Automattic-owned WordPress.com launched its new Story-publishing feature today. Currently, only users with the WordPress for Android or iOS apps can add stories. Self-hosted users with Jetpack-connected sites can publish via the mobile apps too. The development team previewed the Story feature in January, launching a public beta on the Android app. Stories are essentially media…
WordPress.com launched a new website building service today with prices starting at $4,900. Automattic has been beta testing the service since the last quarter of 2020. The product announcement invites customers to let WordPress.com’s professional team “translate your vision into a compelling and modern website” but does not specify pricing for more customized websites: Whether you…
The Conservative Treehouse, a political publication hosted on WordPress.com for the past 10 years, is moving to a new host after receiving a notice from Automattic regarding violations of its Terms of Service. The site’s owner, previously identified as Florida resident Mark Bradman, claims to have a 500,000 – 1,000,000 unique readers per day. He…
Automattic released over 100 block patterns to its users on WordPress.com last week. Patterns are a set of blocks that users can insert into their posts or pages for predefined yet customizable sections of content. Most of WordPress.com’s new patterns are general enough in design to cover a range of uses. However, the choices also…
WordPress.com has announced plans to create a new, open source publishing platform that caters to small and medium-sized news organizations. The Google News Initiative has contributed $1.2 million towards the development of “Newspack” on top of WordPress.com’s infrastructure. Automattic and Google have joined with other contributing partners from the broader world of journalism for a…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss what’s new in WordPress 5.0.3. We share insight into a new feature in WordPress 5.1 that will protect users from fatal errors or more commonly known as the white screen of death. We discuss the WordPress Governance Project and WordPress’ leadership overall throughout the past few…
WordPress.com is kicking off 2019 with a new national marketing campaign that features 14 entrepreneurs, writers, and non-profit organizations who are using the platform to make a big difference for their communities. The campaign is focused around the question: “What Would You Do If You Could Do Anything?” WordPress.com published its inaugural ‘Anything Is Possible’…
WordPress.com launched a new Activity feature today, a tool for monitoring changes that occur on the site and actions initiated through the admin. It’s also available for Jetpack-enabled sites and the activity log can be viewed on WordPress.com or on the WordPress mobile apps. Activity logs the following actions and presents them in an easy-to-read…
As part of the roadmap unveiled at WordCamp EU earlier this year, WordPress.com has started rolling out Gutenberg to a subset of users. According to a WordPress.com Happiness Engineer, the team is testing the implementation to determine the best way and time to enable it. Users will not be able to use Gutenberg unless their…
WordPress.com came under fire this week for hosting a site with conspiracy theories claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax. The New York Times published an article titled “This Company Keeps Lies About Sandy Hook on the Web,” setting off a hailstorm of angry posts on social media that demanded Automattic take…
WordPress.com has partnered with Pexels, a popular stock photo library, to offer convenient access to stock photos inside the post editor. Hundreds of high quality free stock photo sites have cropped up on the web over the past few years, but Pexels is differentiating itself with a commitment to hosting diversity-focused images and videos that…
WordPress.com now supports seamless integration between Google Photos and the WordPress media library. Users can connect their Google accounts to have access to their photos when inserting an image. Google Photos has gained popularity due to its automatic tagless organization and free, unlimited backup for photos and videos up to 16MP and 1080p HD. In…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I open the show by discussing our observations of social media lately. Our feeds are filled with anger and for me personally, Twitter is becoming less useful. We discussed the news of the week, including a lengthy conversation about Automattic opening up the WordPress.org ecosystem of plugins and…
Earlier this year, WordPress.com launched an experiment giving Business plan subscribers the ability to install third-party plugins and themes. Automattic concluded the experiment earlier this week and officially made the features part of the subscription plan. “With support for plugins and third-party themes, WordPress.com Business users will be able to connect their sites to great…
WordPress.com is venturing into the realm of social media management applications with its latest feature that allows users to schedule Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn updates for individual posts. This goes beyond the basic Publicize functionality that automatically shares posts to connected accounts as soon as they are published, giving users the ability to automate their…