.5.3 Fixes 7 Security Issues

    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…

  • How Hari Ravichandran Founded Endurance International Group

    How Hari Ravichandran Founded Endurance International Group

    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.…

  • WP-CLI 0.24 Will Deprecate wp-settings-cli.php in Favor of wp-settings.php

    WP-CLI 0.24 Will Deprecate wp-settings-cli.php in Favor of wp-settings.php

    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…

  • Happy Joe Shifts Focus to Medical Marijuana Education and Workshops for Veterans

    Happy Joe Shifts Focus to Medical Marijuana Education and Workshops for Veterans

    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…