WordPress Performance Team Proposes Developing a New Plugin Checker Tool

WordPress’ Performance team is kickstarting a proposal for developing a plugin checker tool similar to the theme check plugin, which ensures themes are meeting the latest standards and best practices. In 2021, WordPress’ Meta team built a code scanner that detects potential security risks, such as unescaped SQL queries in plugin code, with the goal of reducing the Plugin Team’s load through …

Software Freedom Conservancy Calls for GitHub Boycott

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC),  a non-profit that provides infrastructure support for free and open source software projects, is urging developers to stop using GitHub and move their projects to other platforms. The organization has historically had a number of public grievances with GitHub, which it outlines on its Give Up On GitHub site. GitHub’s public launch of Copilot last week was the final …

WordPress Contributors Propose Improving Block Themes’ Visibility in the Directory

WordPress theme authors and contributors from the Themes team are exploring ways to make block themes more prominent on the official directory. These are themes that are specifically tagged with support for full-site editing. Despite WordPress having a block theme for its most recent default theme, authors have been slow to create more. There are currently only 86 themes that …

Wei: A Free Minimalist WordPress Theme from Rich Tabor

Rich Tabor’s new Wei theme is one of the most well-designed contributions to hit WordPress.org’s free themes directory this month. Wei is a minimalist block theme that keeps things simple while offering users a range of artfully selected accent color combinations. It also includes support for full-site editing and Global Styles for a wider range of site customizations. Wei joins …

ClassicPress On the Rocks: Directors Resign, New Leadership Installed

Recent turbulence in the ClassicPress community has resulted in the directors resigning and new leadership installed. The WordPress fork is run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative. It supports work on a pared back version of WordPress, based on version 4.9, that uses the TinyMCE classic editor as the default option with no block editor. The project appeared …

GoDaddy Responds to Mullenweg’s Accusations: “We All Have the Same Goal”

In a recent Twitter storm, Matt Mullenweg characterized GoDaddy as “a parasitic company,” that is “an existential threat to WordPress’ future.” In a series of tweets that were subsequently deleted, Mullenweg contended that GoDaddy is lacking support for WordPress and WooCommerce, relative to how much the company is benefiting from the projects. He also said the company’s investment in proprietary …

Awesome Motive Acquires WP Charitable Plugin

Awesome Motive, makers of popular plugins like OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights, acquired WP Charitable this week. The plugin is used by more than 10,000 non-profits for creating fundraising campaigns and collecting online donations. It does not charge any transaction fees and currently has a 4.9/5-star average rating on WordPress.org. “Wes and I launched Charitable in 2015 because we were tired …