Twitter announced today that it has open sourced Twemoji, a set of 872 emoji characters. This means that emoji characters tweeted from phones will now be visible on the web and will look the same across all platforms. Twitter also partnered with Automattic to bring emoji to WordPress.com, and users can start adding emoji to…
Many WordPress developers have adopted Vagrant as part of their toolbox for creating development environments, due to the fact that it’s relatively lightweight and makes collaborative work much easier. Varying Vagrant Vagrants is one of the most popular Vagrant configurations for WordPress, but there are many others out there tailored to different uses, i.e. Chassis,…
Matt Mullenweg announced today at Web Summit in Dublin that Automattic has acquired Code for the People, a UK-based WordPress development agency and longtime WordPress.com VIP partner. The acquisition adds all six members of the company, including co-founders Simon Dickson and Simon Wheatley, to the WordPress.com VIP team. “It’s a fairly natural transition for us,”…
One of the most difficult parts of running a WordPress business is coming up with a revenue strategy. In a post on the official SIDEKICK blog, Ben Fox explains that in the past two weeks, customers went through a pricing experiment with an opportunity to provide feedback. The feedback to SIDEKICK highlighted areas ripe for…
Taylor Lovett, director of Web Engineering at 10up, announced today that the company is open sourcing its engineering best practices. 10up has historically been a leader in contributing to open platforms, most notably being one of the first development agencies to sponsor an employee to work full-time on WordPress core. The company used GitHub pages…
Joseph Herbrandson of Sucuri published an excellent article listing the most common attacks today’s websites are facing. Herbrandson does a good job of explaining the attacks without inundating the reader with technical jargon. He also links to WordPress items that are relevant to each type of attack. I’ve spoken to Herbrandson at a few different…
Choosing a webhost is an important but difficult decision, especially when a lot of reviews contain questionable content with affiliate links. It’s hard to find non-biased information such as real experiences customers have had with a company. One reliable source of information is the WPShout webhosting survey. Despite a goal of 500, only 159 people…
WordPress 4.1 will be adding several major improvements for theme developers. Joost de Valk opened a ticket three years ago, requesting a better option for controlling the output of title tags. He proposed a patch that would output the title tag during the run of wp_head, based on whether the current theme has added theme_support.…
WordPress for Android 3.3 was released last week. A majority of the improvements found in this release center around enhancing WordPress.com’s built-in Reader. Android users will find a few changes in the app but nothing that would effect the normal publishing workflow: The post and the comment views are now split up in the Reader.…
Desk is a new $29 desktop publishing application for Mac OS X, developed by John Saddington, aimed at simplifying the publishing experience. Similar to WordPress’ distraction free writing mode, the interface disappears while in full screen mode. When you move the mouse cursor, interface elements appear on the right and lower part of the screen. At the…
The folks behind AppPresser, the first mobile app development framework for WordPress, generated some buzz at WordCamp San Francisco with live demos of their upcoming Reactor product. When AppPresser was launched in January, it was groundbreaking in terms of demonstrating the power of WordPress as an application platform. However, it was not as user-friendly as…
Jetpack 3.2 was quietly released yesterday with a host of new enhancements for self-hosted WordPress sites. Following up on 3.1’s total re-branding of the plugin, 3.2 comes with speed improvements and better caching for related posts. This release introduces the new ‘Site Logo’ feature that was added to WordPress.com themes in late July. The goal…
Today Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word address at WordCamp San Francisco, with roughly 1,000 WordPress enthusiasts and contributors in attendance and hundreds more watching via livestream. Before jumping into the results of the survey, Mullenweg announced that this would be the last event held at Mission Bay conference center. Touch the…
In a strategic effort to make academic journals more relevant to your average reader, JSTOR has launched an online daily magazine. The digital academic library offers full-text searches of 2,000+ journals, e-books, and primary sources. JSTOR Daily will serve to bring more context to current events by connecting readers to relevant scholarly publications found within…
Jason Schuller, the original founder of the Press75 theme company, has been off the radar for a few years as he pursued experiments with alternative publishing platforms. He officially exited the commercial WordPress theme business earlier this year when Press75 was acquired by Westwerk, following a sharp decline in the shop’s monthly revenue. Prior to…