News

On Saturday night, Matt Mullenweg took the stage in St. Louis to deliver the 2019 State of the Word. The talk provides a look at this year in the WordPress community and what is on the horizon for the platform. Mullenweg opened this year’s talk by premiering a documentary created about the WordPress community by WordFence, Open. It’s a look at the beauty and power of the people that run the CMS. It set the tone for the rest of the State of the Word. This year’s WordCamp included 47 organizers, 122 volunteers, and 90 speakers. A huge amount of […]

Automattic just closed a Series D funding round of $3 million from one investor, Salesforce Ventures. According to Automattic founder, Matt Mullenweg, this investment will allow the company to stay the course and honor the current roadmap. For Automattic, the funding will allow us to accelerate our roadmap (perhaps by double) and scale up our existing products—including WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and (in a few days when it closes) Tumblr. It will also allow us to increase investing our time and energy into the future of the open source WordPress and Gutenberg. More than anything, the funding is a huge endorsement of open source and the WordPress […]

In its biggest acquisition to date, Automattic Inc. has purchased Tumblr along with its 200 employees. Automattic CEO, Matt Mullenweg told the Wall Street Journal that executives will try to find ways to merge Tumblr’s functionality with WordPress.com’s. According to Post Status, Mullenweg’s initial goals for the website are to: 1. Move infrastructure off Verizon.2. Support same APIs on both WP.com and Tumblr.3. Switch backend to be WP.4. Open source Tumblr.com client similar to Calypso. He went on to say that though there will be changes to the backend, the front-end user experience will stay the same as it is today. Because Tumblr has […]

After the release of WordPress 5.2, the community has been waiting excitedly for WordPress 5.3. You can have a look right now to see what to expect with new and improved features in the Gutenberg page editor. Here are three things we are very likely to see when version 5.3 becomes a reality. 1. The Group Block One of the most exciting updates is the Group Block, which allows you to create large sections of content. See how I used it in the video above. The group block will be an excellent way to create simple, reusable block templates for […]

This year’s WordCamp Europe is putting on a focus on the future of WordPress by holding a session for kids to create their own sites. This will be on top of the regular childcare services during the conference. The kids’ workshop will take place on the 20th of June during Contributor Day and is open to all 8-14-year-olds. You can register your child here. According to organizers, “This workshop will be run by Petya Raykovska, a Senior Project Manager at Human Made, who has spent more than 10 years managing and creating websites and is experienced in leading WordPress workshops […]

2018 is over – in fact, we’re nearly to May already. After the big WordPress 5.0 launch around Christmas, coupled with a quick break to recharge, the focus is now on how the platform will develop during the next year. As with previous years, there are some exciting developments in the pipeline. Some you could have seen coming from miles away, while others are a little more unexpected. In either case, it’s important to know what’s coming, so you can start making preparations now. In this post, we’ll take a broad look at what the entire community of developers, clients, […]

Historically, the week between Christmas and New Years brings in the lowest traffic of the year. This makes it the perfect time to try out new things on your site without risking the loss of customers or upsetting readers. If something breaks, there are fewer eyes on it, giving you more freedom to experiment a little. Add some new plugins, fix something you’ve been putting off, or try out that design element you’ve been wanting to. Now is the time to make sure everything is running perfectly for the new year. To assist with these big changes, brands from around the WordPress […]