If the WordPress community is your only barometer of knowing how an open source community works together, then you might want to explore outside a bit further to gain a broader outlook on other cultures. Some of the differences are worth examining. A few days ago I noticed an interesting observation regarding the relationship between…
Contributors on the WordPress Meta team are responsible for WordPress.org and its associated sites, i.e. wordcamp.org, apps.wordpress.org, etc. The team works on supporting and improving these sites along with the build tools that are used by the other contributor groups. Folks often complain about how the sites work, but did you know that much of…
WordPress 4.0 “Benny” was released today, named for American jazz and swing musician Benny Goodman, also known as the “King of Swing.” Development for 4.0 kicked off at the end of April, led by Helen Hou-Sandí. This release includes hundreds of refinements and a few brand new features, culminating in a more polished media and…
WordPress 4.0 RC 1 is now available for download. Helen Hou-Sandí announced the release candidate today with an update to the project schedule. The official release was targeted for the week of August 25th but will likely be arriving the following week. “We hope to ship WordPress 4.0 next week, but we need your help…
WordPress global usage on the web is now at 23%, and this year marked the first time that non-English downloads surpassed the number of English downloads. Major internationalization improvements coming in 4.0 will open up the platform even more for those publishing in different languages. While discussing the upcoming language-related improvements at WordCamp Seattle this…
WordPress 4.0 release lead Helen Hou-Sandí recently gave an in-depth preview of the upcoming release at the WordPress NYC Meetup. Her presentation gives a complete overview of the new features that you will see in the official release next week. Part of Hou-Sandí’s responsibility as the release lead is to help shape the scope, goals…
The WordPress plugin installer page is about to get more colorful. The upcoming 4.0 release completely revamps the plugin search and installation process with plugin cards arranged in a new grid view. Andrew Nacin announced today that plugins will also have their own icons in the installer. Plugin authors are at liberty to create their…
The folks at WordPress.com VIP are continuing to add to Documattic, a repository dedicated to sharing presentations and resources with the WordPress community. While the repository already contains some solid resources for WordPress in enterprise and government, today’s addition may have the widest reach, as it pertains to user education. The WordPress.com VIP Superuser Training…
Something I’ve wanted to see in WordPress for a long time is the ability to determine which posts an image is being used on. WordPress 4.0 is expected to ship by the end of August and contains two subtle changes to image data in the media library. You’ll be able to view the author who…
If you use WordPress, chances are that you’ve run into the WordPress Codex. The Codex is a community maintained collection of documentation, hooks, filters, best practices, and other information related to WordPress. With various handbook projects underway, I’ve been wondering what the future of the Codex is. To find out, I got in touch with…
As I was listening to an interview with Chris Lema, I was surprised to hear how Crowd Favorite has offices setup across the world. Many of the WordPress agencies I’m familiar with are 100% distributed with one physical office. This is the first time I’ve heard of a WordPress development agency with multiple offices throughout…
WordPress users are strongly encouraged to update their sites to 3.9.2 as it’s a security focused release. According to the announcement, 3.9.2 fixes a possible denial of service issue in PHP’s XML processing. The bug was first reported by Nir Goldshlager of the Salesforce.com Product Security Team and was fixed by Michael Adams and Andrew…
The WordPress REST API is currently slated for inclusion in WordPress 4.1 and the API team is busy working towards that goal. Project contributors Ryan McCue and Rachel Baker have been on the road giving presentations to introduce developers to the API. They presented at WordCamp Milwaukee and WordCamp NYC, demonstrating how developers can use…
After using WordPress for seven years in a row, it’s hard to consider switching to another publishing platform. I have my gripes about WordPress and there are plenty of things that can improve the publishing process. However, after testing a few other open source alternatives, I was reminded of how many things I take for…
Oli Dale of WPLift, decided to leave comments open while having Akismet be the only anti-spam measure used. The result is 8,000 comments, most of which are spammy in nature. He sifted through 8,000 comments and published the results where he outlines the various techniques spammers are using to try to get past the filters.…