Katie Keith, CEO of Barn2, announced that Kestrel has acquired seven plugins from her company for an undisclosed amount. She had tweeted about her plans to sell the plugins back in January to focus on the more profitable plugins. This is Kestrel’s first acquisition. Kestrel is a new venture by the former co-founders of SkyVerge…
Elementor, the most popular website builder plugin for WordPress with more than 5 million active installations, has announced major changes coming to the features included in its Elementor Pro Essential subscription plan. The plan will still include the Theme Builder along with access to 50+ Pro widgets, basic marketing tools, and the Form widget, but…
WordPress’ Performance team is proposing merging Performant Translations into core in time for the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release. After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translations can significantly impact server response times, the team discussed various solutions and landed on one that requires no configuration from users. More than 2,000 WordPress sites have tested…
Jetpack 12.8 was released this week, introducing Jetpack Creator, a new product under the Growth category that sits alongside the recently launched Newsletter product. Jetpack Creator is aimed at users who want to monetize their content and subscribers. It supports e-books, courses, paid newsletters, advertising, paywalled access, and other content monetization options. The market size…
Adam Schweigert, an independent media and technology consultant, has released a plugin called Newspack Plugin Update Checker that enables self-hosted Newspack users to keep their plugins up-to-date. The Newspack project was launched in 2019 by WordPress.com, with support from the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, and The Lenfest Institute. It provides local news organizations…
Nick Diego, a developer advocate at Automattic and core contributor, is the author of the popular Icon Block plugin that enables users to add custom SVG icons and graphics to the WordPress block editor. He is often asked if the plugin can add icons to the core Button block, but that is outside the scope…
TaxoPress, a plugin that allows users to create and manage Tags, Categories, and taxonomy terms, has joined a growing number of WordPress products using AI to innovate and enhance user experience. The latest release adds support for OpenAI and IBM Watson to auto-detect the best taxonomy terms for content. “Honestly, I’m amazed how good these services are,” TaxoPress…
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin, used on more than four million WordPress sites, has patched an XSS vulnerability in version 5.7. The plugin provides all-in-one site acceleration capabilities, server-level caching, and a collection of optimization features. It is compatible with WordPress multisite, and popular plugins like WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO, which may contribute to its…
The Ollie block theme, created by Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner, now has a companion plugin available called Ollie Dash. The theme made headlines earlier this month after a contentious WordPress.org review process led its authors to remove the innovative onboarding features. Ollie was approved for WordPress.org but without the time-saving onboarding features its authors…
Last week WordPress meta contributors implemented a “Live Preview” button for plugins in the official directory, with the intention of allowing users to safely test any plugin in one click. The button went live across all of WordPress.org’s 59,000+ plugins but took plugin developers by surprise as it was pushed through without any communication or…
WordPress developer Corey Maass has sold his Social Link Pages plugin to Matthaus Klute, an independent WordPress consultant and developer with Alpha Particle. It’s another story of small plugins changing hands, where developers get the opportunity to test ideas and business models. Even the most modest creations have value in a thriving marketplace where business…
When WordPress contributor and developer Nick Diego released version 3.0 of his Block Visibility plugin earlier this year in March, he made all the Pro features available in the free version, with the exception of a few that would take more time. The plugin, which is used on more than 10,000 WordPress sites, allows users to…
WordPress’ Plugin Review Team continues to dig out from under a massive backlog that has grown to 1,260 plugins awaiting review. Developers submitting new plugins can expect to wait at least 91 days, according to the notice on the queue today. “Currently there are 1,241 plugins awaiting review,” Automattic-sponsored Plugin Review team member Alvaro Gómez…
WordPress.com plugin pages have been updated to include a download link for WordPress.org plugins listed in the .com directory. These are the listings that are scraped from WordPress.org. The plugins are available for free on WordPress.org for self-hosted sites but can only be used on WordPress.com with a paid subscription. The text in the sidebar…
Citations is a new plugin created by WP Munich and the team at Luehrsen // Heinrich, a German WordPress agency. It makes it easy to create in-text citations and assign them a specific source. Most of the existing plugins that do this are for older versions of WordPress. This one is created specifically for those using the…