Automattic announced another round of funding today, a $300 million Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures, giving the company a $3 billion valuation post-funding. The last time Automattic raised money was $160 million in a Series C round in 2014. Since that time the company has grown to more than (more…)
WordPress theme and plugin developer Ben Gillbanks is building a Jetpack alternative with an emphasis on speed, simplicity, and privacy. Toolbelt is a new, lightweight plugin that offers a collection of functionality that is commonly-used on WordPress sites. Currently available modules include features like breadcrumbs, browser native lazy loading, a (more…)
Jetpack 7.6 was released this week with several improvements to the plugin’s AMP compatibility. Automattic was one of the earliest publishing partners on Google’s AMP project, as well as the original author of the official AMP plugin for WordPress. This release makes three more Jetpack features compatible with AMP: Related (more…)
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Jill Binder, Founder, and Chief Consultant and Trainer at Diverse Speakers In Tech. We discussed how and why the Diverse Speaker Training group was created, how the training encourages underrepresented people to speak at WordCamps, and how the recent (more…)
Jetpack 7.4 is now available and includes a new Business Hours block. This block contains a toggle that users can set to show whether they’re open or closed. There’s also a way to add additional times so restaurants, for example, can display when they’re open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (more…)
Jetpack has opened a signup for the beta of its upcoming Membership feature in order to collect feedback from potential testers. The changelog for version 7.3, released two weeks ago, hinted at a new Membership block coming to the plugin. The work in progress was added behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant, (more…)
Jetpack 7.3 was released last week and if you didn’t read the changelog, you may have missed that the spelling and grammar checking module that uses After the Deadline has been retired. “Grammar and Spelling: Remove from Jetpack. We’ve chekced the spelling alot over the years, but now time to (more…)
Pressing Topics is a daily podcast hosted by Malcolm Peralty and myself. We discuss the news that’s making headlines in the WordPress ecosystem as well as related topics that catch our eyes. Generally speaking, if you listen to this show on a daily basis, you should have a good idea (more…)
*Update* The previous mp3 attached to this post inadvertently ended around the 31 minute mark. I’ve reuploaded the episode and corrected the problem. The full episode is attached below. In this episode, John James Jacoby and I share what’s new in WordPress 5.2, discuss why not capitalizing one letter can (more…)
Jetpack 7.3 was released yesterday with changes that improve the “out of the box” experience. The plugin now enables fewer features on setup so users can have more control over what they activate on their sites. The new version also integrates with WordPress 5.2’s new Site Health checks. It includes (more…)
Earlier this month, Jetpack 7.1 added suggestions to the plugin search screen, a controversial change that has sparked debate this week. When users search for a plugin that matches a term for an existing Jetpack feature, the plugin now inserts an artificial, dismissible search result into the first plugin card (more…)
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss a controversial feature in Jetpack 7.1 that adds feature suggestions to plugin search results. We also talk about extension suggestions that are coming to WooCommerce. We talk about the security implications from the recent investigations into the Pipdig plugin and what (more…)