Nick Haskins launched Story.am earlier this year as a hosted storytelling platform that offers all the features of Aesop Story Engine. Initially, the platform was only available to paying customers, but this week Haskins announced that Story.am is now available to everyone for free. The platform had not received much feedback in the several months…
WordPress 4.2 “Powell” has arrived and is now ready for download. It is named for Earl Rudolph “Bud” Powell, an American jazz pianist. This release, led by 10up engineer Drew Jaynes, offers a balanced mix of front-facing features that users will enjoy, as well as improvements for developers. Here is a tour of the highlights.…
The fame of wapuunk has spread far and wide and now fans of the creature can purchase t-shirts in the WordPress Swag Store. The punk Wapuu was created for WordCamp London 2015 by Scott Evans with collaboration from the event’s organizing team. The mascot was so well-received that Evans’ colleagues urged him to see if…
The WordPress Theme Review team made a major decision this week to enforce the use of the native customizer on new themes submitted to the directory. Theme authors who want to include customization options will no longer be able to create their own settings panels but will be required to follow the new customizer standard,…
Earlier this week, one of the largest coordinated efforts between WordPress plugin authors, Sucuri, and the WordPress security team resulted in a number of popular plugins receiving security updates. Due to inaccurate information within the WordPress codex, a number of developers improperly assumed the add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions would properly escape user input. When combined,…
Open source software makes up the vast majority of licensed code hosted on GitHub, as one of the primary features of the site is code sharing and collaboration. In of April 2015, GitHub reported 9.2 million users collaborating across 21.8 million repositories. For the past seven years since the site’s launch, one of the most…
The Array theme shop, founded by Mike McAlister, is celebrating one year since becoming a completely independent operation. Array, formerly known as Okay Themes, pulled out of Envato’s marketplace last April to rebrand and relaunch with the freedom to further build the business. At that time, McAlister said, “After fighting the good fight for five…
Cloudup, the file storage and sharing service acquired by Automattic in 2013, has refreshed its web interface. Many of the changes are subtle and place more emphasis on your content. Stats and FAQ links have been moved under the account menu. On the desktop and mobile versions of the site, the add new file button…
If you follow WordPress topics on Quora, you may have noticed a popular question making the rounds regarding security. The question has been viewed more than 30,000 times: I am powering a bank’s website using WordPress. What security measures should I take? Ordinarily, such a question is a magnet for trollish responses and uninformed WordPress…
Last week WooCommerce announced that the plugin had passed 7 million downloads and the WordPress.org plugin directory reports that it is currently in use on over a million websites. WooCommerce is not only head of the pack when it comes to WordPress e-commerce solutions, the plugin is also the global leader among e-commerce platforms. According…
The mobile developers behind WordPress for Android released version 3.9 today on Google Play. The app now supports two-factor authentication without the need for application passwords. In the past, WordPress mobile apps required an extra step wherein you would generate a unique password for the app on each of your mobile devices. This release eliminates…
WPSessions founder Brian Richards announced a radical shift in his pricing structure this week. The site was launched two years ago to provide developer education through videos that allow customers to learn from WordPress experts. Live events are now 100% free for everyone to attend, and the price of the recorded sessions has been reduced…
Have you ever wondered what it takes to support a WordPress plugin with a million active users? At the beginning of 2015, Matt Mullenweg highlighted Jetpack as one of the most important tools in helping WordPress remain competitive and preventing the decline of its market share. The team surrounding Jetpack is laser focused on adding…
Last November the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Let’s Encrypt, a new free and open certificate authority for the public. The initiative aims to make trusted certificates available to anyone at no cost. The idea behind Let’s Encrypt is to transition as many domains as possible from HTTP to HTTPS by providing a virtually painless one-click…
Stack Overflow has released the results of its 2015 developer survey, which covers a wide range of topics including preferred programming languages, education, compensation, and even caffeine consumption. The 45-question survey ran for just two weeks in February and the site was able to collect results from more than 26,000 participants. Obviously, Stack Overflow survey…