🎙️ I had a decent amount of time to listen to podcasts this week, including a few that are new to my rotation. Here are the best "new to me" podcasts I've found: WPandUP's #PressForward podcast had an episode with…
Automattic has acquired Prospress, the makers of WooCommerce Subscriptions -- WooCommerce's highest revenue-generating extension -- for an undisclosed sum.
Mika Epstein has published a proposal to modify the WordPress plugin guidelines. 🔌 Mika's plan covers several areas but focuses on advertising and the clutter of the WordPress dashboard: Our understanding is that a cluttered and unmanageable Dashboard upsets users,…
The WordPress theme review team is adopting a new policy: Trusted Authors "will need to review [one] ticket a month to be able to have their themes set live." 🎫 Some folks have chimed in on this policy, including Justin…
Danny Cooper talks about some common mistakes in submissions to the WordPress.org theme directory. Danny, who has reviewed over 100 themes, discusses naming issues, unescaped output, untranslatable text, prefixing, licensing, and other potential pitfalls.
WordPress.com is preparing a feature for subscriptions (donations and recurring payments) on WP.com sites. 💳 Automattic Happiness Engineer Maria Górska posted a link on Twitter for the beta program sign up form and is looking for feedback, especially from "independent…
Do you think procrastination is about laziness and lack of self-control? Charlotte Lieberman explains in The New York Times why that's not true. This article also has some excellent tips for finding healthier ways to manage the feelings that typically trigger procrastination. 😴
If you follow AMP-related news, then you might have heard that Google is creating "dedicated placement" in search results for AMP Stories. AMP Story creators will soon be able to embed new types of content — specifically Twitter posts, Google…
Google is launching Portals — a navigation system for Chrome that seeks to replace iframes. Portals may not gain traction, but it does seem like an improvement on iframes, which everyone seems to hate. 😠
Alicja Snarska tells the story of how her dream job at Microsoft turned into a nightmare. I came away from this article appreciating the value of life/work balance more and a workplace where you are respected, even if it's on…
Pavel Ciorici explains why WPZoom was delisted from Google search results and what it took to get relisted. 😖 The problem was a backlink in the footer of WPZoom themes. Some advice from Pavel: Only use the footer backlinks with…
Many US government sites use Drupal, but the State Department appears to have switched to WordPress. It uses the Underscores theme, along with the Yoast and Gravity Forms plugins.
Here are two useful posts from Brent Roose about PHP topics. The first article covers the upcoming enhancements in PHP 7.4, and the second article reflects on how far PHP and PHP frameworks have come: PHP isn't just WordPress anymore... WordPress…