Regenerate Thumbnails Plugin Passes 5 Million Downloads, Rewrite in the Works

Regenerate Thumbnails, written by prolific plugin developer Alex Mills, has passed 5 million downloads. The plugin was first released nearly a decade ago in August 2008 during the days of WordPress 2.6. Regenerate Thumbnails is used to retroactively generate new thumbnail sizes for past uploads. It has become an indispensable utility over the years, helping millions of users successfully transition …

Gutenberg 1.2 Adds Postmeta Support and Extended Settings Placeholder

WordPress contributors have not yet made a final decision on the JavaScript framework to adopt for core, but Gutenberg development continues on with version 1.2 released this week. The update provides a better experience resolving block conflicts when switching between the “classic editor” and Gutenberg. Previously, if a user had created some paragraph blocks in Gutenberg but switched to the …

DigitalOcean Partners with GitHub to Support Open Source Projects during Hacktoberfest October 1–31

DigitalOcean is organizing its fourth annual Hacktoberfest in partnership with GitHub. The event was created to support open source projects and participants can earn a free t-shirt by contributing four pull requests during the month of October. More than 29,000 people signed up for Hacktoberfest 2016 from 114 countries and 10,227 people completed the challenge. The event tracked a record-breaking …

WordPress Core JavaScript Framework Selection Discussion Continues with Input from Open Source Community Leaders

WordPress’ #core-js Slack channel hosted a lively and productive meeting this morning led by Andrew Duthie. The discussion focused less on specific framework comparisons and more on the role a framework will play in building JavaScript-powered interfaces for WordPress. Contributors were joined by core developers and leaders from the React and Vue communities, Chrome engineers, and other interested parties from …

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam Plugin Permanently Removed from WordPress.org Due to Spam Code

The SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin has been removed from the WordPress Directory due to its author including spam code. The plugin added a CAPTCHA image test to WordPress forms to prevent spam and was compatible with forms generated by bbPress, BuddyPress, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. It had more than 300,000 active installs at the time of removal. Mike Challis, the original …

DonateWC Reaches Fundraising Goal

DonateWC, an initiative focused on providing less fortunate people an opportunity to attend large WordCamps has reached its fundraising goal of 1,000€. Ines van Essen expressed gratitude and appreciation for the donations. “The responses and feedback that have come in during the past week have been overwhelming,” She said. “I can’t believe we can already move to legalizing things and …