In this episode, John James Jacoby joins me to discuss the news of the week. We give our take on the new WordPress.com commercials and whether or not they hit the mark. We share what’s new in Storefront 2.2.0 and the problems some people are facing trying to get visas to attend WordCamp Europe. Last…
In Matt Mullenweg’s 2016 State of the Word, he announced the WordPress Growth Council. The council was created as a think-tank for individuals and organizations in the WordPress community to share ideas on how best to tell WordPress’ story to grow market share. The Growth Council serves as a collaborative means to combat the more than $300M in…
One of the most important things that distinguishes self-hosted WordPress from WordPress.com is the ability to install custom themes and plugins. A recent change to WordPress.com’s Business Plan removes this limitation, allowing customers to install most third-party plugins and themes. In a WordPress.com support thread created in February, a user asked how to install plugins…
“Alexa, tell Blog Helper to create a new post called ‘Granny’s banana bread recipe.’” Imagine logging a new draft on your WordPress site using only your voice while working in the kitchen. That’s what Blog Helper, an Alexa skill, enables for WordPress.com and self-hosted Jetpack users. It is available for free in Amazon’s catalog of…
UK government officials are targeting online service providers after terrorist Khalid Masood killed four people and injured more than two dozen in an attack in Westminster last week. In an article published on the Telegraph Sunday morning, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd called on Google, Twitter, and Facebook to take action on extremist content. She…
Today Jetpack announced that its users now have access to a collection of 165 free themes from WordPress.com. Jetpack users can browse, preview, and activate themes by visiting the WordPress.com Theme Showcase. WordPress.com has also added the ability for Jetpack users to upload a theme from its interface as well, a feature that targets those…
WordPress.com has unveiled a refreshed post editor that makes content front and center. The most noticeable change is the user interface. The sidebar of meta boxes is now on the right-hand side instead of the left. Clicking the Post Settings link hides the sidebar, providing a cleaner interface. The preview and publish buttons are no…
WordPress.com released its new Chrome Add-on for Google Docs today. The free add-on allows users to edit documents collaboratively in Google Docs and then send the document directly to any WordPress.com site as a draft post. The add-on can also connect to Jetpack-enabled sites, offering the same functionality for self-hosted WordPress users. After installing the…
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 transformative model we were aiming…
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 a number of client sites…
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 that people kept asking me…
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, recipe sites, and local listings.…
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 available to WordPress.com Business Plan…
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 that was not previously available.…
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 larger volume of notifications might…