This has been an emotional, bittersweet morning for me, reading through old posts, as I close the book on my time at this beloved publication. Today is my last day before moving on to embrace a new challenge in the… Continue Reading →
WooCommerce 8.3 was released today, featuring Cart, Checkout, and Order Confirmation blocks as the default checkout flow for new installations. This is a major milestone in moving WooCommerce towards a block-first checkout experience. Version 8.3 was slightly delayed, as core… Continue Reading →
Elementor, the most popular website builder plugin for WordPress with more than 5 million active installations, has announced major changes coming to the features included in its Elementor Pro Essential subscription plan. The plan will still include the Theme Builder… Continue Reading →
Brainstorm Force, makers of the popular Astra theme, has invested in LatePoint, a commercial booking and appointment scheduling plugin for WordPress. LatePoint is used on 21,000 websites to enable bookings for small businesses, such as salons, therapists, doctors, spas, and… Continue Reading →
Moog is one of the latest free block themes to be released on WordPress.org. It features a minimal and bold layout with a responsive, masonry style grid on the homepage. Moog is well suited to blogs or even small magazine… Continue Reading →
WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy has published a proposed schedule for 2024 that includes three major core releases. The dates have not yet been set in stone but have been planned to avoid major holidays and WordPress events. The… Continue Reading →
Wordfence launched a bug bounty program today to provide financial incentive for security researchers reporting high risk vulnerabilities to the company’s program. After researchers disclose vulnerabilities to Wordfence, the company triages them and confidentially discloses them to the vendors to… Continue Reading →
WordPress contributors have worked quickly over the past 24 hours to prepare a 6.4.1 maintenance release after a critical bug emerged from a change in the Requests library, causing problems with updates on servers running older versions of cURL. Hosting… Continue Reading →
WordPress’ Performance team is proposing merging Performant Translations into core in time for the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release. After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translations can significantly impact server response times, the team discussed various solutions and landed… Continue Reading →
WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” was released today, named for famed American jazz pianist and singer Shirley Horn. This release introduces a new batch of writing and design tools that give users more powerful customization capabilities inside the editor. We covered most… Continue Reading →
Jetpack 12.8 was released this week, introducing Jetpack Creator, a new product under the Growth category that sits alongside the recently launched Newsletter product. Jetpack Creator is aimed at users who want to monetize their content and subscribers. It supports… Continue Reading →
Adam Schweigert, an independent media and technology consultant, has released a plugin called Newspack Plugin Update Checker that enables self-hosted Newspack users to keep their plugins up-to-date. The Newspack project was launched in 2019 by WordPress.com, with support from the… Continue Reading →
WordPress contributors have updated the Theme Handbook to include a new chapter on block templating. The chapter covers how the WordPress block template system works, how to build custom templates and parts and include them in a theme. This is… Continue Reading →
Wordfence CLI 2.0.1 introduced free vulnerability scanning this week. The new CLI product was launched at WordCamp US two months ago with malware detection capabilities, but the latest update brings in the most highly requested feature – vulnerability scanning at… Continue Reading →
WooCommerce is rebranding to “Woo,” a shorter, more playful version of the company name that many customers are already using. Automattic acquired WooCommerce in 2015, along with WooThemes. The open source commerce platform now powers more than 4.4 million live… Continue Reading →
Delivering on an highly-requested feature, Gutenberg contributors have made it possible to rename almost any block in the List View. Version 16.9 was released this week with the new feature, which builds on Gutenberg 16.7‘s introduction of the ability to… Continue Reading →
The upcoming 6.4 release, expected on November 7, will disable attachment pages for new installations. Up until now, WordPress automatically created attachment pages when users upload a file through the media upload system. It has been treated as a special… Continue Reading →
TaxoPress, a plugin that allows users to create and manage Tags, Categories, and taxonomy terms, has joined a growing number of WordPress products using AI to innovate and enhance user experience. The latest release adds support for OpenAI and IBM Watson to auto-detect… Continue Reading →
WordPress 6.4 RC2 was released this week with more than 25 issues resolved since RC1. These include a few cherry-picked commits from the Gutenberg repository, additional closed Trac tickets since RC 1, and more than a dozen housekeeping commits for… Continue Reading →
Automattic has acquired Texts, an all-in-one messaging platform, for $50 million. Texts is a newer company founded in 2020 that creates a centralized inbox for all major messaging platforms, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord…. Continue Reading →
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin, used on more than four million WordPress sites, has patched an XSS vulnerability in version 5.7. The plugin provides all-in-one site acceleration capabilities, server-level caching, and a collection of optimization features. It is compatible with WordPress… Continue Reading →
The Ollie block theme, created by Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner, now has a companion plugin available called Ollie Dash. The theme made headlines earlier this month after a contentious WordPress.org review process led its authors to remove the innovative… Continue Reading →
Elementor, the most popular website builder plugin for WordPress with more than 5 million active installations, has postponed its upcoming DreamWeb event. The Israel-based company was set to host its first in-person conference on November 2, in Berlin, Germany, but… Continue Reading →
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg will be delivering his annual State of the Word (SOTW) address from Madrid before a live audience on December 11, at 16:00 UTC. Last year’s event took place in New York City with attendance by invitation… Continue Reading →
WordPress.org has launched the redesign of the Showcase, with new block-based components, through a collaboration between the Design, Marketing, and Meta teams that began last year. It’s part of a larger effort to modernize WordPress.org and comes two months after… Continue Reading →
Kinsta launched its static site hosting product today, making a strong entrance into the market with a free tier that is competitive with established solutions from Vercel, Netlify, and GitHub Pages. Companies can host up to 100 static sites for… Continue Reading →
WordPress 6.4 is one step closer to prime time with RC1 available today. The dev notes are rolling out with details on technical improvements in the upcoming release –block hooks for dynamic blocks, improvements to template loading, changes to attachment… Continue Reading →
Adam Zieliński, creator of WordPress Playground, announced today that the WordPress Core PR previewer is now live. Playground is an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser. It creates a WordPress instance with admin access without… Continue Reading →
Gutenberg 16.8 was released this week with improvements to existing blocks and some experiments that lay the foundation for Phase 3 focused on collaboration. The Cover block now automatically sets an overlay color when a user applies the initial background image…. Continue Reading →
The WordPress Photos Directory crossed a major milestone this week, surpassing 10,000 photos. It’s a growing resource that exists to provide free, publicly-contributed, CC0-licensed photographs. Every photo submitted is moderated by a volunteer. I’m super excited about this milestone,” Photos… Continue Reading →
