WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the internet, up from 25% last year. While it may seem that WordPress is neatly adding 2% of the internet every year, its percentage increase fluctuates from year to year and the climb is getting more arduous with more weight to haul. In January 2015, Mullenweg said…
WordPress 4.7 is a little more than a month away and is going to be packed with new features and improvements. In particular, five feature projects related to the customizer were approved for merge and will be part of the release. One of the feature projects is the custom CSS editor that enables users to…
Nearly a year ago, we published information about a new project by Arūnas Liuiza, a WordPress plugin developer, called Measure Jetpack that would benchmark Jetpack’s performance on websites. Outside of a post published in January, there’s been little information on its progress. I reached out to Liuiza and discovered that he’s going to give a…
Jetpack 4.3 was released today with a new admin interface that has been completely rewritten in React.js. The Jetpack team has been working on the redesign for a year and received feedback from more than 8,000 Jetpack users before the official release. After updating to 4.3, Jetpack users will see a new dashboard that offers…
This week WordPress.com introduced a new Customizer panel to its users called Content Options. The new panel offers a number of minor tweaks that would ordinarily be handled by a few simple free plugins on a self-hosted site. It brings a whole new range of customizability to the WordPress.com sites that was not previously available.…
Automattic is doubling down on its commitment to using JavaScript in its products. In November 2015, the company debuted Calypso, its first React.js-based product powered by the WordPress.com REST API. Shortly after Calypso’s unveiling, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg declared that “JavaScript and API-driven interfaces are the future of not just WordPress but the web.” Today…
Jetpack 4.2 is a combination release with performance improvements and fixes for a couple of security vulnerabilities. These updates secure Contact Form submission exports from potential formula injections and fix a general XSS vulnerability in the misuse of the add_query_arg() function. The majority of enhancements in this release are centered on speeding up communication between…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week including, Jetpack 4.1, an event aimed at new and introverted WordCamp attendees, Aesop Story Engine, and more. This episode is only 35 minutes in length as I was dealing with severe weather so it should be easy to digest.…
Jetpack 4.1 was released today with performance improvements that make calls to the database more efficient, reducing what Jetpack does on each page load. Slideshows should load faster now that the Carousel module has been tweaked to no longer load full-size images in the previous and next previews. Using Photon in dev mode has also…
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…
Jetpack 4.0.4 is available for download and users are encouraged to update as soon as possible. This release contains a number of security fixes, including extra security to post by email, a patched XSS vulnerability in the Likes module, and a fix to ensure that submitted Feedback forms are not publicly available via the REST…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week including, Jetpack’s new developer code reference, shiny updates in WordPress 4.6, and Ukraine holding its first WordCamp. We also discuss whether or not WordCamp afterparties should be alcohol free and the circumstances surrounding the idea. Last but not least…
The Jetpack team launched developer.jetpack.com this week, a searchable code reference for actions, filters, and features found in the plugin. Although Jetpack is developed to be highly extensible, up until now there was no centralized place for developers to find documentation. The reference features new hooks added in the most recent version and can also…
Jetpack 4.0.3 is a security release that contains an important fix for a critical vulnerability that has been present in the plugin since version 2.0, released in 2012. According to Jetpack team member Sam Hotchkiss, a stored XSS vulnerability was found in the way that some Jetpack shortcodes are processed, which allows an attacker to…
Shortly after Jetpack 4.0 was released yesterday many users reported a fatal error and/or white screen when updating. Developers started warning each other in the Advanced WordPress Facebook group to avoid updating to 4.0, after having received emails from clients with sites that went down. A followup 4.0.2 release was pushed out today for users…