The second Global WordPress Translation Day was held November 12 and the stats released this week show the event was an even greater success than the first one. In April, WP Translation Day connected 448 participants through both online and in-person translation events. The second event brought 780 translators together, a 74% increase in participation.…
In this short episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss a handful of news stories making headlines. We discuss a recent security update to the WP eCommerce plugin, Upvato disappearing only to reappear in the near future, and Nashville, TN hosting WordCamp US in 2017 and 2018. Last but not least is Marcus’…
Earlier this year, Automattic added visual icons to the WordPress.com customizer after user testing showed users tried clicking on the parts of the page they wanted to edit, rather than searching through the menus in the customizer. In an effort to see if the same could be done for the self-hosted version of WordPress, Payton Swick…
WordCamp US attendees are counting down the days until the event kicks off in Philadelphia in two weeks but preparations for 2017 and 2018 are already underway. Yesterday Matt Mullenweg announced that Nashville has won the bid to host WordCamp US for the next two years. According to Randy Hicks, one of the organizers, the…
Upvato creator Freddy Lundekvam has confirmed that all user files entrusted to the service have been permanently lost, as his previous storage provider is unable to recover them. After receiving a series of emails from the provider reminding him that payment was due, the provider terminated his account seven days after the invoice was overdue.…
When images are uploaded in WordPress 4.6.1 that have an empty alt text value, WordPress tries to generate one based on the caption text or the image title. If the image title is non descriptive as is common with photos uploaded from digital cameras, the alt text can be meaningless. In WordPress 4.7, the caption text and the image…
Wedding Bride is a new theme from Alex Itsios, co-founder of Ketchup Themes. The Cyprus-based theme company has 16 themes on WordPress.org. Wedding themes are a relatively small niche in the directory with fewer than 20 listings. This new arrival stands out from the pack with its bold colors and customizability. Many WordPress wedding themes…
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…
Upvato, the service that specializes in backing up Envato Market files, has shut down without warning. Freddy Lundekvam, a full time programmer and frequent user of Envato products, created the service after losing 10 files to Envato’s policy of reserving the right to take down and remove any file at its or the author’s sole…
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…
After 14 years of blogging with MovableType, Andy Baio has relaunched Waxy.org on WordPress. Baio’s media and technology blog has been a continual source of original content about life on the internet and how it affects our culture. The migration includes 472 posts and 15,891 entries from his sideblog Waxy Links. Waxy.org played a small…
The bbPress development team has released 2.5.11 to add support for a technical change in WordPress 4.7. Users are highly encouraged to update to bbPress 2.5.11 before updating to WordPress 4.7. In 4.7, the loading order for the current user in the function stack was changed to accommodate user locale switching. Previously, BuddyPress and bbPress…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week. WordCamp US live stream tickets will be free this year and development of BuddyPress 2.8 kicks off. We talk about the revamped guidelines for the WordPress plugin directory and how they should help streamline the review process. Last but…
WordCamp Europe 2017 is set to host the next community summit in Paris. This will be the first time the event has been held outside of the United States, a change that makes it more accessible for contributors who are unable to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. Attaching the summit to WordCamp Europe…
Astute testers may have noticed a new feature in WordPress 4.7 beta 1 that enabled users to search, preview, and install themes from within the customizer. This feature was part of five feature projects related to the customizer that were approved for merge last month. Its goal is to unify the theme browsing and customizing…