Today, I am pleased to introduce Torque’s new Content Strategist, Doctor Popular! Doc will be revamping Torque’s creative, social, and content strategy (you’ve probably seen his illustrations in the wildly popular Torque talks series). Doc brings with him years of creative experience as a community manager, game designer, and talented photographer. He has written for LaughingSquid and other fun blogs, but mostly he concentrates on developing his own website, DocPop.org. Doc’s been featured in the New York Times and SFGate for his superior photography skills. In 2001, he was named National Trick Innovator of the Year in the National Yo-Yo League. In his free time, […]
WebDevStudios Acquires Maintainn
Today, website development company WebDevStudios announced the acquisition of Maintainn, a professional WordPress support and maintenance company. As WebDevStudios has grown into one of the larger WordPress companies in the space, the acquisition seems like a natural step in its lifecycle. Dre Armeda, VP of Operations at WebDevStudios, indicated that the 13-year-old company has a long and successful history with Maintainn’s founder, Shayne Sanderson, and they already work with Maintainn on various retainers today. According to the announcement, Maintainn will become the one-stop support and maintenance entity for WedDevStudios’ client retainers and incoming clients. In addition, Maintainn will continue to […]
WordPress 4.1 Welcomes a New Class of Committers
With WordPress 4.0 released, it’s time to once again look to the future, WordPress 4.1. Over the weekend, Andrew Nacin announced our new release lead for 4.1, Jack Blackbourn, and a couple of guest committers that are coming along for the ride. John Blackbourn has been a core committer to WordPress for the better half of a decade, and has made some pretty incredible contributions to the WordPress community — with valuable blog posts, and plugins like Query Monitor, User Switching, and WP Crontrol. Blackbourn will be joined by a new group of guest committers, with a few names you’ve […]
Tidy Repo Finds a New Partner, with Many Updates to Come
For a little while now, I’ve been running a little site called Tidy Repo as a resource for new and advanced users alike. The site’s principle is fairly simple, a single repository of all the greatest WordPress plugins, tested, curated and reviewed. I go through the tens of thousands of plugins out there, and find the very best ones, and put them up on Tidy Repo with a short walkthrough for getting started. The concept is simple. Use any plugin listed on my site, and I can guarantee that it will work, be well supported, and be frequently updated. Each […]
The Plugin Installation Experience Gets an Upgrade in WordPress 4.0
It’s here: WordPress 4.0. As some of you know, my main passion in WordPress happens to be plugins, and above all, plugin discoverability. And WordPress 4.0 has made some great strides in this area, adding a completely new plugin installation experience that makes it easier to sort and find the plugin you are looking for. To see what the new plugin installation interface looks like, you can visit Plugins -> Add New after you have updated to WordPress 4.0. You’ll notice some pretty big changes right away. The most noticeable change is an upgraded UI, where installable plugins are arranged […]
WordPress 4.0, “Benny,” is Now Available
WordPress 4.0 has arrived! The release of 4.0 — honorably named “Benny” after jazz and swing musician Benny Goodman — was led by Helen Hou-Sandí, with the help of a whopping 275 contributors, which according to the announcement is a new high. 4.0 brings with it a slew of new features aimed to enhance the overall writing, creating, and publishing experience in WordPress. Here are some of the highlighted features: Managing your media uploads in the library is more seamless than ever — now displaying media in a beautiful, endless grid. Embedding content on WordPress is now an effortless task, and offers an expansive […]
Google Officially Removes Authorship Function
In December 2013, Google restricted Authorship’s reach by cutting back the number of people using it. Then in July, Google reduced Authorship’s impact by removing the author image attached to the snippet. After months of toying with us, and gradually reducing the benefits, Google has finally decided to kill off Authorship. From now on, you’ll no longer see the author of an article appearing in the SERPs, and Google’s algorithm has also stopped tracking the authorship markup. It’s gone, and it isn’t coming back. All the signs pointed to this happening, and yet it still comes as something of a surprise. […]
TechCrunch Open Sources Library for Asynchronous Tasks
TechCrunch recently underwent a pretty massive redesign, running on WordPress VIP. One of the biggest priorities for the development team was increasing performance. And not just a little, a lot. One of the tools that was integral to their giant leap in performance was the ability to run non-essential tasks to load asynchronously, meaning time consuming processes can run in the background while a page loads quickly for users. Now, the TechCrunch team has open sourced this asynchronous library so you can start using it on your own site. What’s A Non-Essential Task So what kind of things should run […]
MailPoet Vulnerability Compromises Thousands of WordPress Sites
On Tuesday, Sucuri reported a large-scale concerted attack injecting malware into WordPress sites, causing them to break. Upon further investigation, Sucuri researchers discovered that the exploitation is happening through a recent vulnerability found in the popular WordPress plugin MailPoet. In Sucuri’s blog post, Daniel Cid, CTO and Founder of Sucuri, stated, To be clear, the MailPoet vulnerability is the entry point, it doesn’t mean your website has to have it enabled or that you have it on the website; if it resides on the server, in a neighboring website, it can still affect your website. Even sites within the same […]
Sucuri Reports Malware Infection Targeting WordPress Sites
Earlier today, Sucuri reported a malware infection targeting WordPress sites! The announcement indicates: The last few days has brought about a massive influx of broken WordPress websites. What makes [this infection] so unique is that the malicious payload is being blindly injected which is causing websites to break. The malware targets WordPress sites through vulnerabilities such as weak admin passwords and outdated plugins. According to Sucuri, upon infiltration the infector PHP corrupts WordPress core files, as well as theme and plugin files—leaving PHP errors displayed in the place of content throughout the infected site. Sucuri is continuing to investigate and will provide details as […]
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