WordPress 4.9.5 Beta 1 is available for testing and brings with it 23 bug fixes and improvements. A release candidate is scheduled for release on March 20th and a final release on April 3rd. Here are some notable changes you can expect in the release. “Cheatin’ uh?” Error Message is Replaced The “Cheatin’ uh?” error message has existed in WordPress …
A Plea For Plugin Developers to Stop Supporting Legacy PHP Versions
Iain Poulson has published a thoughtful request on the Delicious Brains blog asking WordPress plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions. He covers some of the benefits of developing with newer versions of PHP, what Delicious Brains is doing with its plugins, and using the Requires Minimum PHP Version header in readme.txt. While we wait for the Trac discussion …
Without Context, Some Lyrics Inside the Hello Dolly Plugin Are Degrading to Women
There have been many discussions over the years on whether or not Hello Dolly should be unbundled with WordPress. Seven years ago, it was argued that the lyrics are copyrighted and could potentially violate the GPL license. The latest issue with Hello Dolly is that some lyrics that appear in users dashboards with the plugin activated can be degrading to …
Let’s Encrypt Wildcard Certificates Are Now Available
In July of last year, Let’s Encrypt announced that it would begin issuing Wildcard certificates for free in January of 2018. Although a little late, the organization has announced that Wildcard certificate support is now live. In addition to these certificates, the organization has updated its ACME protocol to version 2.0. ACMEv2 is required for clients that want to use …
WPWeekly Episode 308 – Wildcard SSL Certificates For All
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss the news of the week including the results from the 2018 Stack Overflow survey, Tech Crunch’s rebuild, and Let’s Encrypt adding support for wildcard certificates. We also talk about Google working towards AMP or parts of it becoming official web standards. I ranted about how the mobile experience on the web …
WPCampus Scheduled for July 12-14 in St. Louis, MO
WPCampus, an in-person conference dedicated to WordPress in higher education has announced its third annual event will be held July 12-14 at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. The call for speakers is open until April 7th. The event is two months before WordCamp St. Louis which will also be held at Washington University. WPCampus held its first event in …
Yoast Launches Fund to Increase Speaker Diversity at Tech Conferences
In an effort to increase speaker diversity at conferences worldwide, the team at Yoast SEO has launched a diversity fund. The fund will pledge a minimum of €25,000 each year. Its purpose is to remove the financial burdens that can cause minorities or underrepresented groups to speak at conferences. “There are WordCamps throughout the world, these are conferences about, by …
WPWeekly Episode 307 – Thirty Percent of the Web
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I start with a continued discussion of AMP from last week. We cover the big releases of the week including Jetpack, Genesis, Yoast SEO, and Gutenberg. We discuss a new project that aims to determine Gutenberg compatible plugins, debate the terminology used to describe WordPress’ market share, and a new plugin that makes …
WordPress Now Used on 30% of the Top 10 Million Sites
W3Techs, a survey company that monitors usage of various web technologies, is reporting that WordPress has reached 30% usage or 60.2% market share of all the websites whose content management systems it knows about. This represents a 0.6% increase since February 1st and 13.1% over the last seven years. Just five days ago, Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress, brought attention …
New Plugin Makes WordPress Core Updates More Secure by Requiring Cryptographic Signature Verification
In 2016, WordFence published their findings of a vulnerability that could have compromised the servers that are used to send out WordPress updates. It turned out to be a complex, obscure vulnerability that ignited a conversation surrounding the security of api.wordpress.org and what could happen if the servers were compromised. One idea that was brought forth is to digitally sign …


