News

  • Pressgram to Shut Down, Development Discontinued

    Pressgram to Shut Down, Development Discontinued

    Pressgram founder John Saddington announced today that he will be shutting down the project and pulling the app from the Apple Store on September 11. The app started as a WordPress-powered photo sharing app and evolved to support all kinds of publishing platforms. Last March, Saddington dropped the social layer in favor of focusing his…

  • WordPress 4.0 Benny Now Available for Download

    WordPress 4.0 Benny Now Available for Download

    WordPress 4.0 “Benny” was released today, named for American jazz and swing musician Benny Goodman, also known as the “King of Swing.” Development for 4.0 kicked off at the end of April, led by Helen Hou-Sandí. This release includes hundreds of refinements and a few brand new features, culminating in a more polished media and…

  • WordPress Plugin Boilerplate 3.0 Released with New Community Website

    WordPress Plugin Boilerplate 3.0 Released with New Community Website

    Version 3.0 of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was released today. The open source project was started in 2011 by Tom McFarlin as a GitHub repository for storing code while he learned plugin development. Over the past three years, the boilerplate has matured beyond his expectations with the help of 39 contributors. It now has more…

  • Google Authorship is Officially Dead, WordPress Authorship Plugins are Now Obsolete

    Google Authorship is Officially Dead, WordPress Authorship Plugins are Now Obsolete

    John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, announced today that Google will be discontinuing its support for authorship in search results. We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as…

  • ProWordPress Subreddit Passes 1,000 Subscribers

    ProWordPress Subreddit Passes 1,000 Subscribers

    Earlier this year we featured the /r/ProWordPress subreddit on a post exploring various WordPress watering holes. If you’re not familiar with subreddits, they are essentially focused topics where where registered users can vote article submissions “up” or “down.” Subscribing to a subreddit allows you to hone in on specific topics where you have an interest.…

  • WP Settings Generator: Quickly Create a Custom Options Page Using the WordPress Settings API

    WP Settings Generator: Quickly Create a Custom Options Page Using the WordPress Settings API

    Yesterday we featured a plugin, created by application developer Jeroen Sormani, that clones Google Keep functionality in the WordPress dashboard. Sormani has produced a number of other interesting experiment with WordPress, including a little known tool for generating WordPress settings. The WP Settings Generator is a tool for plugin and theme developers. It generates a…

  • Jason Schuller Shares His Experience Running a WordPress Theme Business

    Jason Schuller Shares His Experience Running a WordPress Theme Business

    Jason Schuller who was the previous owner of Press75.com, has published a great post detailing his experience of running a WordPress commercial theme business from 2008-2014. While Schuller describes a variety of ups and downs he encountered while running the business, I thought his reasoning for losing his way in 2010 was fascinating. As WordPress…

  • Matt Mullenweg Hosts Impromptu Q&A Session On Facebook

    Matt Mullenweg Hosts Impromptu Q&A Session On Facebook

    WordPress co-creator, Matt Mullenweg, stopped by the Advanced WordPress Facebook group and participated in a WordPress edition of ask me anything. After receiving a warm welcome from the group, Mullenweg outlined what types of questions he would answer. Once the gates were opened, the questions started pouring in. Here are a few of my favorites…

  • WP Tech Event Will No Longer Be a WordCamp

    WP Tech Event Will No Longer Be a WordCamp

    WP Tech is “breaking up with WordCamp,” according to co-organizer Willy Bahuaud. The developer-centric event, previously called WordCamp Nantes WP Tech, is set to be held at the end of November and was welcomed as France’s second official WordCamp. During the course of working with WordCamp Central, the organizers decided to opt out of keeping…

  • Automattic Acquires Parka LLC, The Creators Of BruteProtect

    Automattic Acquires Parka LLC, The Creators Of BruteProtect

    The parent company of BruteProtect, Parka, LLC has been acquired by Automattic for an undisclosed amount. BruteProtect is a service providing brute force login protection for thousands of WordPress sites. The BruteProtect plugin will be phased out and rolled into Jetpack and will  remain free to use. The services offered by BruteProtect pro are now…

  • Gitter: A New Communication Service For GitHub Projects

    Gitter: A New Communication Service For GitHub Projects

    Gitter.im is a new service that provides free and private chat rooms for open source projects on GitHub. It integrates with issue tracking, supports markdown, notifications, and has an activity feed featuring multiple third-party integrations. In order to use Gitter, you’ll need to sign in using your GitHub account. As you can see from the…

  • Helen Hou-Sandí Previews WordPress 4.0 at NYC Meetup

    Helen Hou-Sandí Previews WordPress 4.0 at NYC Meetup

    WordPress 4.0 release lead Helen Hou-Sandí recently gave an in-depth preview of the upcoming release at the WordPress NYC Meetup. Her presentation gives a complete overview of the new features that you will see in the official release next week. Part of Hou-Sandí’s responsibility as the release lead is to help shape the scope, goals…

  • Free WordPress Superuser Training Course from WordPress.com VIP

    Free WordPress Superuser Training Course from WordPress.com VIP

    The folks at WordPress.com VIP are continuing to add to Documattic, a repository dedicated to sharing presentations and resources with the WordPress community. While the repository already contains some solid resources for WordPress in enterprise and government, today’s addition may have the widest reach, as it pertains to user education. The WordPress.com VIP Superuser Training…

  • Updates to VaultPress Result In 25%-90% Faster Restore Builds

    Updates to VaultPress Result In 25%-90% Faster Restore Builds

    VaultPress has announced that a recent update to their backup systems have reduced the time required to build restore files by anywhere from 25%-90%. Before the change, VaultPress stored each SQL row in a separate file in its replicated file system which slowed down restore times. Before the VaultPress update, we were storing each SQL…