In Case You Missed It – Issue 19

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 an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post.

Apple Pay for WooCommerce

WooCommerce announced that Apple Pay is now available for stores accepting payments using Stripe. According to Marina Pape, WooCommerce is the first open source platform to integrate with Apple Pay.

We’re also proud to be the first open source platform to integrate with Apple Pay. Open source is the default for us, but it’s exciting to continue that level of openness with such an important payment solution.

Human Made Makes Two Big Hires

Human Made, a web development agency based in the UK recently announced two big hires. The first is Mike Little, co-creator of the WordPress open source project, as a WordPress Specialist. The second is Jenny Beaumont, who will take on the role of Senior Project Manager.

Editor User Experience Survey

The WordPress core development team has published a survey seeking feedback and data on how people use the editor. The editor is likely the most commonly used feature in WordPress. This is an opportunity for those who use it to provide feedback.

Editor Experience Survey

Behind the Scenes of how Search works on the New WordPress Plugin Directory

Greg Brown published details on Data.blog on how he improved the search relevancy for the new WordPress plugin directory using Elasticsearch. The post is technical in nature but provides great background information into how it works.

In improving the fidelity of search results, it’s not just a question of how we satisfy a single user’s search query, but how we satisfy thousands of users for each unique search term: which plugins will support that volume of users and their requests for support? Which are most likely to give all of these users a great WordPress experience?

NextGEN Gallery Surpasses 17 Million Downloads

NextGEN Gallery just reached over 17 million downloads. #WordPress

— Imagely (@imagely) March 17, 2017

MainWP Reaches 1K Five-star Reviews

After three years of being on the WordPress plugin directory, the MainWP plugin has received 1,000 five-star reviews.

Heather Burns HeroPress Essay

Heather Burns, founder of WebDevLaw, published an incredible essay on HeroPress this week. Burns describes the hardships encountered with her first job and how it and other circumstances led her down the path of discovering WordPress.

By this point I’d started playing around with WordPress, and I learned about a local meetup group. I tiptoed in one night and awkwardly introduced myself and was welcomed right in.

I realized over time that this was a very different sort of group. Everyone was grassroots volunteers, putting in the effort because they wanted to learn, not because they wanted social status. There was no tiresome hierarchy, no obsession with ‘prestige’, no kowtowing to the person with the sexiest car (in fact, we all took the bus.) If you had a question, you could ask it without being laughed out the room. No one was obliged to give anything more than they were able to give.

HeroPress Wapuu!

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

HeroPress Wapuu

I present HeroPress Wapuu in celebration of HeroPress recently publishing its 100th essay. If you’re a fan of HeroPress and want to see it flourish, please consider being a sponsor.

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