Display Widgets, a plugin with more than 200,000 active installs, has been removed from WordPress.org due to its authors inserting malicious code. SEO consultant David Law was the first to bring this issue to the attention of the plugin team after discovering that Display Widgets was inserting content into sites from external servers and also…
WordPress.org introduced a new feature for plugin pages this week that highlights official support representatives. Plugin authors can now find the UI for adding support reps under the Advanced View on the plugin page. Unlike the contributors and developers role, individual support reps do not have commit access and do not appear on the plugin…
“The Final Word” is a new plugin that extends O2 to highlight a comment at the top of a thread. O2 is the plugin successor to P2, Automattic’s group blogging theme that introduced quick posting from the front page with real-time comment updates. The code was released on GitHub in 2015 and it powers the…
Gutenberg contributors continue marching forward this week on their relentless drive to improve the usability of the controversial new editor that will ship with WordPress 5.0. Meanwhile, discussions about Gutenberg’s timing, implications, UI, architecture, and other aspects of the project continue across the web, as the community grapples with what this new editor will mean…
Jetpack 5.3 was released with compatibility for PHP 7.1, a task the Jetpack team has been working on since January 2017 after they received multiple reports of failures with PHP 7.1 when opcache was enabled. This interfered with XML-RPC requests and some users reported issues managing their sites from WordPress.com and connecting to third-party apps.…
Gutenberg 1.0.0 was released this week as another iteration in the beta period that will continue on with 1.1 next week. Design lead Tammie Lister said the team decided “not let numbers set expectations” and will carry on at the same pace with weekly releases. One of the most visible UI updates in version 1.0…
Although WordPress core currently maintains backwards compatibility with PHP 5.2.4+, plugin and theme authors are not required to do so. When developers include features that require more recent versions of PHP, it can break sites or cause otherwise unexpected behavior. As part of a larger effort to encourage users to upgrade their PHP versions, WordPress.org…
Wider Gravity Forms Stop Entries is a new plugin that helps website owners protect the privacy of form submissions by preventing entries from being stored in the database. The plugin was created by UK-based web developer Jonny Allbut for internal use at Wider, a company he set up for handling WordPress clients’ needs. One aspect…
Gutenberg 0.8.0 was released over the weekend with five new blocks, major improvements to existing blocks, and support for more publishing features that have been missing from the new editor’s sidebar. The release also carries out the controversial decision to remove the opt-in usage tracking code from the plugin. The new Categories block can be…
Jetpack’s Contact Form module hasn’t seen too many changes since its first release (version 1.3) in 2012. It is easily one of the most compelling features included in the plugin and has long been overdue for a refresh. Today’s 5.2 release brings major improvements to the Contact Form module. Previously, Jetpack launched the form builder…
With the right combination of plugins and events, the WordPress admin area can quickly become a confusing mess of notices. WordPress’ notification system is often abused and overused by plugin authors who want to inject upsells and announcements into the admin. These can stack up like a pile of junk mail vying for users’ attention…
Gutenberg 0.6.0 was released over the weekend with significant changes to the way paragraphs are created within text blocks. In previous versions of the plugin, pressing enter would create a line break inside a paragraph. This release modifies the behavior of the text/paragraph block to split the block when a user presses enter. (Line breaks…
Contributors to the Customize Snapshots feature plugin are steadily building a UI for managing Customizer changesets using the changesets infrastructure added in WordPress 4.7. Version 0.6.0 of the plugin was released this month with an expanded interface for managing the complexities of multi-user editing in the Customizer. The previous version of Customize Snapshots already supported…
Eight years ago, Justin Tadlock moved back home to Alabama and was living in the spare bedroom of his grandparents’ house with nothing more than a laptop and a suitcase. Over the course of a few months he started going deeper into learning about writing WordPress plugins and produced Members, a role management plugin for…
In the two years since WP Rollback launched on WordPress.org, the plugin has racked up more than 30,000 active installations with nearly all 5-star reviews. It allows users to roll back any WordPress.org plugin or theme to a previous version with just a few clicks and also supports beta versions of plugins. It’s easy to…