WordPress 4.9.6 Beta 1 is available for testing. It’s the first step in bringing GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) tools to WordPress. In addition to 10 bugs being fixed, this release heavily focuses on privacy enhancements. One of the first changes is the addition of a Privacy tab on the successful update screen. The message…
Freemius Insights has announced that its analytics service that was previously only available to WordPress plugins is now available for themes. The company was founded in 2015 by Vova Feldman and his team after discovering how much information is not available to developers who host plugins and themes on the official WordPress directories and marketplaces.…
I’m in favor of WordPress collecting more anonymized usage data that could help make informed decisions on changes or improvements to core, such as tracking changes to the WordPress user interface, which buttons or settings are used most often, etc. A good example of when this data could have come in handy is the recent…
BlogVault, a real-time backup and migration service with a WordPress plugin that’s active on more than 20K sites, announced over the weekend that it suffered a security breach that exposed data. Akshat Choudhary, founder of BlogVault, explains that some customer sites were accessed without authorization and were infected with malware. BlogVault is contacting customers whose…
Year In WP is a new site by Jesper van Engelen that creates a personalized review of a user’s contributions to WordPress in 2016. Entering the WordPress.org username of a plugin or theme author or a WordPress core contributor into the field generates a list of statistics that includes: Profile information Number of times their plugins and themes…
Since I started covering WordPress in 2009, one of the things I’ve noticed is that certain topics have a cyclical nature to them. One of these is the contention in the WordPress community on what data is sent, stored, and shared on WordPress.org. In a post published on Torquemag.io, Josh Pollock, Founder of CalderaWP, argues…
The WordPress plugin directory gives authors a set of statistics but many are left wanting more. Freemius Insights, is a new service founded by Vova Feldman, that allows authors to accumulate detailed statistics from users. Feldman and his team of four, created the service after speaking to more than 100 plugin developers and realizing there’s…
Aaron Jorbin, who contributes to WordPress core on a regular basis, has published a script called WordPress Theme Directory Slurper. The PHP based script downloads and updates a copy of the latest stable version of every theme in the WordPress.org theme directory. Devin Price put the script to good use and has published a series…
WordPress.org user profiles already display a user’s activity, plugins and themes they’re associated with, and their favorite plugins. What if data from WordCamp.org could be displayed as well? If this sounds interesting, keep an eye on the Make WordPress Community blog. Ian Dunn has begun the process by asking what kind of data to display…
This weeks edition of WordPress Weekly features special guest, David Bisset. We were also joined by Marcus Couch. After catching up on the headlines, we dove into the topic of WordCamps. Specifically, encouraging women to speak while also increasing diversity, new IRS regulations that corporate sponsors must abide by and last but not least, whether…
About three years ago, WordPress introduced pie charts and a stats API to the plugin repository. These stats gave plugin authors a chance to see which versions of their plugin were activated while also giving a glimpse into how many actual users the plugin had. The API provided a method to getting access to the…
It’s a fear many WordPress users had in 2009 and it’s one that continues to be near the top in terms of reasons why people won’t upgrade their sites. It’s the fear that their plugins won’t be compatible with the new version of WordPress. Back in October of 2009, the WordPress core team tried to…
WPShout has announced the return of their webhosting review for 2013. Unlike other hosting reviews, this one contains no affiliate links and has user submitted data. It’s over two years since the inaugural Hosting Review, and it’s now time to update the results with some fresh data. A lot has changed in the last two…
Interesting case study using a number of cool data points that shows how WordPress has won the crown amongst Joomla and Drupal for being the most widely used CMS in the world. One things for sure, it certainly paid off for WordPress to be focused on making the democratization of content publishing as easy as…
Lorelle shared an interesting plugin that can be used to show data called beCounted. Check out their example of the 2010 Open Source CMS Market Share report which they’ve turned into a page where you can view how many downloads have occurred for each publishing system since you visited the page.