WordFest Live to Host Free 24-Hour Festival of WordPress March 4, 2022

The third edition of WordFest Live is coming up on March 4, 2022. The online event will feature more than 60 sessions over the course of 24 hours, as well as workshops, socials, and celebrations. Sessions will be focused on WordPress, remote working, and mental wellbeing. Topics include leadership, freelancing, website performance, podcasting, WooCommerce, dealing with mental disorders in tech, …

UpdraftPlus 1.22.3 Patches Severe Vulnerability Through Forced Security Update from WordPress.org

UpdraftPlus, a plugin that allows users to backup to various cloud providers, has patched a severe security vulnerability that would allow logged-in users to download a site’s latest backups. The patched version (1.22.3) was sent out via a forced auto-update, a measure reserved for severe vulnerabilities that affect a large number of users. UpdraftPlus is active on more than 3 million …

WordPress News Gets a New Design

WordPress.org’s News section is sporting a new design with a bold color scheme and updated typography. The design was created by Automattic-sponsored contributor, Beatriz Fialho, who unveiled earlier versions of the update in June 2021. Fialho selected Inter, an open source font, for paragraphs and functional text, and EB Garamond for headings. As design trends change on the web, colors come in and …

BP Rewrites Feature Plugin Now in Beta

The ball is moving on a nine-year-old effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API. BuddyPress currently requires sites to use pretty permalinks in order to be compatible with its URL parser. The plugin analyzes the URL for whatever component you are viewing and performs internal checks to decide what to display there and determine the …

Clarity Ad Blocker for WordPress Announced, Receives Mixed Reactions

Stanislav Khromov announced Clarity, a plugin for hiding obtrusive banners, via Twitter and the Advanced WordPress (AWP) Facebook group today. It was first pushed to WordPress.org around a year ago, but the developer seems to be just now publicizing it. The Clarity website describes its mission as: “Ads, upsells, and analytics banners have been running rampant in our WordPress dashboards …

WordPress Photo Directory Gets Its Own Make Team

The WordPress Photo Directory is taking off, growing to more than 1,400 approved free photos in under two months. After a successful call for testers and volunteer photo moderators, the directory has an enthusiastic team of contributors ready to move the project forward. Angela Jin’s pitch for photo moderators resonated with a lot of people for a couple reasons – …

Convesio Raises $5M to Expand Docker-Powered Hosting Platform

WordPress hosting company Convesio has raised $5 million from private investors. This funding round includes some of the company’s original investors who participated in Convesio’s 2019 Wefunder crowdfunding campaign, which brought in more than $1 million from 800+ investors. “I started Convesio because legacy hosting providers have not evolved their technology, struggled to provide high uptime, and lacked the capability …