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 Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp in…
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 company joined Mozilla, Cisco, EFF…
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 authors, and coverage of world…
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 major operating systems. The apps…
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. The new JavaScript and REST…
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 powered site that you’re not…
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 progress. The sharing module on…
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 the most popular day of…
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 to other parts of WordPress.com…
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 HostPress. I shared a personal…
In March 2014, WordPress.com opened its marketplace to new theme authors. Prior to that time, new sellers were added via invitation only. A year ago there were only 300 themes available to WordPress.com users, but after having the marketplace open to new authors that count is up to 345. Recently the submission form disappeared from…
WordPress.com now supports oEmbeds for CartoDB, a tool used to create and share interactive maps. Simply copy and paste a CartoDB map URL into the WordPress.com post editor and a live preview will display. Here’s an example of a map using the standard HTML embed code. According to an announcement on the official CartoDB blog,…
In August of 2013, Automattic was criticized for its role in taking down Oliver Hotham’s website after the Straight Pride UK group filed a DMCA takedown notice with WordPress.com. In the Guardian article, WordPress.com admitted that the takedown notice was an abuse of the law. In November of 2013, Automattic announced that it teamed up…
In the last year or so, WordPress.com has been experimenting with a new post editor. As a user of WordPress.com, I clicked the add new post button and was shocked to discover an entirely different interface than what I’m used to. Continuously pushing improvements across the platform with little to no announcement and measuring feedback…
Those who use the self hosted version of WordPress have access to WordCamps, annual conferences dedicated to WordPress. Meanwhile, there has never been a conference focused on WordPress.com. Press Publish is a new series of events focused on WordPress.com and Jetpack. The first is scheduled for March 28th, 2015 in Portland, OR. There’s also a…