WP Engine is currently on the hunt to hire two developers to work on the open source WordPress project full-time. This is a relatively new trend that has caught on among companies that sell WordPress products and/or services. Last November, 10up announced that it would be sponsoring Helen Hou-Sandi to work full-time on WordPress core.…
WordPress doesn’t have built-in support for developers working in multiple environments, i.e. local, staging, and production. It’s no surprise, given that this workflow isn’t part of the vast majority of users’ lives when publishing with WordPress. Nevertheless, running a separate development site can be a complex and tedious endeavor and WordPress doesn’t make it very…
The “Press This” browser bookmarklet in WordPress is on its way to a complete redesign via the features-as-plugins development path. If you’ve never used it before, the feature allows you to make quick posts to your WordPress site from anywhere on the web. It’s actually a pretty smart tool for posting and can automatically detect…
This month marks a big milestone for WordPress in Vietnamese. It is now 100% translated, thanks in large part to the folks at foobla who volunteered a great deal of time and effort on the final push to finish translating the software into Vietnamese. New WordPress translations don’t magically happen – they actually take quite…
Many native English speakers take WordPress’ famous 5-minute installation process for granted. Have you every wondered how much of a hurdle it might be to try to install the software when English is not your first language? Andrew Nacin recently published an extensive plan to tackle this problem and a host of others with internationalization…
While WordPress 3.8 and 3.9 substantially improved the theme experience within WordPress, the plugins page hasn’t had the same treatment. In fact, the page hasn’t changed much since 2.7. However, that may change as Alex Shiels has proposed a detailed outline explaining the improvements and changes he’d like to see. According to Shiels, the goal…
WordPress core contributors came to a consensus today during the development meeting regarding the immediate future of the JSON REST API project. Ryan McCue and his team released version 1.0 over the weekend and have been pushing hard for it to be ready for the upcoming 4.0 release. When I spoke with McCue yesterday about…
Late last week, Yan Zhu, a Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation publicly disclosed a security vulnerability she discovered with WordPress.com and how it handles cookies. More specifically, she discovered the “wordpress_logged_in” cookie being sent in the clear to a WordPress authentication endpoint. She was able to use the authenticated cookie to publish blog…
Today marks 11 years since the very first official public release of WordPress. Reading through that changelog will make you smile and realize how far the software has come since the early days when its main competitors were Textpattern and Movable Type. Fast forward 11 years and WordPress now powers 22% of the web with…
At the contributor day event for WordCamp San Francisco 2013, breakout sessions were created to explore ideas on the best ways to teach people how to work with WordPress themes. One of the ideas being pursued are lesson modules. The modules explain all the aspects of developing, editing, and learning about themes. Despite a lot…
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a plugin author requests administrator access to your site for troubleshooting purposes? That’s the question posed by WPBeginner along with a couple of tips to help you decide whether you answer yes or no. Over the years, I’ve given access to a couple of plugin authors…
WordPress 3.9.1 was released late last week, resolving 34 bugs. This maintenance release includes several important fixes for multisite, TinyMCE, the customizer, widgets, and the new audio/video playlists. Site administrators who are still doing manual updates are encouraged to bring their sites up to the latest. WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin reported that in the…
Accessibility is one of those areas of WordPress contribution that hardly ever ends up in the spotlight. Much of the work that goes on in this area is invisible to the vast majority of users. Accessibility experts are generally in shorter supply than other types of contributors as well. Why aren’t more people involved in…
If you find yourself constantly referring to the Codex or searching for a commonly used template function, consider bookmarking this WordPress Cheat Sheet created by Trevor Niemi. Launched in February of this year, Niemi created the site after seeing a pixelated image of the same information published to Reddit. When asked how often the site…
Andrew Nacin announced today that Helen Hou-Sandí will be the release lead for WordPress 4.0, which kicks off development today during the regularly scheduled meeting in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel. Two guest committers, Dominik Schilling (@ocean90) and Sergey Biryukov (@SergeyBiryukov) have both been granted permanent commit access. An important development meeting was held yesterday, where…