In last week’s annual State of the Word address, WordPress project lead Matt Mullenweg announced the WordPress.org photo directory. Officially, it has not yet “fully launched.” However, it is live on the site, and anyone with an account can submit their photos. Thus far, the directory has 103 submissions and are under the CC0 license.…
One of the best things about WordPress is the hundreds of ways of turning things off. There are likely dozens of plugins for disabling various items, each with its own unique set of options. No Nonsense is no different. It is a plugin that allows users to control whether they want to use over a…
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced it is implementing a new Board Member Agreement and Code of Ethics that is meant to guide members in their responsibilities, decision-making, and activities. The documents, which FSF says were “designed to help make FSF governance more transparent, accountable, ethical, and responsible,” were created as part of a six-month long…
It is literally the one thing that no one was asking for, but we can all collectively agree is kind of cool. A block-based version of the old-school Kubrick WordPress theme exists. Gutenberg lead Matías Ventura tweeted a quick video of it in action yesterday. Fellow Automattic engineer Riad Benguella had put the theme together.…
David Gwyer has been teasing ThemeGen over the last couple of weeks. It is his upcoming block theme generator app. Piece by piece, it has seemed to be coming together and could prove invaluable for theme developers. Currently, it is in beta testing. He provided me with a link to an early preview to get…
Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word address yesterday before a live studio audience in New York City. The majority of WordPress enthusiasts joined the event through the livestream on YouTube. More than 25 meetups gathered for in-person and online watch parties around the world – from Detroit, Singapore, Pakistan, and Medellín, to…
The All In One SEO plugin has patched a set of severe vulnerabilities that were discovered by the Jetpack Scan team two weeks ago. Version 4.1.5.3, released December 8, includes fixes for a SQL Injection vulnerability and a Privilege Escalation bug. Marc Montpas, the researcher who discovered the vulnerabilities, explained how they could be exploited:…
One month ago, UXL Themes released Alara. It was a theme that carried with it one bold promise: every week for the next year, users could expect a new design variation, child theme, or block pattern. And, all of this would be done on the back of the block theme system that is slated to…
The Creative Commons search engine has been rebranded to Openverse and now redirects to its new home at wordpress.org/openverse. Users will find the revamped interface maintains the ability to search the same collections, narrowing results by use case, license type, image type, file type, aspect ratio, and more. The Openverse search engine is also now…
Earlier today, version 1.0 of 10up’s Publisher Media Kit went live in the WordPress plugin directory. It is a preconfigured set of blocks and patterns for jump-starting a media kit page for small and medium-sized publications. When I first noticed the plugin, my mind immediately jumped to press kits and branding pages for businesses. Not…
A group of 30 companies that own more than 200 local newspapers have formed a coalition against Google and Facebook in a newly consolidated antitrust lawsuit, alleging the tech giants have manipulated the digital ad market to the detriment of local news. The Charleston Gazette-Mail, a small West Virginia newspaper, was the first to file…
WordPress Core Contributor Konstantin Kovshenin has released a new page caching plugin called Surge. Searching the WordPress plugin directory, you will find hundreds of caching and cache purging plugins, but this one stands out from competitors in that it requires no configuration. The plugin starts working as soon as it’s activated, and there are no…
Earlier today, Gutenberg 12.1 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. The latest release was heavy on improvements to the user experience, including a fix for the block appender layout shift, new global styles features, and improved templates list view. Theme authors also have a new flag for enabling all appearance-related tools. WordPress 5.9 was slated…
In October 2021, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) initiated a lawsuit against Vizio, an American TV manufacturer, for shipping products with copyleft licenses but refusing to provide the source code after multiple attempts at contact since 2018. The lawsuit is historic in its approach, because it focuses on consumer rights conferred by copyleft licenses and…
Gravatar is fielding questions today after “Have I Been Pwned,” a data breech checker service, tweeted “New scraped data: Gravatar had 167M profiles scraped in Oct last year via an enumeration vector. 114M of the MD5 email address hashes were subsequently cracked and distributed alongside names and usernames.“ It claims 72% of these email addresses…