WordPress.org is second only to WordPress.com in Google search results for “WordPress,” followed by the project’s download, about, and featured themes pages. Unfortunately, visitors to WordPress.org land on an outdated website that doesn’t accurately represent the vibrance of the WordPress project and its strong community. As the face of the open source project, WordPress.org is…
WordPress 4.5 is right around the corner with the first release candidate now available for download. It includes 49 changes from the last beta – improvements to the new custom logo feature, a minor update to jQuery, updates to inline documentation, and fixes for various small bugs. The upcoming release is packed full of improvements…
The Accessibility Team announced today that the WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards have been approved for the core handbook. The team sought feedback on the draft of the guidelines earlier this year and, after a few revisions, the coding standards are out of draft status. Contributors will now be required to meet these guidelines in order…
WordPress introduced oEmbed support for tweets in its 3.4 release, but recent changes to Twitter’s API requires updates to core. On May 1, Twitter will be removing the XML response format from the single Tweet oEmbed endpoint. Twitter engineer Niall Kennedy opened a ticket to change the oEmbed URL for single tweets from api.twitter.com to…
As a distributed worker, one of the toughest obstacles I face is burnout. It’s one of the reasons I took a month off from all things WordPress. According to Merriam-Webster, burnout is, “the condition of someone who has become very physically and emotionally tired after doing a difficult job for a long time.” Once burnout…
The WordPress Polyglots team is planning its first ever Global Translation Day to be held April 24, 2016, in every timezone around the globe. The 24-hour translation sprint will start at dawn in the East and end in the West. In addition to translating strings, organizers are also looking to grow the translation teams and…
Building on the momentum generated from the WordPress 4.4 development cycle, WordPress 4.5 includes a number of enhancements to comments. In a post on the Make Core blog, Rachel Baker explains the changes and what to expect. “WordPress 4.5 includes several ancient bug fixes and a few enhancements in the Comments component. We have closed…
Today Andrew Ozz, one of the maintainers on WordPress’ core Editor component, announced some major improvements coming to the links modal in the 4.5 release. Currently, when adding a link to text in the visual editor, a modal launches where you can paste in the URL, add link text, and set the target to open…
In October 2014, Jetpack 3.2 introduced a new site logo feature for theme developers. As Jetpack is widely used, it provided a way for theme developers to easily build in logo support, thereby increasing data portability across themes. After discussion in yesterday’s core development meeting, WordPress 4.5 is now set to introduce theme support for…
Last week the feature plugin decision deadline closed and WordPress core contributors approved Responsive Preview and Selective Refresh for merge. The merge deadline is Wednesday, February 17, followed by the first beta next week. Both feature approved for 4.5 extend the customizer to improve live previews. A new version of the Customize Partial Refresh plugin…
Testing patches is one way that both developers and non-developers can contribute to WordPress without writing any code. It’s a valuable service that keeps things moving along in tickets and helps patches make their way into core. The most challenging part of testing patches is getting your testing environment set up properly. The WordPress core…
The WP REST API team released version 2 beta 12 today. Daniel Bachhuber highlighted the breaking changes in the release that developers will want to digest before updating. This includes the removal of meta endpoints from the primary plugin into its own feature plugin, now available on WordPress.org. In a comment on our coverage of…
Over the weekend, discussion continued surrounding the direction of the WP REST API, as both Matt Mullenweg and Ryan McCue took to their WordPress blogs to clarify statements from last week’s status meeting. Differences of opinion are driving a heated debate about what constitutes a goalpost for the API’s readiness for core. In a post…
During yesterday’s pivotal WP REST API meeting, WordPress contributors discussed adoption of the API. A cursory search of the WordPress.org plugin directory shows that fewer than two dozen plugins are currently using the API scaffolding included in WordPress 4.4. For reference, here are the 20 plugins identified by Mika Epstein during the meeting, along with…
The WP REST API team met yesterday in the #core-restapi Slack channel to discuss the status of the existing post, term, user, and comment endpoints. There are a few outstanding issues with these four core objects, which the team wants to tackle via a feature plugin approach instead of holding the API back from merge.…