On the podcast today we have Aaron Jorbin. Aaron has led teams responsible for some of the largest and most prominent WordPress sites in the world including Rolling Stone, Variety, WIRED, The New Yorker, and The White House. He is also a WordPress Core Committer who focuses on improving developer happiness and making the internet…
In 2016, WordFence published their findings of a vulnerability that could have compromised the servers that are used to send out WordPress updates. It turned out to be a complex, obscure vulnerability that ignited a conversation surrounding the security of api.wordpress.org and what could happen if the servers were compromised. One idea that was brought…
WordPress 4.8.2 is available for download and users are encouraged to update as soon as possible. This release patches eight security vulnerabilities and has six maintenance related fixes. Hardening was also added to WordPress core to prevent plugins and themes from accidentally causing a vulnerability through $wpdb->prepare() which can create unexpected and unsafe queries leading…
If you manage a number of WordPress sites, you may find yourself inundated with emails each time a new version of WordPress is released. If you’d like to quickly disable these types of notifications, check out Control WP Core Emails, a brand new plugin developed by Andrew Norcross of Reaktiv Studios. Once activated, browse to…
When WordPress 3.7 “Basie” was released in 2013, it brought automatic updates to the masses. By default, WordPress automatically updates to point releases. Using additional constants within wp-config.php, you can configure WordPress to automatically update themes, plugins, and major releases. If you want granular control over the WordPress update system without touching code, check out…
There are at least three major releases of WordPress per year where users can expect new features and major bug fixes about every four months. While this is great for users, some companies, plugin, and theme developers are struggling to keep up. We recently received the following email from a reader concerned with WordPress’ release…
A little more than two months ago, Derek Munson, who goes by the username Drumology2001 published a thread in the WordPress.org support forums. While performing maintenance on several WordPress sites on his virtual private server, Munson discovered a number of them running outdated versions. Versions ranged from 3.9 to 4.1 with at least one site…
As the debate on whether or not WordPress.org hosted themes should have changelogs continues, one line of thought is that regular users don’t read them. As a long time user of WordPress, I always read a plugin’s changelog before updating. A good changelog tells me what bugs have been fixed, new features that have been…
Since WordPress 4.2 was released, some users are questioning why their sites have automatically updated to WordPress 4.1.3. There’s no information about the release on the Make WordPress Core site or the official WordPress news blog. However, this Codex article explains what’s in 4.1.3 and the reason it was released. Fix database writes for esoteric…
bbPress 2.5.5 is available for download. This release fixes three potential security vulnerabilities reported by J.D. Grimes and was pushed out within nearly 24 hours of being notified. Users should update as soon as possible as all previous 2.x versions are vulnerable. The patches have also been applied to the 2.6 development branch that will…
Over the weekend, the WordPress plugin directory implemented a major change that better reflects how popular a plugin is. The number of total downloads has been replaced with the number of active installs. While the numbers are not exact, they’re close enough to give people insight into usage. When it comes to reporting WordPress plugin…
Over the years, there have been several articles published on the topic of how many WordPress plugins are too many. A common point of debate is that too many plugins can slow down your site or cause things to break. While the risk of things breaking exists, I don’t think it’s as bad as people…
After using WordPress for seven years in a row, it’s hard to consider switching to another publishing platform. I have my gripes about WordPress and there are plenty of things that can improve the publishing process. However, after testing a few other open source alternatives, I was reminded of how many things I take for…
WordPress 3.8.3 was released today and fixes a pesky bug introduced in WordPress 3.8.2. As we reported a few days ago, one of the security fixes in 3.8.2 caused the Quick Draft dashboard widget to break. Auto-drafts created through the widget were not being promoted to draft status. When a title and content were added…
One of the biggest features to land in WordPress 3.7 were automatic updates. When automatic updates are completed, an email notification is sent to the address specified within Settings > General which is typically the website administrator. However, if you maintain websites for clients, you probably want those notifications to be forwarded to you and…