Yesterday, WordPress celebrated its 12th birthday. To mark the occasion, I’m going to take a look at some of the biggest milestones in WordPress’s twelve-year history. To date, the excellent team of core contributors have turned out 26 major WordPress updates. These updates have taken WordPress from a humble blogging software right to the global CMS superstar it is today. Every update has contributed to this, but today I’ve picked out ten of the most important ones. If you want to see a chronological timeline of WordPress’s history, read on! I’ll be showing you when the most important features and functionality […]
Microsoft Announces New OneNote Partnership with WordPress
On Friday, Microsoft announced a new partnership between WordPress and its digital note-taking app, OneNote. For those unfamiliar, OneNote is part of the Microsoft Office suite, and Microsoft’s answer to Evernote–it allows users to take notes, write to-do lists, and make sketches, all of which are stored in the cloud. This makes your notes accessible across all devices. The new partnership allows WordPress users to transfer their OneNote ramblings directly into their WordPress blog. In just a few clicks, your notes can be published to the live version of your website. Looking at it another way, the partnership gives WordPress […]
Free Lynda.com WordPress Essential Training Course
Last week, Lynda.com’s WordPress Essential Training course surpassed a significant milestone—100,000 viewers. The WordPress Essential Training course, created by developer Morten Rand-Hendriksen, was originally launched back in 2010. It’s currently on its fourth edition, with a fifth on the way soon. To celebrate the 100k milestone, Lynda is making the course completely free for a whole month, until June 18th. Be sure to check it out if you want six hours’ worth of WordPress video tutorials without spending a dime! (A full priced Lynda subscription typically starts at $19.99/month.) All-in-One Beginner Course Lynda has published more than 70 WordPress courses for various skill levels. […]
Automattic’s Acquisition of WooCommerce and the Future of WordPress
Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg announced a big acquisition in the WordPress world: Automattic has taken over WooCommerce. The deal, reported to be worth around $30 million, means Automattic have now acquired the entire Woo brand—including all their other themes and plugins. It’s Automattic’s biggest acquisition to date, and shows that Automattic believes that eCommerce will play an integral role in WordPress’s expansion plans, as they attempt to reach a 51% market share. Automattic, best known for WordPress.com and its Jetpack plugin, have always been in the business of democratizing publishing. Now, they want to focus on helping people to sell online more […]
Proposed Password Changes for WordPress 4.3
On Monday, Mark Jaquith confirmed that WordPress 4.3 will see an overhaul in the way passwords are generated. The changes will encourage WordPress users to strengthen their login credentials, making their websites more secure. A stronger password will also make your website less vulnerable to brute force attacks. The proposed updates focus on the way passwords are chosen, as well as changing some important default settings in the UI. Let’s take a quick look at the four main points coming out of the proposal: WordPress will generate strong passwords by default. You can override this setting and create your own password, […]
DOM-Based XSS Vulnerability Impacts Millions of WordPress Users
A WordPress security vulnerability has been discovered which could affect millions of WordPress users. The problem, spotted by security firm Sucuri, has been identified as a DOM-based Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability. If you want to learn more about the technical side of the vulnerability, this is a great resource by Acunetix. The vulnerability relates to the genericon package; specifically the example.html file. Any theme or plugin that uses this example.html file is potentially vulnerable—if any of your themes or plugins utilize vector icons, you could be at risk. Worryingly, this is known to include the TwentyFifteen theme which ships with […]
OptinMonster App: A New Multi-platform Direction for the Popular WordPress Plugin
The OptinMonster team has announced big changes to the popular lead generation plugin. Going forward, OptinMonster will be exclusively available as a stand-alone SaaS lead generation software—the OptinMonster App. The changes mean that OptinMonster can now be used by non-WordPress users—Drupal, Joomla, Shopify, and Magento users can all install OptinMonster on their websites. (Of course, WordPress users will still be able to use OptinMonster, too.) Current OptinMonster users should be aware that the existing WordPress plugin will remain fully supported until the end of 2015, when it will be phased out. If you want to migrate over to the OptinMonster app, […]
Open source in 2015: following WordPress’s lead
We’ve seen a lot of open source announcements in the news lately—something we first covered last November. Since then, the announcements have continued, thick and fast. Here are two announcements involving some of the world’s biggest companies from the last few days alone: Apple moves to third-generation Siri back-end, built on open source Mesos platform Microsoft’s open source ambitions pick up speed Why are all these huge, multi-national corporations scrambling to embrace open source? Apple and Microsoft have almost bottomless budgets to develop their own proprietary software, don’t they? So what’s in it for them? What is open source? Before […]
First impressions of WordPress 4.2
Yesterday WordPress version 4.2 launched. Named “Powell,” paying homage to jazz pianist, Bud Powell, version 4.2 focuses on communication, sharing, and simplicity. Although WordPress 4.2 didn’t introduce anything ground-breaking, it was another solid update from the team of contributors behind core. Having now had a little more than 24 hours to test out the new features, today I want to share my thoughts on the main 4.2 changes. New characters and emojis WordPress is used internationally, and recent updates have focused on making WordPress more accessible to users of different nationalities. This trend continues with 4.2, which sees the utf-8 database upgraded to […]
‘Mobilegeddon’ unleashed: Google’s new mobile-friendly algorithm
Mobilegeddon is finally here. That’s right; today, April 21, Google unleashed the biggest algorithm shake-up in several years. The algorithm change specifically targets mobile searches. With an ever-growing number of mobile users, Google has been trying to enhance its mobile-friendliness for months now—something I first touched on in November 2014. Unlike the other major algorithm changes—notably Penguin and Panda—Google has been relatively open about the changes. They announced in February that the mobile-friendly update would be coming, and even provided a set of guidelines and testing tools to ensure your website wouldn’t be impacted too badly. This makes a lot of sense: previous […]
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