Last week, we mentioned that the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group is giving away more than $40K worth of WordPress related prizes away to celebrate crossing the 20,000th member milestone. This past weekend, the prize value jumped to more than $70K after Automattic contributed 100 one-year long Jetpack Pro licenses to the prize pool. Jetpack Professional…
Over the weekend managed WordPress host Pressable performed an accidental change to its customers’ databases causing character set issues that caused some sites to display certain characters as gibberish. The company’s system operators published the following status update today: On Friday, June 10th, at 17:37 UTC (12:37PM Central) we accidentally deployed a platform-wide change that…
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…
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…
On this episode of WordPress Weekly, I describe my experience attending WordCamp Chicago 2016 this past weekend. Marcus Couch and I then discuss the news of the week including a new tool that helps WordCamp organizers create customized name badges. We also have a lengthy discussion on the freemium business model and how it’s affecting…
WooCommerce is the current leader in e-commerce software, capturing 31% of the market, thanks to its relatively user-friendly interface and connection to WordPress. However, setting up a WooCommerce site, or any e-commerce site for that matter, is not for the faint of heart, no matter how user-friendly the software. It requires knowledge of hosting, PCI…
Twenty-four hours ago, the future of Edit Flow was unclear due to a lack of communication from the project’s maintainer, Automattic. Today however, the company pushed Edit Flow 0.8.1 to the WordPress plugin directory which is the same version that’s on GitHub. According to the plugin’s changelog, 0.8.1 includes the following: New German localization New…
Edit Flow is an editorial workflow plugin for WordPress created in 2009 that is actively installed on more than 10K sites. Although the author listing on the plugin’s page shows Mohammad Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, and Scott Bressler as authors, it’s currently maintained by Automattic. Bachhuber announced in 2013 that Automattic claimed ownership of all the…
WordPress.com announced today that it has turned on encryption for custom domains. The network’s subdomains have been HTTPS-enabled since 2014 as part of the Reset the Net campaign against mass surveillance. Today Automattic expanded HTTPS coverage to more than one million custom domains hosted on the network. Last April the company joined Mozilla, Cisco, EFF…
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Jen Mylo Moves on From Automattic Jen Mylo, formerly known as Jane…
Silicon Valley is a comedic television series on HBO about a group of six engineers who create a startup company in Silicon Valley. Wired.com sat down with the cast and gave them the names to real startup companies to see if they could guess what they do. Among the names mentioned is Automattic. Fast forward…
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Justin Tadlock Announces Simpler Pricing Justin Tadlock revamped his pricing model for…
Today the WordPress.com VIP team released a plugin for Facebook’s Instant Articles, which will be open to any publisher starting April 12, 2016. Automattic partnered with Facebook and VIP-Featured-Partner agency Dekode to produce a plugin that outputs a compliant feed of posts wrapped in the required markup for Facebook. Instant Articles for WordPress is now…
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is part of a new series where I share an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Automattic Stands with Apple…
Last week WooCommerce announced on Twitter that its Stripe payment gateway is now a free product. Prior to this decision, it was priced at $79 for a single license, $99 for up to five sites, and $199 for up to 25 sites. Exciting product announcement from @stripe (which is also now free for WooCommerce, woo!)…