Seriously Simple Podcasting, created by Hugh Lashbrooke in 2012, has been acquired by Podcast Motor. The plugin is actively installed on nearly 20K sites and out of 104 reviews, has an average rating of 4.9 stars. Lashbrooke no longer has the time to dedicate to the project, “I am in fact selling the plugin (along…
UpdraftPlus, a European company that maintains a backup plugin by the same name with nearly 1M active installs, has acquired the WP-Optimize plugin. WP-Optimize was created eight years ago by Ruhani Rabin and is actively installed on more than 500K sites. Its primary function is to clean and optimize databases. WP-Optimize will become part of…
Over the weekend, the WP eCommerce team released version 3.11.4 of its e-commerce plugin. The update patches an SQL injection vulnerability that was responsibly disclosed by Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team. According to Justin Sainton, lead developer of WP eCommerce, the team was notified of the vulnerability on November 11th and patched within…
WordPress emoji are served from s.w.org, but they are not compressed. This impacts the SVG loading time, depending on how many emoji you are using, and can even throw warnings on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Turkey-based WordPress developer Mustafa Uysal has just released Compressed Emoji, a plugin that makes use of the emoji_svg_url filter introduced…
Two months ago, revised guidelines for the WordPress Plugin Directory were opened up on GitHub for public feedback. This transparent and open process of updating the guidelines resulted in more than a dozen contributors submitting pull requests with improvements to the language and content. The revamped guidelines have now replaced the previous ones with language…
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) today kicks off its 18th year helping writers achieve their creative goals. The online event is organized by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that encourages participants to work towards writing a 50,000-word novel. Writers commit to posting their word counts to their profiles each day during the event, which runs from…
Augustin Prot and Rémy Berda, co-founders the Weglot multilingual plugin for WordPress, started their operation in a small apartment in September 2015. Weglot was originally a simple JavaScript project that offered a language switcher so that users could view websites in different languages. After testers started asking for a solution that could be used with…
This week José Conti, creator of WangGuard, announced that he would be shutting down the service and further development. The plugin, which Conti says has nearly 20,000 users, is one of the few effective solutions for combatting WordPress, multisite, BuddyPress, and bbPress spammers and sploggers. Conti was struggling to pay for the servers and, after…
Pippin Williamson has published a comprehensive review of some of the most popular WordPress page builder plugins. The post has received more than 90 comments and is already inspiring changes across the page builder plugin market. Williamson, a prolific plugin developer and mentor to many others, is one of the most authoritative voices in the…
If you manage a number of WordPress sites, you may find yourself inundated with emails each time a new version of WordPress is released. If you’d like to quickly disable these types of notifications, check out Control WP Core Emails, a brand new plugin developed by Andrew Norcross of Reaktiv Studios. Once activated, browse to…
Automattic announced today the company is bringing WP Job Manager back to life. The plugin became an Auttomattic project after the company acquired WooCommerce and its employees in 2015 but it has not been actively developed since then. Today’s announcement also requests feedback from WP Job Manager users who want to help shape future development:…
W3 Total Cache 0.9.5 was released early this morning, the first major update to the plugin since 2014. Users were expecting a security release after an XSS vulnerability was reported in the plugin last week but were surprised to find the release is packed full of new features. In addition to the patch for the…
The WordPress Plugin Directory has more than 100 plugins that integrate Constant Contact in different ways for email marketing, such as adding a subscription checkbox to registration or providing an email signup form via a widget. This week the company released its own official plugin on WordPress.org to expand its reach to the WordPress market.…
WP Media is reporting a high risk XSS vulnerability in W3 Total Cache that the company learned about from El Rincón de Zerial’s security blog. The plugin is currently active on more than one million WordPress sites. This particular vulnerability is found within the plugin’s support form that is embedded in the admin, according to…
Last week CloudFlare released the first update to its official WordPress plugin in approximately six months. Although the release post refers to the update as “CloudFlare’s new WordPress plugin,” it is essentially a major rewrite and a jump from version 1.3.25 to 3.0. The previous changelog has been wiped out and replaced with notes for…