WordPress News

Five years of Yoast

Brian Krogsgard

May 22, 2015

Joost de Valk sent a newsletter this morning noting that Yoast has been in business for five years. It's hard to believe just five years ago he had a job working for someone else. Now they are a team of…

Transparency in WordPress businesses

Brian Krogsgard

May 21, 2015

Business

I love seeing companies open up and share their business details. Income and transparency reports have become more and more popular. Alex Turnbull, of Groove, notes why transparency alone should not be just about the numbers: Why is transparency effective? Because…

A couple more notes on the WooThemes acquisition

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

Business

Thank you to all members for your patience on the newsletter, as I spent a great deal of time on the WooThemes acquisition post. I have a couple of thoughts I thought I'd leave specifically for you. New space in…

Automattic has acquired WooThemes, makers of WooCommerce

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

BusinessHosting

Matt Mullenweg announced today that Automattic has acquired WooThemes, whose flagship product is the popular eCommerce plugin, WooCommerce. All 55 team members at WooThemes will join Automattic, swelling ranks at Automattic by around 18%.

UI and password initiatives for WordPress 4.3

Brian Krogsgard

May 12, 2015

DesignSecurity

Two of the initiatives for WordPress 4.3 are for further improving WordPress (especially mobile) UI and re-evaluating password management. Starting Thursday, lead developer Helen Housandí will host UI chats in the WordPress Slack #design channel. Additionally, lead developer Mark Jaquith further laid…

In defense of WordPress

Brian Krogsgard

May 9, 2015

Security

Mattias Geniar gives WordPress a pat on the back for how the project has handled recent security vulnerabilities. At PHP conferences, WordPress often serves as a punching bag. Nearly every talk that discusses code quality brings in WordPress and compares…

The trojan emoji

Brian Krogsgard

May 8, 2015

DevelopmentMake WordPress

Andrew Nacin, lead developer of WordPress, just finished a talk at Loopconf, where he talked about a series of related WordPress security fixes that spanned two years, with the final fix included into WordPress core under the guise of emoji support.

How to create better, more accessible WordPress themes

Sami Keijonen

May 7, 2015

DesignDevelopment

Accessibility is an important part of modern web development. It is our responsibility as creators of WordPress themes to make them accessible to all users, on any device. In this article, I'll offer some simple tips to create better, more accessible WordPress themes.

WordPress 4.2.2 released to protect against critical security bug in Genericons

Brian Krogsgard

May 6, 2015

Security

WordPress 4.2.2 was released this evening in order to protect against a critical security bug in Genericons. From the release post: The Genericons icon font package, which is used in a number of popular themes and plugins, contained an HTML…

One year of Post Promoter Pro

Brian Krogsgard

May 6, 2015

Business

We often hear of big fails and big success stories with WordPress plugins and products. It was refreshing to hear Chris Klosowski blog about his experience selling Post Promoter Pro, his commercial buffer-style plugin that has done okay, but certainly…

OptinMonster goes SaaS in effort to cater for more hosting environments and non-WordPress platforms

Brian Krogsgard

May 6, 2015

BusinessHosting

OptinMonster has changed the very core of their product today, and it is now a standalone SaaS (software as a service) product, versus a plugin that runs on users' servers.

Audience Ops aims to offer regular editorial content for your business blog

Brian Krogsgard

May 1, 2015

Business

Brian Casel, who is half of the Bootstrapped Web podcast and the founder of Restaurant Engine, has a new project called Audience Ops. Audience Ops is a recurring service business that offers content marketing for online businesses. Brian is a…

Automatically expire passwords for WordPress users

Brian Krogsgard

April 29, 2015

Security

Frankie Jarrett has created yet another handy plugin, this time to auto expire passwords for users of certain roles based on a customizable number of days. This plugin could be handy for organizations that require password resets, or just for…

Sync adds customer maintenance reports to their site management tool

Brian Krogsgard

April 29, 2015

Business

iThemes Sync has a decent amount of competition between ManageWP, Jetpack Manage, and others that offer site management services that allow you to manage and update themes, plugins, and WordPress core. But they've recently come out with a feature that…

Hosting giant Endurance slammed by “independent research” company with suspect motivations

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

Hosting

I looked into this story for hours, and have concluded that the doomsday scenario described in the headline on Business Week and the report by Gotham City Researchers are exaggerated at best. Gotham City Research publishes these reports depicting crash…

Advantages of ems and rems over pixels

Brian Krogsgard

April 28, 2015

Design

I've long preferred a mix of ems rems (and percentages for that matter) over pixels in web design and front-end development. However, some of the original reasons have gone away as browsers have gotten smarter. Yet, Vasilis van Gemert has collected…