John James Jacoby

featured article

WordPress Business Roundup for the Week of November 14

Photo of author
Dan Knauss
Tom Willmot on the Challenges and Opportunities  Facing Enterprise WordPress • Tom Lach on the costs of rapid growth — It's not for everyone • The Future of GiveWP and the Block Editor • Evolving Edupack — and Sunsetting It • and more...
Latest articles

Naming is hard—but important

Photo of author
Dan Knauss
This is an important topic that came out of a Post Status Slack #security discussion involving Robert Rowley and John James Jacoby: WordPress Terminology Meta. It continued over at the WPwatercooler.

Post Status Excerpt (No. 70) — Trust and Distrust: Microaggressions, Active Install Growth Data for Plugins, and Open Source Security

Photo of author
Dan Knauss
In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, Dan and Ny take on three issues in the WordPress community that can threaten or impair trust while also revealing how foundational trust and healthy communication are: 1) racism and microaggressions, 2) the sudden removal and uncertain fate of the active install growth chart in the WordPress.org plugin repository, and 3) open source and security. Briefly discussed: emerging US federal policy that aims to secure open-source software. Zero-trust architecture might work well for networked machines, but human relationships and communities need trust.

Active Install Charts Removed from Plugin Repo

Photo of author
Dan Knauss
In reaction to as-yet-unpublicized details about the abuse of active install data in the WordPress.org plugin repository, the charts displaying that data have been removed from plugin pages in a move expected to be temporary. Important (and some familiar) questions are emerging as this story unfolds: how to balance the values of openness, security, and privacy as well as cooperation and competition at WordPress.org — still the central hub for WordPress plugin businesses.

A Taxonomy of Access Control

Photo of author
Dan Knauss
Once you know these states, you can assign probabilities of transitioning from one state to another (someone hacks your account and locks you out, you forgot your own password, etc.) and then build optimal security and reliability to deal with it. It’s a truly elegant way of conceptualizing the problem.

Open Secrets: Forced Updates in WordPress

Photo of author
Dan Knauss
We've seen forced updates become increasingly common and less controversial over time. But who decides, and how is that decision made? Are there unofficial channels and processes, like a decision tree, for escalating to a forced update?

John James Jacoby explains the addon…

Photo of author
Dan Knauss

John James Jacoby explains the addon “took almost an entire year to invent, test, and deploy… We ported the RRULE spec directly to PHP from the iCalendar RFC, because nothing existed to do what we needed.”

John James Jacoby has created a…

Photo of author
Dan Knauss

John James Jacoby has created a utility called Persistent Dismissible. Here's how he describes it, in his words: "How many times have you written some WordPress code to help you with storing the state of whether-or-not a logged-in user clicked…

There are some very good (and…

Photo of author
Dan Knauss

There are some very good (and some funny), recent Twitter threads here full of people sharing their "WordPress stories." Thanks to John James Jacoby for asking! 😄

Building Your First WordPress Plugin: Live Webinar Friday

Photo of author
Dan Knauss

Join WP core contributor and developer John James Jacoby for this live coding workshop on Friday, June 26, from 1-3 p.m. Central.  JJJ will walk through best practices and steps for building your first WordPress plugin. JJJ is co-author of…

New books 📚 of note: Building…

Photo of author
Dan Knauss

New books 📚 of note: Building Web Apps with WordPress: WordPress as an Application Framework by Brian Messenlehner and Jason Coleman is available in print and digital forms from O'Reilly. Justin Tadlock, Brad Williams, and John James Jacoby will be publishing…

bbPress 2.6.0 is out after only…

Photo of author
Dan Knauss

bbPress 2.6.0 is out after only six years (years?!) of development. John James Jacoby explains the reason for this timeframe was mainly because there are only far "less than part-time folks" actively working on the project. bbPress is installed on…

John James Jacoby released the initial…

Photo of author
Brian Krogsgard

John James Jacoby released the initial version of BerlinDB, a "collection of PHP classes and functions that aims to provide an ORM-like experience and interface to WordPress database tables." John touched on these concepts in his talk at WordCamp Europe…
A2 Hosting
WordPress.com