As the WordPress customizer becomes more widely adopted by theme and plugin developers, users often have a host of live preview options to play with when personalizing their sites. Different combinations can produce wildly different designs. What if you could save a preview of customizations before going live with it? This is the idea behind…
Last month GitHub introduced issue and pull request templates in response to the “Dear GitHub” letter of complaints from open source project maintainers. The new templates let maintainers streamline contributions to be more structured and meaningful for the project. Creating issue and pull request templates could be a boring addition to your project’s task list,…
Getting a theme approved for the WordPress directory can sometimes take months, depending on the number of corrections required and reviewers available to handle the queue. As part of a larger plan to make things more efficient, the WordPress Theme Review Team is making progress towards automating many of the time-consuming checks involved in reviewing…
When Matt Mullenweg asked the audience who has used Git and/or GitHub during his 2014 State of the Word address, the response was almost unanimous. “Whoah, that’s all the hands!” he exclaimed before announcing that core contributors will soon be able to submit pull requests on GitHub. Two years later, an official patch workflow has…
The Accessibility Team announced today that the WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards have been approved for the core handbook. The team sought feedback on the draft of the guidelines earlier this year and, after a few revisions, the coding standards are out of draft status. Contributors will now be required to meet these guidelines in order…
WP Engine announced today that two-factor authentication (2FA) is now available to its 42,000 customers. The security measure will help combat increasing attempts on the host’s user portal. “As we grow, almost everything about the company changes, and security is one of them,” said WP Engine founder Jason Cohen. “For example, we see things like…
WordPress introduced oEmbed support for tweets in its 3.4 release, but recent changes to Twitter’s API requires updates to core. On May 1, Twitter will be removing the XML response format from the single Tweet oEmbed endpoint. Twitter engineer Niall Kennedy opened a ticket to change the oEmbed URL for single tweets from api.twitter.com to…
In the latest episode of Office Hours, a WordPress business podcast, host Carrie Dils interviewed Cory Miller and Pippin Williamson to discuss the importance of personal wellness. The episode is titled “Taking Care of Your Business Means Taking Care of Yourself” and the video is now available on OfficeHours.fm. Both Miller and Williamson are successful…
Stack Overflow published the results of its 2016 Developer Survey, summarizing responses from 56,033 developers in 173 countries. The 45-question survey collected answers from more than twice as many developers as the previous year. The results were published along with a disclaimer recognizing that the survey is “biased against devs who don’t speak English, or…
Fight for the Future, a non-profit organization that works to preserve freedom of expression on the web, launched its new “Save Security” campaign today in support of Apple. The FBI has requested that the company hack into an iPhone recovered from one of the terrorists involved in the San Bernardino mass shooting to assist in…
When Apple News Publisher launched in September, 2015, it partnered with 20 publishers including, ESPN, The New York Times, and CNN. Today, publishers large and small are able to sign up to Apple’s News Publisher program which delivers content from sites to devices running iOS 9 or above. Since its launch, the service has garnered…
The White House is calling for developers to comment on its proposed draft for a Government-wide Open Source Software policy. In the request for public comment, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) outlined two major goals for the new policy: This policy requires that, among other things: (1) new custom code whose…
Shopify announced today that the company is jumping into the WordPress market with a new official plugin and three WordPress themes. The Canadian company captures just 8% of the e-commerce technology market share, trailing WooCommerce (31%), Magento (19%), OpenCart (11%), Prestashop (10%), and others (13%). The new Shopify Buy Button plugin is intended for users…
The WordPress Polyglots team is planning its first ever Global Translation Day to be held April 24, 2016, in every timezone around the globe. The 24-hour translation sprint will start at dawn in the East and end in the West. In addition to translating strings, organizers are also looking to grow the translation teams and…
Last month GitHub finally responded to the open letter on issue management that has now been signed by nearly 2,000 open source project maintainers. GitHub officially apologized for the lack of communication and promised to add new features and iterate on the core experience. Shortly after acknowledging the letter, GitHub introduced templates for issues and…