WPCampus Survey Results Indicate Misconceptions of WordPress Are Slowing its Growth in Higher Education

Before the first inaugural WPCampus took place last weekend, the organizing team conducted a survey to learn how WordPress is used in higher education. A total of 486 people responded to the survey. Modern Tribe has not only made the survey results available to the public, they have also published an in-depth review of the data. There are a couple of items that stand …

Downtime Expected for Some WP Engine Customers as Linode Patches A Critical Security Vulnerability

WP Engine customers on legacy Xen Linode host servers are being notified via email and the company’s status blog about impending downtime between July 21st and July 25th. According to an email forwarded to the Tavern from a WP Engine customer, Linode’s legacy Xen host servers contain a critical security vulnerability. We are contacting you today regarding an upcoming emergency security …

John James Jacoby Publishes 35 Part Tweetstorm on WordPress Leadership, Community, and Economics

John James Jacoby, lead developer of bbPress and BuddyPress, published a 35 part tweetstorm sharing his thoughts on leadership in the WordPress project, the community, and the WordPress economy. A tweetstorm is a series of tweets linked together in chronological order around a particular topic. There are a number of useful nuggets of wisdom in his tweets that I think …

Google Removes Dennis Cooper’s 14-Year-Old Blog, Illustrates Dangers of Using a Publishing Service

Fans of artist Dennis Cooper are concerned about Google’s mysterious removal of his 14-year-old blog approximately two weeks ago. Cooper, a novelist and performance artist known for his controversial subject material, fears that Google may be censoring his work but hasn’t received an explanation. After contacting Google via multiple channels, Cooper received a statement about the blog being in “violation …

Codeable.io Buys Back Shares From Early Investors, Partners with WooCommerce

Codeable.io, an outsourcing marketplace for WordPress projects, announced a new partnership with Automattic today, along with a share buyback from some of the company’s early investors. Tomaž Zaman and Per Esbensen bootstrapped the company for the first couple of months after founding it in 2012, prior to receiving a $75K investment from three business angels. After another couple of months, …

Jetpack 4.1 Adds Telegram and WhatsApp Sharing Buttons, Introduces Untappd Menu Shortcode

Jetpack 4.1 was released today with performance improvements that make calls to the database more efficient, reducing what Jetpack does on each page load. Slideshows should load faster now that the Carousel module has been tweaked to no longer load full-size images in the previous and next previews. Using Photon in dev mode has also been improved by cutting out …

Bulgarian Government Now Requires Custom Software to be Open Source

photo credit: Bulgarian Flag – (license) The Bulgarian government has just passed an amendment to its Electronic Governance Act that mandates all custom software created for the government must be open source. The amendment was voted on in the Bulgarian parliament and put into effect July 1, 2016. According to Bozhidar Bozhanov, a 27-year-old software engineer and advisor to the …

Automattic Pushes the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group Giveaway to More Than $70K in Prizes

Last week, we mentioned that the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group is giving away more than $40K worth of WordPress related prizes away to celebrate crossing the 20,000th member milestone. This past weekend, the prize value jumped to more than $70K after Automattic contributed 100 one-year long Jetpack Pro licenses to the prize pool. Jetpack Professional costs $299 per year and …