In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss Joost de Valk’s decision to step down as WordPress’ Marketing Lead. I shared my recent encounter with food poisoning and some of the lifestyle changes I’m making to improve my health. We also talk about a new experimental plugin by Automattic that aims to provide full site editing and FreeCodeCamp’s decision …
Take Back Your Web: Tantek Çelik’s Call to Action to Join the Independent Web
Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla and co-founder of IndieWebCamp, delivered an inspirational talk titled “Take Back Your Web” at the most recent beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. He opened the presentation with a litany of Facebook’s wrongdoings, taking the world’s largest social network to task for its role in increasing polarization, amplifying rage, and spreading conspiracy theories. …
Gutenberg Team is Exploring Adding Motion to Block Moving Actions
In a post titled “Using Motion to Express Change,” Gutenberg designer and engineer Matías Ventura takes a deep dive into how animation can be applied to interfaces to replicate realistic motion. These animations can sometimes more clearly communicate changes, particularly in relationship to the action of moving or reordering items on a page. “Even though the instant transformation of the interface …
FreeCodeCamp Moves Off of Medium after being Pressured to Put Articles Behind Paywalls
After four years of publishing on Medium, FreeCodeCamp is migrating all of its articles to its own open source publishing platform, a modified version of Ghost. The platform allows approved authors to cross-post their blog articles on the new FreeCodeCamp News site for free, without any ads. “Medium was a great place to publish because it helped a lot of …
WPWeekly Episode 354 – Pantheon Acquires StagingPilot
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss Panethon’s acquisition of StagingPilot and why regression visual testing will likely become a standard feature across managed WordPress hosts if it’s not already. I rant about the size of text on so many sites being too large and having to shrink the site down to 80-90% in order for it to …
Pantheon Acquires Visual Regression Testing Platform StagingPilot
Panethon, a managed host geared towards Drupal and WordPress sites, has acquired StagingPilot. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Nathan Tyler, founder of StagingPilot, and his brother Phil Tyler will be brought into the company. StagingPilot is a four year old company that runs a barrage of visual regression tests on WordPress sites before they’re automatically updated. StagingPilot …
Happy Sweet 16, WordPress
Over the weekend, the WordPress community celebrated 16 years since Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked the B2/cafelog blogging platform to create the first official release of WordPress on May 27, 2003. It launched with a new admin interface, manual excerpts, intelligent line breaks, a link manager, and was compliant with XHTML 1.1 standards. image credit: Web Design Museum The …
In Case You Missed It – Issue 24
photo credit: Night Moves – (license) There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Marcel Bootsman Is on His Way to WordCamp EU Earlier this …
Automattic Acquires Prospress, the company behind WooCommerce Subscriptions
Automattic has acquired Prospress and its flagship WooCommerce Subscriptions product, along with the company’s entire suite of e-commerce plugins and automation tools. Prospress’ 20 employees will be joining Automattic to continue developing and supporting their products. There are no immediate changes planned for current WooCommerce Subscriptions customers. Automattic will begin working on a roadmap for the product after integrating the …
Elementor Launches Hello Theme on WordPress.org
Elementor launched its Hello theme on WordPress.org this week. After just a few days in the directory, the theme already has more than 10,000 active installations. It is essentially a blank starter theme that offers 100% compatibility with Elementor. Page builders with a large user base are in a unique position to influence the WordPress theme market. Loyal users will …




