In what began as a heated conversation on Twitter, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson took to the airwaves to debate opposing viewpoints on market share, monopolies, and power in open source communities. Hansson reacted to a statement Mullenweg made in (more…)
The WordPress theme review team (TRT) is kicking off a review weekend October 5 and will begin at 10:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). These events, called “review shindigs,” are marathon sessions where the team joins together to review themes and teach best practices. The current plan is to hold the (more…)
PHP 7.4 is slated for release on November 28, 2019. WordPress 5.3 will also include several commits that address deprecated features. It’s unlikely that most WordPress plugin and theme developers will be able to use the new PHP 7.4 features for a while except when working on setups where they (more…)
BuddyPress 5.0.0 “Le Gusto” was released this week with the long-awaited BP REST API, a new Invitations API, and BuddyPress info on the Site Health screen. The release was named for a favorite pizza restaurant in Fortaleza, Brazil, where BP REST API contributor and core committer Renato Alves resides. The (more…)
Brian Gardner announced he was stepping down from his role with StudioPress this past Friday. Last year, WP Engine acquired StudioPress. After staying on board for the remainder of his contract, Gardner stepped down from his role with the company. “The past 15 months have gone by quickly, and it (more…)
Gatsby Days London kicked off yesterday with a lot of momentum after Gatsby Inc. announced a $15M Series A funding round last week. The one-day conference drew 200 attendees and was the third in a series of Gatsby Days that have been held in other cities. They are designed to (more…)
Edit Flow, the modular editorial plugin that enables collaboration inside the WordPress admin, is no longer being actively developed. After no updates for nine months, Mark Warbinek, a frustrated user, contacted Automattic to ask if they have abandoned the plugin or still plan to update it. A support representative from (more…)
Now that WordPress 5.3 Beta 1 is open for testing and with the official release slated for November 12, it’s time for theme authors to begin making sure their themes are ready for several changes. Most work will revolve around the block editor. WordPress 5.3 will include versions 5.4 – (more…)
Secure the News is a project that was created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2016 to track HTTPS encryption across major news organizations’ websites. It lists the publications and automatically scores them on a scale of 0-100, based on HTTPS implementation according to best practices, as defined (more…)
I began using WordPress in 2005. I’d already been learning HTML and CSS for a couple of years. I even had a home-brewed blog that pulled posts from plain text files at one point. I knew enough JavaScript to do pop-up alerts and other annoying things that served no purpose (more…)
After tracking exploits of a zero day XSS vulnerability in the Rich Reviews plugin for WordPress, Wordfence is recommending that users remove it from their websites. The company estimates that there are 16,000 active installations vulnerable to unauthenticated plugin option updates: Attackers are currently abusing this exploit chain to inject (more…)
Gatsby Inc. CEO Kyle Mathews announced a $15M Series A funding round today, just one year after creating the company with GatsbyJS core contributors. The open source Gatsby project started in 2015 to provide a framework for developers to quickly build websites with React. As the project soared in popularity, (more…)