Jeremy Keith Resigns from AMP Advisory Committee: “It Has Become Clear to Me that AMP Remains a Google Product”

Jeremy Keith, a web developer and contributor to the web standards movement, has resigned from the AMP Advisory Committee. Keith was selected for the committee last year, despite his well-documented criticisms of the AMP project. In his resignation email, he cites Google’s control of the project and its small percentage of open source parts as reasons for his growing resentment: …

Gutenberg 11.3 Introduces Dimensions Panel, Adds Button Padding Support, and Speeds Up the Inserter

Earlier today, Gutenberg 11.3 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. The latest update introduces a new dimensions panel for toggling spacing-related block options. The Button block now supports the padding control, and the Post Featured Image block has new width and height settings. One of the release’s highlights was a speed improvement for both opening and searching within the inserter. …

WordPress.org Experiments with Rejecting Plugin Submissions with the “WP” Prefix to Mitigate Potential Trademark Abuse

Many in the WordPress developer community were surprised to learn that WordPress.org is rejecting plugins with the “WP” prefix in the name after Joe Youngblood tweeted the rejection note he received. Although that restriction was put into place approximately seven months ago, there was no official communication on the change. WordPress is now claiming that the @WordPress Foundation has demanded …

Early WordPress 5.9 Look: The Road Toward Deeper Responsive Block Design

Gutenberg project lead Matías Ventura announced the Preliminary Road to 5.9 on the Make Core blog earlier today. He covered several big picture items, including several sub-points for each. He also linked to a GitHub issue with specific tasks and tickets that need work. The post covers notes on block patterns, navigation menus, the theme.json interface (global styles), design tools, …

Wordfence and WPScan Publish Mid-Year WordPress Security Report

WPScan is on track to post a record-breaking year for WordPress plugin vulnerabilities submitted to its database, according to a collaborative mid-year security report the company published with Wordfence. In the first half of 2021, WPScan has recorded 602 new vulnerabilities, quickly surpassing the 514 reported during all of 2020. The report is based on attack data from Wordfence’s platform …

Automattic Invests $30M in Titan, a Business Email Startup

source: Titan.email Automattic has invested $30 million in Titan, a professional email suite aimed at businesses and companies offering white-labeled email solutions for customers. At WordCamp India 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company had just made “a pretty large investment” in the India-based startup and stated that it “will be a big part of how WordPress.com offers …