Medium started 2017 on uncertain footing, laying off a third of its staff in January after admitting that its ad-based business model was not working. “We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the (more…)
If you logged into WooCommerce.com over the weekend, you may have noticed a distinct change. In order to sign into the site, users are now required to have a WordPress.com account. The change occurred without warning and surprised those who manage multiple WooCommerce stores for clients. Brad Griffin, who maintains (more…)
This post was contributed by guest author Sami Keijonen. Sami is a math teacher who enjoys learning about the web, accessibility, and WordPress. He juggles between freelancing, building themes at Foxland, and teaching. I’ve been doing several WordPress Theme Shop interviews lately. The original reason for the interviews was (more…)
When Google first launched AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), its open source initiative to speed up the mobile web, the project focused on getting publishers on board. AMP pages were featured in the “Top Stories” carousel and soon adoption of AMP grew beyond news publishers to other industries such as e-commerce, (more…)
WordPress.com is a service that doesn’t allow users to install plugins to add functionality. Because of this, users are at the mercy of WordPress.com and the tools it offers for managing SEO. These tools have expanded with the ability to create custom meta descriptions, custom title formats, and live previews now (more…)
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…)