Today marks a moment in internet history, as the very first .blog domain is now operational on WordPress.com. Knock Knock, WHOIS There, a subsidiary of Automattic, launched Nic.blog today to begin getting registrars to sign up to sell the new TLD. Automattic won the rights to oversee the sale and registration of the .blog domain…
Gene Robinson, lead developer of the Thematic WordPress theme, has announced that the project will no longer be developed. Thematic was last updated in 2013 and is actively installed on more than 4K sites. Users are advised to migrate to a different theme as updates will no longer be released. As WordPress core evolves, sites…
When WordPress 3.7 “Basie” was released in 2013, it brought automatic updates to the masses. By default, WordPress automatically updates to point releases. Using additional constants within wp-config.php, you can configure WordPress to automatically update themes, plugins, and major releases. If you want granular control over the WordPress update system without touching code, check out…
Among the improvements coming in WordPress 4.6 are accessibility enhancements to the Category and Tag management pages. The flow of each page has been changed so that the visual order of elements match the tab order. This allows those who navigate with keyboards to access the Add New Tag or Add New Category area first.…
BuddyPress 2.5, released in March, introduced customizable emails via a new BP Email API. This new feature allows community managers to easily edit BuddyPress-generated emails in the admin and make design changes in the customizer. It didn’t take long for developers to think of bringing this same customizability to bbPress emails. Brandon Allen has just…
In an exceptionally well-documented commit message, BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges introduced a new API to manage single item navigation, thanks to contributions from core developers Mathieu Viet and Raymond Hoh. Gorges summarized the changes to how BuddyPress will handle navigation in the upcoming 2.6 release: The new BP_Core_Nav overhauls the way that BuddyPress registers,…
Wes Bos, a developer and educator known for his high quality video tutorials, has just launched a free online course for building JavaScript apps with React.js and Redux. The 2.5 hour Learn Redux course includes 20 videos that guide developers through building an example ‘Reduxstagram’ app to present the core ideas behind Redux. To get…
Daniel Bachhuber, maintainer of the WP-CLI project and a contributing developer to the WP REST API, joined Chris Carr and Austin Pray on a recent episode of the Roots Radio podcast. Bachhuber discussed his recent experience crowdfunding his work on “A More RESTful WP-CLI” as well as the challenges he’s encountered as a contributor to…
DreamHost, Flywheel, and SiteGround have joined Bluehost on WordPress.org’s new recommended hosting page. In mid 2015, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the open source WordPress project, announced the page would be revamped. To have a chance at being listed webhosting companies needed to fill out a 40-question survey. This is Flywheel’s first time on the page.…
The World Health Organization estimates that 285 million people worldwide are living with some form of visual impairment and 39 million of those are estimated to be blind. Many people with low vision depend on speech recognition technology to navigate the web and communicate their thoughts. This type of software also assists people who have…
Happytables is changing from being a platform that hosts restaurant websites to one that provides analytics and insights by tapping into apps that restaurants are already using to promote their businesses. The company uses WordPress as a command center for the application that communicates with various restaurant-tech APIs to deliver information to the dashboard in…
Yesterday GitHub announced pricing changes that give all paid plans unlimited repositories and change plans to a pricing-per-user model. Individual developers are the most likely customers to benefit from the changes, but many organizations will see an exponential increase in pricing. GitLab, a competitor in the Git repository hosting space, immediately addressed disgruntled GitHub customers…
It’s almost inevitable that as a WordPress plugin gains popularity, it will receive a bad review. How plugin authors handle and respond to bad reviews is crucial, especially in a public forum. Mika Epstein, who helps review plugins before they’re added to the directory and is a dedicated support forum volunteer, gives advice on how…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Andrea Middleton, who works at Automattic as a Community Organizer for the WordPress open source project. We discuss a number of topics including, updates to the WordCamp Central website, the for-profit subsidiary, and the experimental WordCamp incubator program. At the conclusion of…
Automattic announced today that it will begin offering top-level .blog domain registration starting in August 2016. The .blog domain extension will be available to both WordPress and non-WordPress sites. According to Mark Armstrong, an Automattic subsidiary is exclusively managing the registration of .blog domains and will be offering it for purchase through WordPress.com and other…