First Look at PHP 7.4 for WordPress Developers

PHP 7.4 is slated for release on November 28, 2019. WordPress 5.3 will also include several commits that address deprecated features. It’s unlikely that most WordPress plugin and theme developers will be able to use the new PHP 7.4 features for a while except when working on setups where they have some measure of control over the environment. Given WordPress’ …

The Top eCommerce Trends To Keep An Eye On in 2019

New eCommerce trends emerge at a staggering space. It’s hard to keep up-to-date with them all, so we’ve researched and collected the hottest eCommerce trends of 2019 in this post. eCommerce sales will account for 10% of money spent by shoppers this year. If you run or manage an eCommerce store, it’ll help you a great deal knowing the latest …

Brian Gardner Steps Down From StudioPress

Brian Gardner announced he was stepping down from his role with StudioPress this past Friday. Last year, WP Engine acquired StudioPress. After staying on board for the remainder of his contract, Gardner stepped down from his role with the company. “The past 15 months have gone by quickly, and it sometimes feels like yesterday that we made the announcement,” Gardner …

Automattic Has Discontinued Active Development on Edit Flow Plugin

Edit Flow, the modular editorial plugin that enables collaboration inside the WordPress admin, is no longer being actively developed. After no updates for nine months, Mark Warbinek, a frustrated user, contacted Automattic to ask if they have abandoned the plugin or still plan to update it. A support representative from Automattic confirmed the company will no longer be updating Edit …

Here Comes Hummingbird 2.1 With Compressed Caching & Cookies

From Asset Organization Tours to several new caching features and upgrades, Hummingbird 2.1 is a humdinger. There’s so much to cover, I can’t summarize it all in this teeny tiny paragraph — so let’s just jump right in, shall we? A lot of the features I’m about to detail are only available in Hummingbird Pro, so if you’re not already …

Secure the News Project Finds 93% of Major Publishers Offer HTTPS Encryption by Default

Secure the News is a project that was created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2016 to track HTTPS encryption across major news organizations’ websites. It lists the publications and automatically scores them on a scale of 0-100, based on HTTPS implementation according to best practices, as defined by General Services Administration (GSA) Pulse’s current criteria for modern …

Gatsby Raises $15M, Plans to Invest More Heavily in WordPress and CMS Integrations

Gatsby Inc. CEO Kyle Mathews announced a $15M Series A funding round today, just one year after creating the company with GatsbyJS core contributors. The open source Gatsby project started in 2015 to provide a framework for developers to quickly build websites with React. As the project soared in popularity, Mathews formed a company to fund its ongoing development and …

Hacktoberfest 2019 Registration is Now Open

Hacktoberfest has started back up again for its sixth year running, sponsored by DigitalOcean and DEV. The annual event brings together open source communities from all over the world for virtual and local collaboration. Organizers are expecting approximately 150,000 participants this year. The first 50,000 participants who make four pull requests to any GitHub-hosted repositories between October 1-31, will receive …

WordPress 5.3 to Introduce New Admin Email Verification Screen

WordPress 5.3 is set to introduce an admin email verification screen that will be shown every six months after an admin has logged in. The feature was proposed seven months ago in a ticket that contributor Andrei Draganescu opened as part of the Site Health component improvements. Draganescu said the idea came from discussions in the #core-php channel regarding WSOD …