Last week, the popular Rank Math SEO plugin received a major update that includes a new artificial intelligence system. The Content AI feature is a SaaS product that behaves like a personal writing assistant to boost search rankings. “We built Rank Math’s Content AI feature to revolutionize the content production and optimization process with proprietary…
WordPress executive director Josepha Haden Chomphosy announced today that the 2021 State of the Word will be held on December 14, between 5 and 7 pm ET/10 – 12 am (December 15) UTC. For those who are new to the WordPress community, this event is where Matt Mullenweg reviews the milestones and progress of the…
A current proposal could spell the death of at least one form of child theming. The feature would allow themes to ship multiple theme.json files, housing variations on a site’s default styles. Essentially, it is the old-school concept of “skins.” How the feature would work is not yet defined. However, theme authors would presumably be…
Gutenberg 11.9 landed on Wednesday, and it is packed with dozens of enhancements. Contributors are speeding forward, getting in some of the final features before the release of WordPress 5.9, expected on December 14. Version 11.9 is the last plugin release to include new features for the upcoming WordPress update. Bug fixes will continue to…
GoDaddy has acquired managed WordPress hosting company Pagely to expand the company’s expertise in hosting WooCommerce stores. Pagely, co-founded by Joshua and Sally Strebel, has been in business for 18 years, offering hosting for businesses and enterprises at the higher end of the managed hosting market. “We will be working closely with the amazing team…
After what seemed like a shoo-in for WordPress 5.9, a proposed web font API was put on hold. The feature would standardize how theme and plugin developers load fonts and lay the groundwork for future user-facing features. Jono Alderson opened a ticket for the feature in February 2019. In recent months, the proposal picked up…
Lemon Squeezy, a hosted e-commerce platform for selling digital products, subscriptions, and software licenses, launched a WordPress plugin. The plugin allows the platform’s customers to sell their products directly on WordPress sites. Merchants sign up, create products, and manage customers and subscribers using the Lemon Squeezy platform. Then they use the plugin to connect via…
In June, netmix® CEO Tony Zeoli began touting the release of the company’s Radio Station PRO plugin. It would offer an upgraded experience over the free version his team had maintained since 2019. At the end of last month, the company officially launched its commercial offering, a plan that had been in the works since…
Are you using post formats? Now there’s a block for that! WordPress’ post formats feature was introduced in version 3.1 as a way for themes to customize presentation of a post. It allows users to choose the way a post looks by selecting a post format from a dropdown list. WordPress has a fixed list…
WordPress’ Polyglots team has published the first edition of a new monthly newsletter aimed at helping contributors stay informed and engaged with the team’s activities. WordPress has been translated by volunteers for more than 15 years since version 1.2, with the earliest contributions from the Hindi, French, Japanese, and Norwegian communities. Since that time the…
It has been a long year since Paal Joachim Romdahl’s proposed an alternative block pattern experience. In November 2020, he opened a ticket on the Gutenberg GitHub repository to explore an overlay-based approach to viewing, searching, and inserting patterns into the content canvas. Late last week, a pull request for the long-awaited feature landed in…
The Chrome Dev Summit concluded earlier this week. Announcements and discussions on hot topics impacting the greater web community at the event included Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, improvements to Core Web Vitals and performance tools, and new APIs for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Paul Kinlan, Lead for Chrome Developer Relations, highlighted the latest product updates on…
In September, Patchstack released its six-month report on the vulnerabilities found with WordPress and its extensions. At the time, it listed over 1,000 issues — the company has shared the updated numbers with WP Tavern. It soon followed that up with a free vulnerability-reporting plugin. Under the banner of WebARX, the company launched the first…
Automattic has acquired WPScan, a ten-year-old service that provides a database for WordPress core, plugin, and theme vulnerabilities. The company has sponsored WPScan for a number of years and has already been white labeling its use in Jetpack Scan. Pricing for WPScan is based on API requests per day, with a free version limited to…
WordCamp Birmingham is the first in-person WordCamp on the schedule for 2022. The event will be held at the Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema in downtown Birmingham on February 4-5. It is one of the first cracks in WordPress’ iced over event landscape after the pandemic brought in-person gatherings to a halt. “WordCamp Birmingham was…