WordPress Turns 20

WordPress is 20 years old today, an estimable milestone for open source software running on the web. Parties are happening all over the world – in Geneva, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Bangkok, Lahore, Jakarta, Mumbai – in over 150 different locations. The software has been downloaded more than 2.8 billion times but the most impressive stat is the project’s staggering 112,000 …

WordPress and Drupal Co-Founders Discuss Open Source, AI, and the Future of the Web

WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow and recently its co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined Drupal founder Dries Buytaert together on stage at a private event for the first time on May 17. They discussed how their lives were influenced by open source and how they built their projects around the freedoms it guarantees. Founders of both projects …

WordPress 6.2 Core Performance Analysis Finds Improving Template Loading for Classic Themes Could Make a Major Impact

WordPress’ Performance Team has published a summary of a core performance analysis they completed in order to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. As part of this process, contributors created a methodology with a standard set of tools that can be used to collect and share profiling data for various components of the application. The team tested a classic theme …

Automattic Releases wp-now: A Local Development Environment Powered by WordPress Playground

Automattic has published a new project called wp-now that creates a local development environment in seconds. The tool is a NodeJS app that is powered by WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser. wp-now allows developers to quickly spin up a new WordPress site with their chosen theme and then open it in …

WordPress 6.2.2 Restores Shortcode Support in Block Templates, Fixes Security Issue

WordPress 6.2.2 was released early this morning as a rapid follow-up to 6.2.1, which introduced a bug that broke shortcode support in block templates. Version 6.2.1 was also an important security release, but due to the catastrophic breakage for those using shortcodes in block templates, some users were implementing insecure workarounds or simply downgrading to 6.2 to keep critical functionality …