Happytables is changing from being a platform that hosts restaurant websites to one that provides analytics and insights by tapping into apps that restaurants are already using to promote their businesses. The company uses WordPress as a command center for the application that communicates with various restaurant-tech APIs to deliver information to the dashboard in…
Yesterday GitHub announced pricing changes that give all paid plans unlimited repositories and change plans to a pricing-per-user model. Individual developers are the most likely customers to benefit from the changes, but many organizations will see an exponential increase in pricing. GitLab, a competitor in the Git repository hosting space, immediately addressed disgruntled GitHub customers…
Automattic announced today that it will begin offering top-level .blog domain registration starting in August 2016. The .blog domain extension will be available to both WordPress and non-WordPress sites. According to Mark Armstrong, an Automattic subsidiary is exclusively managing the registration of .blog domains and will be offering it for purchase through WordPress.com and other…
JetBrains announced today that it has released a security update for PhpStorm and all of its other IntelliJ-based IDEs due to a set of critical vulnerabilities: The cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw in the IDE’s built-in webserver allowed an attacker to access local file system from a malicious web page without user consent. Over-permissive CORS…
GitHub has been inundated with negative feedback after announcing a major change to its pricing today. All paid plans now include unlimited private repositories, but there’s a catch. The new pricing structure requires GitHub.com organizations to purchase a seat for each user. At $9 per user/month, collaborating on private repositories is now far more costly…
The organizers of WPCampus are seeking feedback via a survey on how schools and campuses utilize WordPress in their environments. The survey consists of five sections: How Do You Use WordPress on Campus Site Demographics, Traffic, and Data Plugins, Themes, and Features Security, Performance, and Hosting Your Team Structure & Workflows There are a couple…
When Automattic acquired WooThemes in 2015, it gained employees, plugins, themes, and the company’s trademarks. These trademarks include, standard character marks, logos, and specific graphics such as the Verified WooExpert badges. One of the responsibilities of a trademark owner is to protect it from infringement. WooGPL is a service that provides customers with commercial themes,…
Storefront, the official WooCommerce theme built to work seamlessly with the plugin, has just passed the 2.0 milestone. This release introduces a new “best sellers” section to the homepage and adds compatibility with the upcoming WooCommerce 2.6’s tabbed “My Account” section and the average rating widget. The most important update in Storefront 2.0 is the…
Last week the creators of Timber, the plugin that enables WordPress theme developers to write HTML using the Twig Template Engine, released version 1.0 on WordPress.org. The plugin is active on more than 10,000 websites where theme authors have elected to keep PHP files separate from HTML. Timber is built on DRY and MVC principles…
VersionPress 3.0, released this week, is the first version since the plugin became a free, open source project. Creators Borek Bernard and Jan Voráček, who originally attempted to crowdfund the project and then raised $400,000 in seed funding, announced last month that they are transitioning to a public development model. The team’s goal with this…
Laravel, the open source MVC PHP framework created for application development, has just released Valet, a minimalist development environment for Mac. It uses just 7mb of RAM, because it doesn’t include Vagrant, Apache, Nginx, or a /etc/hosts file. Here’s how it works: Laravel Valet configures your Mac to always run PHP’s built-in web server in…
WordPress 4.6 will bid farewell to Open Sans in the admin in favor of using system fonts. Open Sans, which loads from Google Fonts as an external resource, has been in use in the admin since 2013. “At the time of introduction in 3.8, there were not good system fonts common to all platforms at…
Earlier this year, the WordPress project made a huge move by adopting accessibility coding standards for new and updated code. If you’re struggling to meet WCAG 2.0 guidelines in your WordPress projects and need help, check out the new Accessibility section in the WordPress.org support forums. Amanda Rush, who helps WordPress developers make their themes…
Font Awesome, the open source vector icon collection used by more than 300 plugins on WordPress.org and many free and commercial themes, announced the beta release of its new CDN. Developers can now add a single line of code to bring the icons and CSS toolkit into their projects. The icon files and CSS are…
WooCommerce is the current leader in e-commerce software, capturing 31% of the market, thanks to its relatively user-friendly interface and connection to WordPress. However, setting up a WooCommerce site, or any e-commerce site for that matter, is not for the faint of heart, no matter how user-friendly the software. It requires knowledge of hosting, PCI…