After two years in business, Jami Gibbs is selling Rescue Themes. The niche theme shop specializes in products for nonprofits, politics, breweries, and e-commerce websites. Gibbs did not publicly disclose how much revenue the shop is generating, but Rescue Themes has seven products available on Themeforest ranging in price from $16-$59. She also has several…
During the 2015 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg highlighted Bluehost‘s recent efforts to update its customers’ outdated WordPress sites. After finding that 80% of their WordPress installations were not on the latest version, Bluehost wrote a Perl script that uses WP-CLI to update sites, even those running on versions as old as 1.0.2.…
The call for volunteers for WordCamp Europe closed this week and organizers announced that they have assembled a team of more than 100 people to help run the event. The 130 applicants represent 33 countries from Europe and beyond, with the highest numbers from the United States, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, and Romania. The event…
The WP REST API team released version 2 beta 12 today. Daniel Bachhuber highlighted the breaking changes in the release that developers will want to digest before updating. This includes the removal of meta endpoints from the primary plugin into its own feature plugin, now available on WordPress.org. In a comment on our coverage of…
Over the weekend, discussion continued surrounding the direction of the WP REST API, as both Matt Mullenweg and Ryan McCue took to their WordPress blogs to clarify statements from last week’s status meeting. Differences of opinion are driving a heated debate about what constitutes a goalpost for the API’s readiness for core. In a post…
During yesterday’s pivotal WP REST API meeting, WordPress contributors discussed adoption of the API. A cursory search of the WordPress.org plugin directory shows that fewer than two dozen plugins are currently using the API scaffolding included in WordPress 4.4. For reference, here are the 20 plugins identified by Mika Epstein during the meeting, along with…
The WP REST API team met yesterday in the #core-restapi Slack channel to discuss the status of the existing post, term, user, and comment endpoints. There are a few outstanding issues with these four core objects, which the team wants to tackle via a feature plugin approach instead of holding the API back from merge.…
When people ask the question, “Can WordPress scale?” they are often pointed to some of the largest websites running on WordPress, such as Time Magazine, TechCrunch, NBC Sports, Playstation, the New York Observer, and others. But how do you get there and what does it take to deliver WordPress at scale to millions of visitors?…
With all of the design improvements to the plugin and theme screens in recent WordPress releases, the experience of updating extensions started to feel clunky and disjointed. The Shiny Updates feature plugin was created to hide what project contributors refer to as the “The Bleak Screen of Sadness.” WordPress users received a small taste of…
Last weekend more than 200 developers gathered in London for a niche conference devoted to the WordPress REST API. A Day of REST featured speakers from around the world who are building applications with the REST API at companies like WIRED, The New York Times, Fusion, Automattic, and Bocoup. “The conference was a fantastic proof…
One of WordPress’ greatest strengths is that it’s free to download and use. This makes it an excellent choice for nonprofit organizations that have a small budget. Nonprofits that can’t afford a developer to maintain their sites may opt to run it on their own. Managing a WordPress site requires a basic understanding of how…
Jack Slingerland started hacking on WordPress in 2008, but recently his career has taken him a bit further afield from it than he would like. By day he is a Senior Software Engineer at CA Technologies in Raleigh, working in React/Redux, Node, ElasticSearch, Grails, and Groovy. But at night he is busy building Kernl, a…
I know a lot of people in the community who got their start answering questions in the WordPress support forums. It’s one of the easiest ways to contribute back to the project without having to touch code. If you’re interested in helping others in the support forums, check out the first global contributor drive on January…
Arūnas Liuiza, like many other WordPress developers, prefers to develop his plugins on GitHub, thanks to the collaborative tools for issue tracking, merging, and pull requests. Hosting and developing open source projects on GitHub is much easier than trying to get any participation from the community via a plugin’s Subversion repo on WordPress.org. For these…
WordPress.org is getting some love in 2016. In addition to a beautifully redesigned login page, the testimonials page is in the process of being completely revamped. The update comes not a moment too soon, as the old testimonials page included entries dating back to 2003 with what are now rather humorous references to b2 and…