WordPress core developer John Blackbourn sparked a heated discussion yesterday when he posted an image of his WordPress User Switching plugin ranking higher for the WordPress.com listing than the page on WordPress.org. Blackbourn later apologized for the inflammatory wording of the original post, but maintains that .com plugin listings being displayed higher in search results…
It has be nearly one year since WordPress silently turned off active install growth data for plugins hosted in the official plugin repository, a key metric that many developers rely on for accurate tracking and product decision-making. “Insufficient data obfuscation” was cited as the reason for the charts’ removal, but this opaque decision landed without…
Earlier this year, the WordPress Training Team published the results from the Individual Learner Survey completed in 2022. The goal of the survey was to identify the most useful and high-impact resources and content for Learn.WordPress.org and guide the future development of this community learning tool. One of the main takeaways of this survey was…
10up, a leading development agency and contributor to the WordPress project, has merged with Fueled, a technology consultancy that specializes in mobile and web application development. Together, the companies now employ more than 400 full time team members, forming a digital powerhouse with expanded market reach across mobile and publishing sectors. “Fueled has built stand out…
WP Includes is a new initiative that launched this week with the goal of improving equal representation of women at global WordPress companies. It was founded by Human Made COO Siobhan McKeown and XWP Director of Engineering Francesca Marano. “I’ve been in WordPress a long time and I’ve met a lot of talented women but not enough in leadership roles. It’s…
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), one of the plugins WP Engine acquired from Delicious Brains in 2022, has published the results if its first annual survey. Although ACF reports more than 4.5 million active users, including PRO site installs, the survey only gathered feedback from 2,031 respondents. These results are more representative of the plugin’s developer community, as…
Gutenberg 16.6 is available with progress on a feature that was formerly called auto-inserting blocks but has now been renamed to block hooks. In a previous release (16.4), Gutenberg introduced auto-inserting blocks as an experimental feature that allows plugin developers to specify a location in which the block will be automatically inserted, such as before…
Media Temple (MT) is closing its doors after 24 years in the hosting industry, with the brand now retired and customers fully migrated to GoDaddy. In 2013, GoDaddy acquired MT “to win the hearts and minds of developers,” as then-CEO Blake Irving told VentureBeat at the time. When it was purchased, the highly regarded brand…
WooCommerce is experimenting with improving the store experience through the addition of the Interactivity API to the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. The new API, which was announced earlier this year, will allow developers to build interactive blocks that support frontend experiences where visitors can interact with content without having to refresh the page. The WordPress contributors…
Human Made, a leading enterprise WordPress agency, is organizing a followup event to the community’s first ever AI for WordPress virtual conference that it hosted in May 2023. The second edition is called “AI: The Next Chapter” and will take place online on September 14, 2023, at 10AM EST. The first event had 13 speakers…
After an accumulation of undisclosed and unpatched vulnerabilities in plugins hosted on WordPress.org, Patchstack has reported 404 plugins to WordPress’ Plugin Review Team. “This situation creates a significant risk for the WordPress community, and we decided to take action,” Patchstack researcher Darius Sveikauskas said. “Since these developers have been unreachable, we sent the full list…
Kevin Ohashi from Review Signal has published his 2023 WordPress and WooCommerce hosting performance benchmarks. This is his 10th round of capturing performance data from hosting companies that opt into the testing. Ohashi’s methodology tests two metrics through a variety of methods: peak performance and consistency. The benchmarks include a LoadStorm test designed to simulate real…
After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translations can impact server response times, WordPress contributors proposed half a dozen technical solutions for consideration to improve performance for the ~56% of sites that use translations. Performant Translations, a feature project by the core Performance Team, is now available as a plugin on WordPress.org. It…
A collection of leading WordPress agencies have launched a collaborative project to promote the platform to large-scale organizations. Big Bite, in partnership with 10up, Alley, Human Made, Inpsyde, and XWP, have published a free WordPress for Enterprise guide that includes contributions from Google and WordPress VIP. The guide highlights many high profile companies and organizations…
WordPress.com is now selling a 100-year plan, one of the longest available in the industry, for a one-time payment of $38,000. It includes managed WordPress hosting (whatever that looks like in 100 years), multiple backups across geographically distributed data centers, submission to the Internet Archive if the site is public, 24/7 dedicated support, and a…