This past weekend, 250 professionals gathered in Phoenix, Arizona for Pressnomics, a three-day event focused on entrepreneurship in the WordPress economy. During the last day, attendees had the opportunity to watch Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel interview Matt Mullenweg. Although the session wasn’t recorded, the audience tweeted out the highlights of the interview, and discussion continued…
Life on the internet is full of controversial debates, people with strong opinions, and trolls, occasionally mixed in with intelligent, engaging conversation. You never know what you will encounter when you venture into the comments section on blogs with open discussion enabled, but that’s the beauty of free expression. The Tavern has always been a…
WP Chat is currently hosting an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session with Justin Tadlock, founder of Theme Hybrid and co-author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Tadlock recently joined forces with fellow WordPress.org Theme Review team member Emil Uzelac to provide theme review as a service. Leland Fiegel, founder of WP Chat, invited Tadlock as the…
Customers who have been following the Pressable Status blog received no reassurance this week regarding the current outage. The Pressable team is currently working around the clock to resolve the issues causing customer websites to go down. The status blog states: “We do not currently have and will not likely provide an ETA in this…
HeroPress is a new WordPress community initiative with a Kickstarter campaign, created by Topher DeRosia, a developer for XWP. Its mission is to “develop the WordPress heroes of the world by sharing the accumulated wisdom of the community.” While looking for a way to give back to the WordPress community, DeRosia spoke with hundreds of…
The PageLines and Platform drag-and-drop themes for WordPress have recently been patched for a privilege escalation vulnerability and a remote code execution issue discovered by Sucuri during a routine audit. Sucuri is classifying the vulnerabilities as high risk, with a DREAD score of 9/10, and recommends that users update their copies of the themes as…
One of the most unique sessions I attended at WordCamp Europe 2014 was Yana Petrova’s presentation on Depression in IT – Why Sometimes Happiness Requires Effort. Petrova, a marketing expert and long-time food blogger, is a member of both the WordPress community and the larger tech community in Bulgaria. She has also worked as an…
Research and analyst firm, RedMonk, released its programming language rankings for January 2015. RedMonk looks at programming language discussions on Stack Overflow and usage on GitHub in an effort to extract insights into potential adoption trends. The results from the analysis are not clear indications of general usage but rather, an examination of the correlation…
After experiencing a significant delay in late 2014, the folks over at SIDEKICK have launched a new website along with Composer. Composer is a tool that allows you to create visual, guided, walkthroughs. When SIDEKICK Co-founder, Ben Fox, showed off the initial demo last year, I described it as the Camtasia of WordPress. SIDEKICK has…
Kim Parsell once told me that attending WordCamp San Francisco 2014 was one of the best experiences of her life. It was her first WordCamp San Francisco and although she was unemployed at the time, she was able to attend thanks to financial assistance received from the WordPress Foundation. Knowing how much it meant to…
The Pages feature, although generated dynamically in WordPress, was designed for use with static, evergreen content. Pages have always been somewhat simpler than posts, which received a major boost to flexibility when custom post types came on the scene in version 3.0. Fredrik Forsmo, a systems developer in Stockholm, Sweden, wanted to do more with…
WP Engine Labs, in collaboration with the VVV creators at 10up, released Mercury Vagrant (HGV) today. The new open source Vagrant configuration uses HHVM to serve PHP code. It also includes the ability to run your development site using standard PHP to test against for comparison. Mercury Vagrant is useful for any WordPress developer who…
Last week, Emil Uzelac launched a new theme review service targeted at WordPress developers and companies that want their products to adhere to best practices. Just one week after launch, Justin Tadlock, a fellow member of the WordPress.org theme review team and author of the Hybrid Core framework, is joining forces with Uzelac to provide…
VersionPress, the plugin that allows you to revert changes to a site without having to restore a backup, is being released to early backers. Near the middle of 2014, VersionPress creators Borek Bernard and Jan Voráček created a crowdfunding campaign asking for $30K. The campaign started off on a rocky note, as several readers questioned…
A long-awaited update to the official WordPress Themes Directory is in progress. Contributors on the Meta team for WordPress.org are picking up speed on the effort to move the theme repository away from bbPress and into a new plugin, comprised of a custom post type for the repository package and a theme uploader. Konstantin Obenland…