New Report Estimates WordPress’ Market Share of US Higher Education Institution Websites at 40.8%

A new report from eQAfy, a company that collects and analyzes data about higher education websites, has benchmarked which content management systems US institutions are using. The report is a snapshot of data from December 2020, sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database. After scanning a list of 4,000 active institutions, EQAfy’s headless browser was able to detect the …

Block Manager Redesign Coming Soon

WordPress’ block management interface was introduced in Gutenberg 5.3, released in March 2019, and is due for an update. In case you haven’t explored the editor’s Tools menu, the block manager setting allows you to select which blocks will be shown or hidden in the block inserter. Last week, Automattic engineer Nik Tsekouras opened a new issue in the Gutenberg …

Upsells, Barriers, and the End/Beginning of the Quality $free Themes Era

The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. Justin Tadlock via Twitter As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the directory as “crippleware.” At the …

WordPress Security Expert Stories & 40 New Security Tips from Our Members!

We recently interviewed four WPMU DEV members, who provide professional WordPress security services, about keeping WordPress secure. Here’s what they said… Earlier this month we published a series of tutorials on WordPress security, ran a discussion on our members’ forum about WordPress security issues, and put out a request to interview WordPress security experts about…well, you guessed it…WordPress security! We …

Automattic Launches the Blank Canvas WordPress Theme for Building Single-Page Websites

Split Screen pattern from Blank Canvas. On Monday, Automattic announced its Blank Canvas theme on WordPress.com. The goal is to allow end-users to build single-page websites, such as an “about me” or product landing page. Blank Canvas is a child theme of Seedlet, which Automattic’s Theme Team has been using as a launchpad. One example is its recently-released Spearhead child …

Jetpack Launches Customer Research Project to Improve the Plugin and Reduce User Frustration

Jetpack’s Design and Research Team is launching a new customer research panel as part of an ongoing effort to collect feedback in advance of launching new features. They are allocating one day every month to talk with users: It’s a small step toward an important goal of better understanding what our users need, seeing and hearing first hand where they …