Security researchers at Wordfence are reporting that thousands of hacked home routers are attacking WordPress sites. Wordfence firewall and malware scanner products are in use on more than 2 million WordPress sites and the company estimates that 6.7% of all attacks on these sites are coming from hacked home routers. (more…)
The Advanced WordPress Facebook group (AWP) is making a radical change. After three years of allowing members to post freely, the group’s administrators voted to restrict posting to admin-approved content only. The popular WordPress watering hole has amassed more than 28,000 members and plays host to many lively conversations. Over (more…)
The first ever WordCamp for Publishers will be held August 17-19 in Denver, Colorado. The niche WordCamp will be open to anyone who uses WordPress to manage a publication, no matter what size. Organizers submitted an application last November and received approval from WordCamp Central in February. A huge thanks (more…)
The WordPress Editor Experience survey results have been published with data from 2,563 participants, a significantly larger sampling than the 50 who responded to the recent customizer survey. Both the editor and the customizer are included in Matt Mullenweg’s three main focus areas for core development in 2017. The purpose (more…)
In 2014, WordPress Trac received a facelift and one of the improvements was the “good-first-bug” tag. The goal of good-first-bug tickets is to get newcomers familiar with WordPress code, processes, and contributing patches. If you’d like to be notified of new tickets created on trac tagged good-first-bug on Twitter, check (more…)
Less than three weeks ago Yoast SEO version 4.5 was released with an ugly, non-dismissible notice for sites on PHP 5.2. The notice encourages the user to upgrade to PHP 7, explaining that it is faster and more secure. It includes links for getting started and example emails that users (more…)
UK-based web developer Jeremy Keith published Resilient Web Design as a free e-book in December 2016. Over the past few months, industry leaders have been raving about the book, so I decided to take an evening to find out what all the fuss is about. Keith has been blogging for (more…)
Since the launch of the newly redesigned WordPress plugin directory, the Meta team has been hard at work fixing bugs and updating the design. The directory has undergone a series of visual updates that address some of the concerns readers expressed last week. The number of active installs, tested up (more…)
“Alexa, tell Blog Helper to create a new post called ‘Granny’s banana bread recipe.’” Imagine logging a new draft on your WordPress site using only your voice while working in the kitchen. That’s what Blog Helper, an Alexa skill, enables for WordPress.com and self-hosted Jetpack users. It is available for (more…)
Jetpack 4.8 was released this week with a settings redesign that is a continuation of the React.js-powered admin interface introduced last September. The new settings screen has been completely rearranged under a more simplified menu. “We went through every setting on WordPress.com and Jetpack to make sure it was necessary (more…)
WooCommerce 3.0 “Bionic Butterfly” was released today with significant improvements to the product gallery and developer tools. This version, which was previously going to be 2.7, is the first major release since the plugin switched to semantic versioning. It was released after more than three months in beta and an (more…)
WP-CLI has hired Alain Schlesser as a new part-time co-maintainer. The position was made possible by sponsorships from Automattic, Bluehost, DreamHost, SiteGround, WP Engine, and more than 60 individuals who contributed to the project. “With Alain joining the project as a co-maintainer, the WP-CLI project is restoring capacity to meet (more…)