WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow and recently its co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined Drupal founder Dries Buytaert together on stage at a private event for the first time on May 17. They discussed how their lives were influenced by open source and how they built their projects around the freedoms it…
Last weekend I had the opportunity to interview Andy Fragen, a longtime member of the WordPress community and core contributor. He is also the author of the GitHub Updater plugin, which allows developers to enable automatic updates to their GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, or Gitea hosted WordPress plugins, themes, and language packs. In the video below,…
Matt Mullenweg joined Matías Ventura at WordCamp Spain yesterday for a lively Q&A session. The virtual event drew 5,000 registered users, and attendees came prepared with some thought-provoking questions about the future of WordPress. Here are a few highlights on some recent topics of interest. WordCamps around the globe have been going virtual, embracing the…
Chef co-founder and former CTO Adam Jacob gave a short presentation at O’Reilly Open Source Software Conference (OSCON) 2019 titled “The War for the Soul of Open Source.” In his search for meaning in open source software today, Jacob confronts the notion of open source business models. “We often talk about open source business models,”…
Alex Young, creator of the WPCasts video tutorials site, has published a free crash course that offers a brief introduction to using WordPress as a headless CMS. The 28-minute tutorial covers the basics of setting up a bare bones React application that uses WPGraphQL to query ACF data. Young begins by installing four plugins: WPGraphQL,…
I have a hard time walking a mile or two let alone 718km, but that’s what Marcel Bootsman did on his journey to WordCamp EU to generate funds for DonateWC. In this interview, Bootsman explains how he prepared for the journey, what he experienced during his trip, and why he chose DonateWC as the charity…
Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla and co-founder of IndieWebCamp, delivered an inspirational talk titled “Take Back Your Web” at the most recent beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. He opened the presentation with a litany of Facebook’s wrongdoings, taking the world’s largest social network to task for its role in increasing polarization, amplifying…
Today is Earth Day, a worldwide annual event first celebrated in 1970 that focuses on addressing environmental concerns. Earth Day Network coordinates 192 countries with more than a billion people participating in today’s event. The organization uses WordPress to build the world’s largest environmental movement through education, public policy, and consumer campaigns. Over the past…
During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg announced that Phase 4 of the Gutenberg project would be aimed at developing an official way for WordPress to support multilingual sites. There are no technical details available yet for what approach core will take, because it’s still in the experimental stage. The site building…
Last week Automattic published a video titled “A meditation on the open web” that calls out Facebook as the antithesis of the open web: As you get closer the air gets smoggier and you realize it’s a vast metropolis. It’s surrounded by high concrete walls, completely contained. Inside it’s bustling, lots of honking traffic, people…
If learning React is among your New Year’s goals, here’s some inspiration from nine-year-old Revel Carlberg West. The video below is a recording of his presentation at the React NYC meetup. West describes how he learned basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and then moved on to learn React using the CodeSandbox online code editor. He…
Although WordPress developers and professionals have been inundated with Gutenberg news for more than a year, there’s a whole wide world of users who will learn about the project for the first time when 4.9.8 includes a “Try Gutenberg” prompt in the admin. If you haven’t been following the news closely and are wondering what…
Sessions from WordCamp Europe 2018 are making their way onto WordPress.tv, including Matt Mullenweg’s Summertime Update. In the video, Mullenweg shares the progress that’s been made on Gutenberg, WordPress core development, a Gutenberg road map for including it into core, and what to expect after WordPress 5.0 is released. Be sure to watch the video…
If you happened to miss out on WordCamp EU this year, check out the following short film produced by Production Pool. Production Pool is a video production company based in Belgrade, Serbia that was hired to record all of the videos and wrap up the live stream for WordCamp Europe. The video is just shy…
While the initial focus of Gutenberg is the editor, the second focus is the Customization experience in WordPress. Mel Choyce, Product Designer at Automattic, recently spoke at LoopConf, on the past, present, and future of the customizer. Choyce begins the presentation by describing when and how the customizer was added to WordPress. Fun fact, the…