Jetpack 2.9 was released today with the long-awaited Related Posts module, which was introduced on WordPress.com in early November 2013. Server resource-intensive features such as stats tracking and related posts are very difficult to accomplish in an efficient way. Jetpack’s new Related Posts module uses WordPress.com resources to do this instead, which is undoubtedly a…
WordPress.org profiles are set to get a revamp in the very near future. Jen Mylo posted yeseterday, asking for thoughts and ideas about what to incorporate into the new profiles. She will be working with Mel Choyce to design a new UI for the profile data. Mylo also initiated an effort to get speaker information…
WP Contributor Day is a new WordPress event that is coming up this weekend. It will be held Saturday, March 1st, 2014, in Manchester, England from 10:00 – 18:00. The goal is to have eight solid hours of contributors working together to improve WordPress. Jenny Wong, the organizer of the event, regularly attends the WordPress…
Recently we explored the question of whether or not a clear path for WordPress.org plugin adoption could help to lower the rate of abandonment. Some have suggested that having a standard (unofficial) adoption tag might help to bring more exposure to plugins that need a new owner. “Adopt-Me” was suggested as one possible tag for…
Bob Dunn, who’s been teaching WordPress for years, has launched an all new website dedicated to helping people learn WordPress. The new site is filled with tutorials, up to date information about WordPress, and in the near future, complimentary eBooks. I got in touch with Bob and asked him a few questions about the new…
In the old days, WordPress theme developers used to build loads of specific functionality into their themes, i.e. recipes, portfolios, testimonials, analytics, fundraising capabilities, custom post types etc. Commercial theme providers competed fiercely with one another to see who could pack the most functionality into their offerings. Many companies sought to become a one-stop-shop for…
Postcard is a new free social sharing app for iOS that landed in the app store today. The app makes it easy for you to share content from your phone to multiple social networks at once. The golden feature of this app is its “Custom Network” capability, which allows you to share to your own…
Eric Blanchard has always been a techy at heart. In 2007 he was working with the Sinton Police Department. He wanted to create a website for the department but had no idea how. After some research he started learning CSS, HTML, MySQL, and PHP with the help of a friend. Blanchard cut his teeth building…
Security company Wordfence is reporting that the large distributed brute force attack on WordPress sites is starting to subside. On the morning of February 10th, employees noticed a large increase in the volume of attacks. Their real-time activity map was showing so much activity, they had to throttle the amount of data displayed. I asked…
Stripe announced that it now supports 139 currencies in an effort to increase patrons’ ability to sell to worldwide audiences. The update allows those using Stripe to charge customers using any of the new currencies. Stripe handles the conversion and transfers funds to its patrons in their home currencies with a 2% fee added on…
WordPress.com announced that it is joining forces with other organizations and companies around the globe to protest NSA surveillance. Earlier this morning Google endorsed the USA Freedom Act, new legislation with bi-partisan authorship that calls for NSA reform. Today WordPress.com joins Google and Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cloudflare and many others in…
Joost de Valk has announced he’s acquired WPForce.com from Jonathan Dingman for an undisclosed amount. WPForce was created in 2011 as an outlet for Jonathan to share opinions and news with the WordPress community. Along with the acquisition, Joost shared details of the process he had to go through to transfer the site into his…
On February 11th, 2014, internet users around the world plan to fight back in protest against mass surveillance. The setup is similar to the protest that was held in January 2012, which helped to defeat SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation. The February 11th event is called The Day We Fight Back and the mission is:…
BruteProtect, the cloud-powered brute force attack prevention service that we wrote about back in July of 2013 has successfully closed a seed round of venture capital funding with a private angel investor in California. Jesse Friedman who previously worked for Astonish, has been hired on as the director of innovation. BruteProtect is looking to hire…
The WordPress community is a vast ecosystem of websites, forums, blogs, social media, and everything inbetween. WordPress.org is not yet suited to handle a large userbase of groups with varied interests. I call areas of the community where these groups congregate, watering holes. One example of such a place is Reddit. Casual WordPress News and…