Jetpack 3.9.3 and 3.9.4 are now available. Although 3.9.3 is billed as a “maintenance and compatibility release,” there are a number of significant changes and improvements that make this an important release. WordPress 4.5 will introduce native support for a theme logo. This will render Jetpack’s site logo feature obsolete. The 3.9.3 release of the…
Last year WordPress developer Hardeep Asrani and the folks at ThemeIsle released Custom Login Customizer, a plugin that allows users to design their own login pages in the customizer. Since that time core developers have made more progress on the customizer roadmap, allowing for more varied uses outside of a theme-related context. Last week the…
On this day in 2011, Jetpack, the project formerly known as “.org connect” inside Automattic, was released to the public. At the time, the team consisted of five people. Today, there are more than 50 people on various teams within the project, including, support, user experience, growth, and development. It’s also active on more than…
Gary Pendergast is looking to bring WordPress users a new way of giving feedback on posts that goes beyond simple text-based comments. A core committer and emoji aficionado, Pendergast spearheaded the effort to add emoji support to WordPress and is now working on an emoji reactions feature plugin. The plugin is being developed to offer…
Today the WordPress.com VIP team released a plugin for Facebook’s Instant Articles, which will be open to any publisher starting April 12, 2016. Automattic partnered with Facebook and VIP-Featured-Partner agency Dekode to produce a plugin that outputs a compliant feed of posts wrapped in the required markup for Facebook. Instant Articles for WordPress is now…
Over the years, we’ve told users that the WordPress plugin directory is the safest place to download and install plugins from. This is due in large part to the dedication of volunteers who act as gatekeepers and review plugins before they’re added to the directory. Plugin updates, however don’t receive the same scrutiny as there’s…
The team behind the TGM Plugin Activation Library (TGMPA) is working to propose it as a feature plugin for WordPress. Last July contributors on the project opened the discussion on a post calling for feature plugins, and the upcoming 3.0 version is being developed with this path in mind. Developers use TGMPA to manage dependencies…
Today the WordPress plugin review team issued a reminder for what they said is a long-standing, unwritten rule: frameworks are not allowed in the official directory. In a post tiled “Please do not submit frameworks,” Mika Epstein outlined the reason behind the rule: At this time, we are not accepting frameworks as we don’t feel…
Today WordPress.com announced support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Google’s open source project to improve the experience of the mobile web for publishers. When visitors arrive to a WordPress.com site via a mobile search, posts will load faster than ever before. Each post is dynamically generated according to the AMP spec, with /amp/ added to…
WooCommerce is currently the most popular way to add a store to WordPress. Its usage is on the rise and seems to be growing in tandem with global WordPress usage. Wappalyzer estimates a 31% marketshare in the e-commerce category and BuiltWith has WooCommerce at roughly 29% among other shopping cart technologies. Either way you slice…
WP Pusher is on a relentless mission to make it effortless for WordPress developers to connect their plugin and theme repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. Version 2.1.0 of the plugin eliminates the requirement to manually create a token with GitHub and introduces 1-click authentication via OAuth. This update makes setting up the plugin on…
The development team behind TGM Plugin Activation released its new generator last week. The popular tool is a PHP library that allows WordPress developers to require or recommend plugins for a theme or plugin. It essentially helps walk WordPress users through installation and activation of plugin dependencies in the admin. Bundling a bunch of plugin-type…
Today is normally Thank a Plugin Author Day which motivates users to thank plugin authors but based on discussions from last year’s event, I’ve decided to add theme authors to the mix. The purpose of the day is simple, give thanks and express gratitude to WordPress plugin and theme developers. There are several ways to…
Jack Slingerland started hacking on WordPress in 2008, but recently his career has taken him a bit further afield from it than he would like. By day he is a Senior Software Engineer at CA Technologies in Raleigh, working in React/Redux, Node, ElasticSearch, Grails, and Groovy. But at night he is busy building Kernl, a…
WooCommerce, which currently powers roughly 30% of online stores, has a growing catalogue of 355 extensions ranging from free to $249. Most of the major payment gateways are offered at $79 per single site license. There are also hundreds of additional extensions hosted on WordPress.org, including several payment gateway plugins that, if listed on the…