For those of you unable to attend WordCamp US at St. Louis, Missouri, this weekend, the event will be available for live streaming. The conference runs from Friday, November 1, through Sunday, November 3. Friday and Saturday’s regular sessions, which do not include workshops, will be streamed. While previous events like WordCamp US 2018 have always been available to watch …
Automatic Image Alt Tags and More with Image SEO
I had the opportunity to test the Image SEO plugin over the past week. Image SEO is a plugin that connects to an accompanying online service that processes images uploaded to a WordPress installation. The plugin can automatically rename file names, create alt tags for screen readers, and optimize images for Pinterest. The plugin is one half of a Software …
GoDaddy Launches eCommerce Hosting Plan in Partnership with WooCommerce
GoDaddy launched an eCommerce tier for their managed hosting plans on October 22. The new tier launched in partnership with WooCommerce and offers over $1,500 of commercial extensions and themes for setting up an online shop. The eCommerce plan utilizes GoDaddy’s onboarding process available with all managed hosting plans. The system automatically sets up the user’s online shop based on …
Curated List of Featured Themes Coming to the Theme Directory
Themes are the face of WordPress. Like it or not, the average user is more interested in what their site looks like when they first begin using the platform than what the thousands upon thousands of plugins can do for them. Perhaps that’s unfair to plugin developers — there are more exciting things happening in the plugin world right now …
Gutenberg 6.7 Introduces Storybook and Gradient Backgrounds
The Gutenberg team released version 6.7 of the Gutenberg plugin last week. The announcement post listed a little over three dozen bug fixes and several enhancements to existing features. The most notable features included in the update are Storybook support and gradient backgrounds for the button block. All of the bug fixes included in Gutenberg 6.7 were ported to the …
Coming in WordPress 5.3: What is the PHP Spread Operator?
On October 9, Juliette Reinders Folmer announced on the core WordPress blog that WordPress 5.3 will use the spread operator. The spread operator was one of the new features made available in PHP 5.6, a version released in 2014. WordPress abandoned PHP 5.2 – 5.5 with the release of WordPress 5.2. This means the core team can start taking advantage …
Product Reviews in the WordPress Ecosystem: Honesty and Genuine Experiences
I don’t write fluff pieces. I call ’em like I see ’em. If your project is a dumpster fire, I’m going to say it’s a dumpster fire. Whenever someone comes to me in hopes that I review their product, I give them some form of the preceding paragraph. It doesn’t matter if it is a plugin, theme, web host, or …
Chilean News Publication El Soberano First to Launch on Newspack
El Soberano homepage on the Newspack platform. Nine months after the announcement of Newspack by WordPress.com, the Chilean news site El Soberano became the first publication to launch on the new platform. On October 16, the small news team relaunched with a fresh design powered by the Newspack theme and its newsroom-focused plugins. Newspack is a project of Automattic, the …
Mark Davies Joins Automattic as Chief Financial Officer
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and various other products, announced earlier today that Mark Davies has joined the team as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This news comes fresh off the heels of Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr in August and a $300 million Series D investment from Salesforce Ventures in September. The investment round gave the company a $3 …
Kioken Blocks Partners with Gutenslider Plugin
Kioken Blocks creator Onur Oztaskiran is teaming up with Niklas Jurij Plessing, a Berlin-based developer and author of the Gutenslider plugin, to improve both products under the same roof. Oztaskiran said the partnership is not an acquisition but rather a unification of efforts that may eventually result in combining under the same name. “Our short term plan is to work …