WordPress 4.2 “Powell” has arrived and is now ready for download. It is named for Earl Rudolph “Bud” Powell, an American jazz pianist. This release, led by 10up engineer Drew Jaynes, offers a balanced mix of front-facing features that users will enjoy, as well as improvements for developers. Here is a tour of the highlights.…
WordPress 4.1.2 is available and is a critical security update for all previous versions of WordPress. The release has eight security fixes, one of which is high risk, three are medium-low risk, and the last four added to harden WordPress. This is the first major security update to WordPress core since WordPress 4.0.1 released in…
For the past week, security firm Sucuri has worked with the WordPress core security team to address a cross site scripting vulnerability discovered in more than a dozen popular WordPress plugins. The vulnerability stems from the improper use of the add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions. Inaccurate information within the WordPress Codex lead many developers to assume…
This post was contributed by Robert Dall. Studying web design in college, he stumbled upon WordPress.com early in his career. Dall made the natural progression from WordPress.com to the self-hosted version of WordPress. Since then, he’s worked almost exclusively with WordPress using it as a blog, CMS, portfolio, and e-commerce. He’s also an avid photographer. Coming…
For years, Microsoft and open source have rarely been used in the same sentence. With new leadership, the company has made major strides in becoming part of the open source movement. Late last year, the company announced its .NET server stack would be open source, enabling .NET to become a cross-platform framework. The company has…
WordPress 3.8 marked a major milestone for the admin with the inclusion of “MP6,” a brand new responsive design and color scheme. By now many users have become accustomed to the color scheme, but 4.2 will introduce subtle changes to create a more harmonious color palette. Over the past several months, Hugo Baeta has been…
Andrew Nacin announced on the Make Core blog that Konstantin Obenland will lead the release of WordPress 4.3, while Scott Taylor will lead 4.4. Obenland’s latest contribution to WordPress is the redesigned theme directory. Taylor is largely responsible for the audio and video improvements in WordPress 3.9. Nacin defines a WordPress release lead as someone…
WordPress 4.2 will soon be released with expanded core support for emoji, a new feature that users either love or love to hate. By making a key database change from utf8mb3 to utf8mb4 to add support for emoji, WordPress also receives the benefit of being able to natively handle Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. On…
PressThis is a bookmarklet that allows you to quickly publish drafts or posts without having to navigate the backend of WordPress. It was added to WordPress in version 2.6 and can be found in the Tools menu. One of the major features coming in WordPress 4.2 is a completely revamped PressThis bookmarklet. Michael Arestad proposed…
A few days ago, we highlighted how WordPress 4.2 radically improves the installation and update process for plugins. Several readers commented on the article expressing that automatically activating plugins after installation is a bad idea. A decision was made during the March 25th, WordPress core developer chat to remove enhanced plugin installs from WordPress 4.2…
Shortcake, a plugin that adds a UI to make shortcodes more user friendly, is now an official WordPress feature plugin. The project is led by Daniel Bachhuber, currently the interim director of engineering at Fusion, the company where Shortcake originated. Contributors include Matthew Haines-Young and the folks at Human Made. The plugin is being developed…
The WordPress REST API plugin version 1.2 was released today after roughly nine months of development. Version 1.1 was released in June 2014 with the addition of taxonomies and terms routes and a focus on increasing test coverage for all endpoints. Version 1.2 has test coverage for taxonomies and terms at 98%. Meta is 87%…
One of the features I’m looking forward to in WordPress 4.2 is the improved plugin install and update process. Gary Pendergast and a team of volunteers have spent the last six months collaborating on shiny updates. When you update or install a plugin in WordPress 4.1, you’re taken to a screen that shows its progress.…
If you use the WordPress for iOS mobile app, you can easily add a site’s pageviews and visitor stats to the iOS notification center. To add WordPress to the notification center, perform a top to bottom swipe on the iPhone’s home screen. Scroll to the bottom and tap the Edit button. You should see the…
WordPress 4.2 beta 1 is now available for early testers to download. It’s “pencils down” time for core contributors as far as new feature requests are concerned. This is the point in the release cycle where contributors are focusing their efforts on bug fixes and inline documentation. Drew Jaynes, the 4.2 release lead, posted the…