2020: Step Away From the Fire

If there was a common theme that held humanity together in 2020, it was that most of us agreed that the year was nothing short of a dumpster fire. That and sweatpants. As people learned to cope with a new reality in the Covid-19 era, the WordPress community has been a beacon of hope. When other industries needed to learn …

GitHub’s 2020 State of the Octoverse Report Highlights: Developers are Working More Hours but Turning to Open Source Projects for Creative Outlets

GitHub has published its annual Octoverse report for 2020. The code hosting platform currently serves more than 56 million developers who created 60+ million new repositories this past year. The volume of work pumping through GitHub’s pipes and its preeminence as the world’s largest developer platform gives the company access to a trove of data on how people have been …

Google to Migrate Structured Data Testing Tool to New Domain after Backlash from Deprecation Announcement

Google’s Rich Results Test came out of beta in July with support for all Google Search rich result features like carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. At that time, Google announced it would be deprecating the Structured Data Testing Tool, which SEOs, developers, and site owners have relied on for testing structured markup and troubleshooting schema issues. The SEO community …

Exploring Photo Blocks, an Experimental FSE-Ready Photoblogging Theme

Kjell Reigstad announced the Photo Blocks theme on December 9. It is a part of an ongoing set of experimental work from the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. It is essentially a testbed of ideas that are helping to propel the upcoming block-based theming era. In the past few months, I have covered the repository’s Carrd-like landing page theme, …

Ask the Bartender: Integrate With Third-Party App or Use Native WordPress Plugin?

My question to you is how you see the future (or even the present) of integrating software with WordPress and when you should make the distinction of going the integration vs. native approach. In other words, with the vast ecosystem of WordPress plugins out there, how can a website owner discern which responsibilities WordPress the software should handle and whether …

Contact Form 7 Version 5.3.2 Patches Critical Vulnerability, Immediate Update Recommended

Contact Form 7 has patched a critical file upload vulnerability in version 5.3.2, released today by plugin author Takayuki Miyoshi. The plugin is installed on more than five million WordPress sites. “An unrestricted file upload vulnerability has been found in Contact Form 7 5.3.1 and older versions,” Miyoshi said. “Utilizing this vulnerability, a form submitter can bypass Contact Form 7’s …

Mapbox GL JS Is No Longer Open Source

Mapbox GL JS, formerly an open source JavaScript library for interactive, customizable vector maps, has adopted a proprietary license in its recent version 2 update: mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license. By upgrading to this release, you are agreeing to Mapbox terms of service. Refer to LICENSE.txt for the new licensing terms and details. For questions, contact our team …