In Case You Missed It – Issue 3

photo credit: Night Moves – (license)

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

In light of the recent court order issued against Apple in the San Bernardino case, Automattic has taken a stand with Apple by joining other influential technology companies in filing an amicus brief in support of Apple’s legal challenge.

The court order requires Apple to write code that acts as a backdoor and weakens security on iPhones. Automattic’s transparency blog explains why they’re siding with Apple:

Like Apple, we respect the rule of law, and honor the valid government orders we receive to furnish data in connection with criminal investigations. But deliberately weakening information security, as Apple has been asked to do here, is a step too far that makes everyone less safe.

Undermining security measures – even in situations where there appear to be good intentions – will inevitably have unintended consequences for regular people.

We stand with Apple in both condemning terrorism and defending the privacy and security of our users. If Automattic was faced with a government order like the one issued in San Bernadino, we, like Apple, would do everything within the law to challenge it. That’s why we’re joining with a sizable group of leading tech companies today to support Apple in this case.

If you’d like to learn more about why the court order is a terrible idea, check out the full legal brief submitted by Automattic to the United States District Court.

The Ethics of Sharing GPL Code

Tom McFarlin shares his thoughts on working with clients, educating people, and sharing GPL code from client projects. If you’re a consultant, how do you convince clients to give you permission to release code they pay for and you write to the public under the GPL?

After reading the post, check out this comment left by Darrinb.

Gravity Forms Becomes 2nd Gold Partner

Around this time last year, Scott Kingsley Clark launched a new sponsorship program called Friends of Pods. The funding is used to decrease private development of Pods and focus more on Pods core, related plugins, and integrations. Gravity Forms, the popular form creation plugin created by Rocketgenius is the second gold partner in the program.

In addition to the partnership news, the Pods Gravity Forms add-on is now available on the WordPress plugin directory.

ActiveDen is No More

ActiveDen, a site where people could sell Flash assets and was the first site in the Envato Marketplace has officially closed its doors. The company shut it down in order to focus on things that have more impact.

ActiveDen Shuts Down

To learn more about the history of ActiveDen, I encourage you to watch this 45 minute video featuring Collis Ta’eed where he talks about the first six months of Envato.

SIDEKICK Partners With ThemeForest

SIDEKICK announced it is in a trial partnership with 19 ThemeForest authors. The partnership enables customers to view interactive tutorials from within the WordPress dashboard. According to the announcement, the test aims to alleviate some support pain for authors.

Calypso’s Contributor Code of Conduct

Codes of Conduct are not limited to events. Many open source projects have implemented them as a way to provide a base line of expectations from those who participate in the project. WordPress core contributor, Ryan Boren, shared a link to Calypso’s Code of Conduct on Github which explains the expectations project maintainers have of contributors.

Open source contribution is onboarding flow 4 the future of work in a software eaten world. It has codes of conduct. https://t.co/isXa7S1WTh

— Ryan Boren (@rboren) March 3, 2016

Coen Jacobs on Bundling Libraries in WordPress

Coen Jacobs explains why bundling libraries is not overhead but a best practice. It’s another post in a series from Jacobs on the issue of handling dependencies in WordPress.

WordImpress and Media Temple Partnership

The WordImpress team announced on its site that it has partnered with Media Temple as WordPress Community Consultants. In exchange for information about customer needs, Media Temple is enabling the team to sponsor, attend, and speak at more WordCamps this year.

Happy Birthday Wapuu!

In what is a traditional part of this series, I end each issue featuring a Wapuu design. For those who don’t know, Wapuu is the unofficial mascot of the WordPress project.

In honor of Wapuu’s recent birthday which is February 19th, I present Birthday Wapuu. I hope you’ll join me in wishing Wapuu a happy birthday!

Happy Birthday Wapuu

That’s it for issue three. If you recently discovered a cool resource or post related to WordPress, please share it with us in the comments.