Feross Aboukhadijeh, maintainer of the StandardJS library, a JavaScript style guide, linter, and automatic code fixer, launched an experiment last week that places ads in the terminal in order to fund development. The experiment has since been paused after receiving negative feedback from the developer community, causing Linode, one of the initial sponsors, to remove its advertisement. “I think that …
Top Fifty WP: New Website Ranks Plugins by Downloads per Day
The team behind Pootlepress has launched a new website that displays the top 50 WordPress plugins by downloads per day. It uses the WordPress.org Plugin API to pull the previous day’s download stats from plugins hosted in the directory. The site also shows the average rating as a percent in the right-hand column. As one might expect, the most popular …
php Central Europe Conference Canceled Due to Lack of Speaker Diversity
phpCE, a central European PHP conference that was previously scheduled for October 4-6, has been cancelled due to a public fiasco resulting from a lack of gender diversity in the speaker lineup. The event, previously known as PHPCon Poland, was set to be held in Dresden, Germany, after the concept changed last year to rotate host cities and include a …
Chrome 76 Adds Native Lazy-Loading, WordPress Contributors Continue Discussion Regarding Core Support
lazy cat – photo credit: Kate Stone Matheson The latest version of Chrome (76) shipped with a new “loading” attribute that allows developers to specify resources, such as images and iframes, to defer loading until the user scrolls nearer to them. In the past, developers have used third-party libraries to achieve lazy loading but soon this will no longer be …
WordPress 5.3 Development Kicks Off: UI Polishing, Editor Improvements, and New Twenty Twenty Default Theme
WordPress 5.3 release dates were confirmed this week. The timeline has the official release arriving November 12, 2019, with a decent margin of time to avoid WordCamp US (early November) and the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday week at the end of November. Beta 1 is expected September 23 and a Release Candidate is scheduled to follow on October 15. The scope …
WordPress Poised to Begin Implementing Proposal to Auto-Update Older Sites to 4.7
photo credit: Ryan McGuire WordPress contributors from around the world joined in a lively meeting yesterday to continue the discussion regarding the proposal to auto-update old sites to version 4.7 in a controlled rollout. The idea is that sites would gradually update from one major version to the next (not all at once). The discussion was led by WordPress 3.7 …
A Nofollow Option for Links Is Coming to Gutenberg
Gutenberg users are requesting an easy way to add a nofollow attribute to links in the block editor. Users can currently toggle a setting to designate a link to open in a new tab, but a similarly user-friendly option for adding a nofollow attribute is not yet available. Requests have come in across multiple issues on GitHub, as well as …
WordCamp London 2020 Organizing Team Eyes September Dates Due to Brexit Uncertainty
photo credit: Benjamin Davies The Joomla World Conference in London, planned for November 2019, has been cancelled. Joomla’s Board of Directors announced the cancellation at the end of July, citing the updated October 31, 2019, Brexit deadline as the primary reason: Last week the new UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has been elected with a mandate to ensure Brexit happens …
Attend the Great WP Virtual Summit for Free: August 19-23
For five days next week, from August 19-23, the inaugural event of The Great WP Virtual Summit will be taking place. Conceived by South African based WordPress developer Anchen le Roux, the summit aims to bring together experts from various fields within the WordPress ecosystem to share their knowledge over the five days I reached out to Le Roux, to …
Automattic Acquires Zero BS CRM, Considers Rebranding it as Jetpack CRM
Automattic has acquired Zero BS CRM, a free plugin with more than 30 commercial extensions that provide deeper integrations with third-party services. Zero BS was co-founded by a two-person team that includes Mike Stott and Woody Hayday. The team marketed the plugin as a “no-nonsense CRM” and have been operating it with a successful subscription-based model for bundles of extensions. …