WordPress 4.7 Development Kicks Off This Week

WordPress 4.7 development officially kicked off at today’s meeting in the #core Slack channel. This release is being led by lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí who has selected Aaron Jorbin and Jeff Paul as release deputies. The first item on the agenda was an update on the upcoming 4.6.1 maintenance release. Jeremy Felt reported that the team managing the release set …

Google to Penalize Pages with Intrusive Popup Ads Starting January 2017

photo credit: Wilfred Iven Google announced today that it will begin penalizing pages with intrusive interstitials, commonly known as popup ads, beginning in 2017: Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search …

WPCampus Is Accepting Applications to Host the Event in 2017

Hot on the heels of WPCampus 2016, the event’s organizing team is currently accepting applications to host the event in 2017. The team is specifically looking for a campus or educational institution that can help plan and host the event. In addition, the following factors will help determine the location. Availability in early Summer months (June/July). Reasonable costs. Distance to …

Jetpack 4.2 Released with Performance and Security Updates

Jetpack 4.2 is a combination release with performance improvements and fixes for a couple of security vulnerabilities. These updates secure Contact Form submission exports from potential formula injections and fix a general XSS vulnerability in the misuse of the add_query_arg() function. The majority of enhancements in this release are centered on speeding up communication between WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled sites. Jetpack …

Customize Snapshots 0.5.0 Introduces Scheduled Publishing and Frontend Browsing

photo credit: Kristian Karlsson Earlier this year we tested the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, which allows users to draft and preview customizer states. For the past several months Weston Ruter and his team at XWP have been working on adding the ability to schedule Customizer changes. This would allow users to stage content as a set of customizer changes, such …