Automattic’s relaunch of P2 is now in Beta. This is the long-awaited update to the company’s internal collaboration software that is also used on WordPress.org and other self-hosted sites via a theme. For years, Automattic, which now counts more than 1,200 employees in 77 countries, has had P2 at the core of its written communication…
Iain Poulson announced that Plugin Rank is open to the public yesterday. It is a new service that allows plugin authors to track their rankings by keyword on the official WordPress plugin directory. The service is geared toward plugin authors with freemium offerings. The tools were already in place for Poulson to build the service.…
As the world scrambles to invent and manufacture therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19, the World Health Organization has declared the pandemic “a once-in-a-century health crisis, the effects of which will be felt for decades to come.” Outbreaks vary in severity across the globe, making it impossible to host international conferences safely for many months (and…
Samir Shah is ready to part ways with his popular Disable Comments plugin. The WordPress extension has garnered over a million users and a solid 220 five-star reviews out of 229, but its owner no longer has the time to maintain it. Rather than simply give it away or sell it for profit, he plans…
Dōvy Paukstys was rushing out another update with bug fixes yesterday morning as we chatted about the future of his popular Redux Framework. It was not the first update of the day. The Virginia-based developer is just over a week into what he has called the soft launch of Redux 4.x. It is a major…
Last week, Automattic’s marketing team made a positive step towards curbing the perennial branding confusion between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The company’s press page was updated with a notice to journalists who are writing about Automattic: Automattic owns and operates WordPress.com, which is a hosted version of the open source WordPress software with added features for security,…
A Big Orange Heart, formerly known as WP&UP, has opened its 2020 Remote Work Wellbeing and Mental Health Survey. The charity organization focuses on supporting remote working communities with education and resources for mental and physical health. It is also home to a community of more than 4,700 members who support each other in growing…
WordCamp US 2020, which was originally scheduled for October 27-29, was officially canceled today. In April, organizers transitioned to planning for it to be held as a virtual event, but the tenuous situation with the pandemic in the United States and the stress on the event’s large crew of volunteers has precipitated a full cancellation.…
Bing has launched its first official plugin for WordPress aimed at helping site owners get their content indexed immediately. Instead of waiting for a bingbot to crawl the site, the plugin notifies Bing of any new or updated content automatically using its Submit URL API. “Bing believes that the future for search engines is less about…
August 11, the target release date for WordPress 5.5, is just shy of two weeks away. For developers who have not been completely on top of the upcoming release, now is a good time to start looking at how changes might affect their projects. Theme authors in particular can expect several new features and some…
Gutenberg 8.6 landed quietly last week. Much of the focus right now is ironing out the remaining bugs for WordPress 5.5 during its beta cycle. However, that does not mean the Gutenberg project has come to a complete halt in terms of new features. The team is marching forward with extra goodies for those who…
The WordPress Community Team has officially updated its guidelines for WordCamps to be online-only events for the remainder of 2020. The six WordCamps on the schedule through the end of the year were already planning on using an online format but the guidelines also include local meetups. “The team acknowledges that this is not easy…
Riad Benguella released BlockBook, a project that promises to overhaul how developers build blocks and more, on Tuesday. It is a development environment that allows creators to work with blocks in isolation, outside of WordPress. Developers can view individual block properties and test output from a defined block library. BlockBook is available as an npm…
Concerns are mounting regarding Unsplash’s terms and image licensing after the site launched its official WordPress plugin this week. Several people commented on the restrictions and lack of clarity in the license. “The irony here is that this goes against Unsplash’s own licensing for images,” Aris Stathopoulos commented. “It’s vague and restrictive to the point…
Yesterday, Alex Shiels posted an update to the proposed guidelines for the WordPress block directory. The document adds eight rules for plugin authors to follow if they plan to add their one-off blocks to the directory. The guidelines are additional requirements on top of the existing plugin directory guidelines. While the wording and organization of…