In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week including, WooCommerce’s 42% market share, the redesign concept of WordPress.org, and two plugin acquisitions. I also share details of a side project I’m working on that involves BuddyPress. Last but not least, we briefly discuss Jeff King’s impact on…
WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” was released today, named in honor of American jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan. This release makes significant improvements to the new theme setup experience, inspiring the tagline: “Your site, your way.” Twenty Seventeen is making its debut in 4.7 as the first default theme designed for business websites. It beautifully showcases new…
Earlier this year, Automattic added visual icons to the WordPress.com customizer after user testing showed users tried clicking on the parts of the page they wanted to edit, rather than searching through the menus in the customizer. In an effort to see if the same could be done for the self-hosted version of WordPress, Payton Swick…
When images are uploaded in WordPress 4.6.1 that have an empty alt text value, WordPress tries to generate one based on the caption text or the image title. If the image title is non descriptive as is common with photos uploaded from digital cameras, the alt text can be meaningless. In WordPress 4.7, the caption text and the image…
Back in August, we highlighted potential changes to the WordPress editor that would improve the user experience. The team has since implemented some of the suggestions outlined in ticket #27159 into WordPress 4.7, including rearranging some of the toolbar buttons. The headers drop-down menu is now in the top row of buttons while the strikethrough…
WordPress 4.7 Beta 1 was released this evening with a long list of highlighted features that are certain to delight both end users and developers. Core contributors are asking for testing and feedback on some of the larger items ahead of the official release, slated for December 6. Twenty Seventeen and its support for atmospheric…
WordPress 4.7 will ship with a new default theme in December. David Kennedy merged Twenty Seventeen into core yesterday as his first commit to WordPress. Any remaining development issues for the project will now be managed via Trac. In the merge proposal, Kennedy described Twenty Seventeen as “an ambitious theme that focuses on a creative…
After a lengthy and impassioned meeting in the WordPress #core Slack channel on Monday evening, the WP REST API content endpoints were conditionally approved for merge into 4.7. Since that time Brian Krogsgard published a document with input from the team on how they plan to measure the success of the API. The conditions included…
Customize Changesets, the technical term for the infrastructure in the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, was merged into WordPress 4.7 yesterday. The project, formerly known as Customizer Transactions, brings the underlying architecture required for the ability to save a session as a draft. It enables WordPress to save a set of changes made in the Customizer…
The WP REST API team and WordPress core contributors met tonight to decide whether to merge the content endpoints in 4.7. After the merge proposal was published a week ago, several core developers expressed concern regarding the brokered authentication scheme and the team has since decided to remove it from the proposal in favor of…
Over the weekend, the WP REST API team published a proposal to merge the API endpoints for content types into WordPress 4.7. This is the second in a two-part proposal, which merged the infrastructure for the API into core in October 2015. Since that time the team has worked on polishing the content endpoints and…
WordPress users who protect posts with passwords will soon have the option to make their passwords more secure. The upcoming 4.7 release brings resolution to a 12-year old ticket requesting an increase in the number of characters allowed for passwords on password-protected posts. Users will now be able to protect their posts with 255-character passwords,…
WordPress lead developer and 4.7 release lead Helen Hou-Sandí unveiled the design for the Twenty Seventeen default theme today and confirmed that it will be part of the upcoming release. Mel Choyce, a core contributor and design engineer at Automattic, is credited with the design of the new theme, which falls into the business or…
WordPress 4.7 development officially kicked off at today’s meeting in the #core Slack channel. This release is being led by lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí who has selected Aaron Jorbin and Jeff Paul as release deputies. The first item on the agenda was an update on the upcoming 4.6.1 maintenance release. Jeremy Felt reported that the…