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 (more…)
WordPress.com launched browser notifications this week, a feature that delivers instant notifications of site activity to Chrome and Firefox users. Notifications are opt-in, so users will need to enable them before they will be active. Fortunately, they are also configurable on a per-site and per-activity basis, otherwise users with a (more…)
WordPress.com is finally adding sharing buttons for some of the world’s most widely used messaging apps. Users can now add WhatsApp, Telegram, and Skype to the lineup by editing the sharing buttons for their sites. Private groups and messaging are rapidly overtaking social networking. This was the driving factor behind (more…)
WordPress.com announced today that it has turned on encryption for custom domains. The network’s subdomains have been HTTPS-enabled since 2014 as part of the Reset the Net campaign against mass surveillance. Today Automattic expanded HTTPS coverage to more than one million custom domains hosted on the network. Last April the (more…)
Between posts and comments, WordPress.com is an enormous hub of activity. The service recently published its 2015 year in review and the numbers are staggering. Last year, users published 660M posts that generated more than 655M comments. The review looks back at posts that went viral, books published by (more…)
Today Automattic announced that the WordPress.com desktop app is now open source and available on GitHub under the GPLv2 (or later). A Linux version joins the OS X and Windows apps that were released at the end of November and early December, making desktop publishing accessible to users on all (more…)
Last week Automattic unveiled Project Calypso, a brand new architecture for WordPress.com and a Mac app that mirrors the experience on desktop. The overhaul was nearly two years in the making, a risky bet for Automattic but one that shows a glimpse of what the future of WordPress could be. (more…)
WordPress.com has unveiled a new user interface called the Action Bar. It’s a bar that shows up in the bottom right corner of the screen for logged in users and is accessible from any device. The bar performs multiple tasks depending on the page you’re on. When on a WordPress.com (more…)
If you use the sharing feature on WordPress.com, you may have noticed an anomaly between your post title and what’s shared to social services. Since the post title is the first field to complete when writing a post, it makes sense to fill it in even if it’s a work in (more…)
WordPress.com announced major improvements to its Stats feature today. The new Insights tab gives users a bird’s eye view of posting activity and visitor trends. The Stats panel now displays all-time numbers for posts, views, visitors, and the day the site received the most number of views. Insights also calculates (more…)
Since writing about o2, Automattic’s successor to the P2 theme in 2013, a number of readers have requested updates on the project’s status. When asked about the project in a recent interview, Matt Mullenweg explained that despite loving the project and truly believing in it, work on o2 has shifted (more…)
On this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week. We inform you of the recent security vulnerability discovered in Jetpack and the Twenty Fifteen theme. We also discuss a new crowdfunding campaign to create a server manager built on top of WordPress called (more…)