Yoast SEO 4.5 was released today with a handful of improvements and, most notably, a big push for users to upgrade to PHP 7. “In Yoast SEO 4.5, we are urging site owners whose sites run on servers with an outdated version of PHP to update to a more recent version,” Joost de Valk said.…
Last week Steve Burge and the team at PressShack released PublishPress, a fork of Automattic’s Edit Flow plugin. PressShack is operated by the same team behind OSTraining with a focus on creating publishing plugins for larger organizations. Edit Flow has more than 10,000 active installs but is updated sporadically and is not very well supported.…
Over the course of a year, WordCamps take place nearly every weekend. Although you can view upcoming events on WordCamp Central, a relatively new plugin exist that enables you to see upcoming WordCamps on the WordPress Dashboard. It’s called WordCamp Dashboard Widget developed by Ajit Bohra. Once activated, a new widget appears on the dashboard…
Big changes are on the way for WooCommerce. Mike Jolley, lead developer of WooCommerce, announced that WooCommerce 2.7 will be versioned 3.0.0 with a scheduled release date of April 4th. During the 2.7 beta testing phase, the team discovered a significant bug in the way that timestamps are handled. “Essentially, some developers need a way…
Three years ago Google introduced its new reCAPTCHA v2 API, replacing distorted text challenges with a simple “I’m not a robot” checkbox for validating users. This was a welcome improvement over the fuzzy text in a box that frustrated and infuriated real humans. reCAPTCHA v1 is no longer supported as of May 2016 and most…
Google announced that it is retiring its official Adsense plugin, previously known as the Google Publisher plugin. For the past three years it has allowed WordPress users to easily add Adsense ads to their sites, enable mobile-specific ad layouts, and manage ads with a point-and-click interface. “After reviewing the AdSense Plugin for WordPress, we’ve decided…
NRKbeta, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s media and technology site, is experimenting with a new way of keeping comments on topic. A new plugin on the WordPress-powered site aims to ensure commenters have read the article by requiring them to complete a short, three-question quiz before opening the comment form. Visitors who get the questions wrong…
Slavco Mihajloski, security researcher at Sucuri, has discovered a critical SQL injection vulnerability in NextGEN Gallery, a popular WordPress plugin that’s active on more than a million sites. Mihajloski gives the vulnerability a 9 out of 10 on Sucuri’s DREAD scale. Dread stands for Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, and Discoverability. Each category receives a score between 0…
When we wrote about why plugins sometimes disappear from the WordPress plugin directory, it generated a healthy discussion in the comments. One of the topics of discussion brought up is whether or not users should be notified when a plugin disappears and if so, how? Currently, when a plugin is hidden on the directory, users are not…
Nearly 50K publicly available plugins call the WordPress plugin directory home but once in awhile a few of them seem to disappear. There is usually a good reason for why this happens but the only information available to the public is a page that says the plugin cannot be found. If the plugin is popular…
WP Super Cache is a nearly 10-year-old plugin that is maintained by Donncha Ó Caoimh and is actively installed on more than a million sites. Releases have been far and few between, but Ó Caoimh has released WP Super Cache 1.4.9 that patches cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities on the settings page. “Those pages are only accessible by admin…
Postmatic is rebranding its WordPress.org Postmatic Basic plugin as Replyable and pushing the two-way email commenting feature into a new SaaS product. After discovering that many users simply want email commenting, without additional post delivery and newsletter features, Postmatic launched Replyable to offer this starting at $3/month. “Replyable was born out of user feedback,” founder…
Daily blogger and plugin author Tom McFarlin has found a new maintainer for five of his WordPress.org plugins. Within two days of putting the plugins up for adoption, McFarlin announced that Philip Arthur Moore will be taking over Category Sticky Post, Comment Tweets, Single Post Message, Tag Sticky Post, and Tipsy Social Icons. Moore, who…
WordPress core doesn’t make it easy to edit text strings, but a little plugin called Say What? has been quietly gaining a solid user base by providing this functionality. It allows users to edit text strings without editing WordPress core or plugin code. Lee Willis released Say What in 2013, but the plugin had a…
One of the first things I recommend users do after installing WordPress is to either close user registration or install a plugin that protects the site against spam registrations. A friend of mine recently started a new WordPress site that has BuddyPress installed. After two weeks, I chipped in to help him out and discovered…