photo credit: Brodie Vissers WordPress 5.5 has already been downloaded more than 4 million times after its release earlier this week, and it’s time to kick off work on 5.6. Josepha Haden will be leading the release alongside coordinator Dee Teal, with additional leads for Triage (Tonya Mork), Core Tech (Helen Hou-Sandì), Editor Tech (Isabel […]
This was supposed to be the year that ushered in a revolution in how we work. Remote jobs would become a common practice, spurred on by the global COVID-19 pandemic. A time when everyone would start paying attention to those radical ideas from remote work evangelists such as Matt Mullenweg. The question is whether this
It is an age-old question. OK, well, it’s really a 10-year-old feature request, but that is age-old in software development years. Should WordPress have a local avatar system? Let’s be honest. Most of us have kind of gritted our teeth and quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — lived with the Automattic-owned properties that
The world of open source tooling has expanded to welcome JSHint, as the project’s maintainers have finally completed the necessary work to adopt the MIT Expat license. Previously, the JavaScript linter’s code was partially published under the JSON license, with an additional seemingly innocuous clause that stated: “The Software shall be used for Good, not
In light of the recent conversations about the Unsplash plugin’s CDN, several extensions have popped up this week for disabling it. By default, the plugin serves images from the CDN but saves copies to the WordPress media library in case the plugin is disabled or removed. The plugin does not currently have an option to
On Wednesday, the Gutenberg team pushed what was primarily minor enhancements and bug fixes to the WordPress platform’s primary project. Everyone is mostly gearing up for the WordPress 5.5 release, so we are not seeing any major features dropping at the moment. However, steady work continues on improving the Gutenberg plugin. Gutenberg 8.7 contains over
A short while ago, Justin Tadlock posted an article titled Are Plugin Authors to Blame for the Poor Admin Notices Experience?. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading his article. It describes in detail one question I’ve been pondering since I originally posted the WP Notify feature project proposal almost a year ago now: Will
Automattic’s relaunch of P2 is now in Beta. This is the long-awaited update to the company’s internal collaboration software that is also used on WordPress.org and other self-hosted sites via a theme. For years, Automattic, which now counts more than 1,200 employees in 77 countries, has had P2 at the core of its written communication
Iain Poulson announced that Plugin Rank is open to the public yesterday. It is a new service that allows plugin authors to track their rankings by keyword on the official WordPress plugin directory. The service is geared toward plugin authors with freemium offerings. The tools were already in place for Poulson to build the service.
Last week, Automattic’s marketing team made a positive step towards curbing the perennial branding confusion between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The company’s press page was updated with a notice to journalists who are writing about Automattic: Automattic owns and operates WordPress.com, which is a hosted version of the open source WordPress software with added features for security,
With the WordPress 5.5 development cycle coming to a close, it is time to begin mapping out what features should land in WordPress 5.6 later this year. Earlier today, Chloe Bringmann asked the community to chime in with its wish list on the Make Core blog. As usual, I have a few thoughts. I tend
A Big Orange Heart, formerly known as WP&UP, has opened its 2020 Remote Work Wellbeing and Mental Health Survey. The charity organization focuses on supporting remote working communities with education and resources for mental and physical health. It is also home to a community of more than 4,700 members who support each other in growing
